International GERSTEL Symposium 2021

Food and beverage companies rely on accurate and detailed aroma profiling to deliver high-quality products with consistent key flavour compound profiles and to develop new products. Quality and reliability of aroma analysis by capillary gas chromatography (GC) is greatly affected by the applied sample preparation technique. Conventional solvent-based extraction techniques can now be miniaturized and automated, but still suffer sometimes from severe matrix contamination resulting in poor chromatographic performance. New GC technologies can be implemented to avoid such matrix influence on performance.
 
Solvent-based extraction techniques are also increasingly being replaced by solventless techniques, such as dynamic headspace sampling (DHS), which is suitable for the characterization of aromas in food and beverages. The technique can also be fully automated and delivers full aroma profiling covering a wide volatility range due to less selectivity than other headspace enrichment techniques. Besides the principle of DHS, the flexibility of working in different DHS modes and the high sensitivity that can be reached with DHS enrichment, it will be shown how to successfully implement DHS for aroma profiling purposes depending on the type of food matrix and the volatility range that needs to be covered.

Speaker: Christophe Devos - Research Institute for Chromatography RIC|group