GC-Sniffing – most powerful tool in odour assessment
A perfect partnership
Chemical information is often useful for odour assessment, but it has its limitations. Sensory information – provided by the human sensory system – can help fill in the gaps. A combination of these two approaches creates the most powerful tool possible for the characterisation and identification of odours.
GC-Sniffing, or GC-Olfactometry, is a remarkable technique that combines the chemical information typically gained from gas chromatography with the sensory information provided by the human sensory system.
How can we help?
By combining the responses of a chemical detector with those of a GC-Sniffing panellist, we can highlight the odour-relevant compounds (i.e. identify which compounds smell), mark their odour contribution (i.e. know what they smell like) and even search for an odour target for which the detector might only record ‘noise’ (as the human nose is often more sensitive and discriminating than non-human detectors).
In other words: GC-Sniffing makes it possible to find out which compounds smell – and what they smell like – and which ones don’t.
It has a great number of applications, some of which are:
- the identification of the compound(s) responsible for an odour contamination in an air sample
- providing industry with a link between chemical data collected from ingredients or products and the sensory (and consumer preference) data collected from the marketplace
- the quality control or development of value-added products, or measurement of the efficiency of any implemented modifications.
Odournet is in the unique position of having both sensory and chemical odour analysis capabilities in-house, offering the best possible GC-Sniffing analysis.
