Annual corporate costs associated with off-odors are easily measured in the millions of dollars. These are due to product recall, litigation expenses, and lost revenue associated with products themselves. Off-odors may be introduced during one or more steps in production, packaging, and transportation to client. Key to off-odor analysis is designing the appropriate chemical extraction process. Our team has successfully re-created environmental conditions (where odors developed) and employed the most appropriate chemical extraction techniques to identify problem odorants. An example of environment re-creation was building a heated, humidified, inert chamber out of a stainless steel milk can to simulate days of transportation in a shipboard cargo hold.

By utilizing GC-MS/O, in addition to the mass spectrometric detector, an expert odor judge’s sense of smell is utilized to sort through the complex chromatogram of chemicals and focus on those that contribute odor. The result is an aromagram where odor intensity and character (olfactometry) is matched with chemical identification (mass spectrometry).

Off-Odor Analysis in your industry:
Food
Beverage
Paper and Packaging
Plastics
Pharma
Home, Beauty, and Health
Environment and Industrial
Toys, Education, and Entertainment
Other Industries