Investigating the impact of volatile compounds on the flavor profiles of foods and drinks

Volatile profiling of food and beverages is crucial for understanding and enhancing their quality, safety, and consumer appeal. Analysing these volatiles presents several challenges due to the diversity of chemical classes, their varying concentrations, and the complex matrices involved, which can be problematic for conventional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) approaches.

Join Prof. Kieran Kilcawley, Principal Research Officer at Teagasc Food Research Centre and Adjunct Professor, University College Cork and Technological University Dublin, as he explores how innovative extraction and enrichment techniques, combined with state-of-the-art GC–MS analyses, can overcome these difficulties and deliver more detailed and accurate volatile profiles.

Key learning objectives

• Understand the critical role volatile compounds play in shaping the flavor and overall quality of food and beverages
• Learn about the latest techniques for the sensitive extraction and analysis of aroma-active compounds, including high-capacity sorptive extraction and comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC).
• Explore practical applications through case studies, including volatile profiling of whiskey, analysis of fatty acids in dairy products, and evaluating the impact of cooking temperature on the volatile profile of beef

Who should attend?

• Food scientists who want to understand more about profiling, odour perception, sensory evaluation, and food authenticity analysis.
• R&D food scientists and analytical scientists who want to enhance their understanding of analysing complex samples.
• GC(–MS) users eager to hear about the latest instrument developments.

Certificate of attendance

All webinar participants can request a certificate of attendance, including a learning outcomes summary, for continuing education purposes.

Presenter: Prof. Kieran Kilcawley (Principal Research Officer, Teagasc Food Research Centre and Adjunct Professor, University College Cork and Technological University Dublin)

Prof. Kieran Kilcawley oversees the flavor chemistry facility at Teagasc, where he conducts extensive research on flavors in various foods and beverages. He became an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork in 2020 and in the School of Food Science and Environmental Health at the Technological University Dublin in 2024. His expertise encompasses advanced gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, including olfactometry, as well as aroma extraction, method development and validation, data processing, and chemometrics.

Moderator: Carrie Haslam (Associate Editor, SelectScience)