Plant-based and same great taste? Finding off-flavours causing negative consumer perception of pea milk using highly sensitive HiSorb extraction
Presented at EuSP, Crete, 2024
In recent years, the range of plant-based milk products has grown considerably across the globe, with the current UK market forecast to near-double to £565 million by 2025. This is due to the rising popularity of vegan, vegetarian and flexitarian diets compared with more traditional animal-based dairy diets, as well as consumers becoming more climate and health conscious. Although steadily rising in popularity, some have had limited approval by consumers with reports of recurring off-odours having bean-like and grassy notes.
Studies have highlighted low-level pyrazine compounds as a possible reason. A comprehensive profile of a sample is key for showing the desirable flavour compounds, while also highlighting off-odour causing compounds within the same plant-based product.
Headspace is the sampling strategy of choice, replicating as closely as possible the smell sensation that consumers experience when interacting with the product. But it is limited in sensitivity and is strongly affected by water ingress from the sample.
In this poster we investigate the use of robust HiSorb probes for immersive high-capacity sorptive extraction to enable sensitive detection of the low-level volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs & SVOCs) in plant-based milk samples, highlighting key organoleptic compounds of interest
