Food, Flavor & Fragrance

High throughput analysis of VOCs in food, flavor and fragrance processing and packaging.

Plant species – even to the cultivar level – usually have distinctive natural aromas. When damaged, additional volatile compounds are generated through enzymatic activity. SIFT-MS readily detects and quantifies volatiles characteristic of both aroma and leaf wounding in real-time, which are of significance to the culinary and agricultural industries, respectively.

Analysis of in vivo flavor release from foods requires high sensitivity, rapid response, and immunity to moisture. SIFT-MS combines these requirements with best-in-class selectivity to effectively measure flavor release, as demonstrated in this case study for chewing gums.

Rapid classification of coffee bean origin is achieved simply and objectively by applying SIFT-MS to instantaneous, direct detection of emitted volatile compounds.

This application note demonstrates the simplicity with which small molecules are detected from fruits using direct SIFT-MS analysis, in contrast to conventional gas chromatographic methods. Automated SIFT-MS also provides significant throughput and method development advantages compared to conventional analytical approaches.

Direct headspace analysis using SIFT-MS is very sensitive and provides straightforward determination of aroma volatile concentrations. This application note uses fruit juices and mixes as a case study, demonstrating the ease with which static headspace and stripping studies can be conducted using SIFT-MS.

Process-line or laboratory detection of fish oil oxidation is achieved extremely simply by applying SIFT-MS for instantaneous, direct detection of volatile oxidation markers.

Due to relatively long shipping times, and relatively high shipping costs, green kiwifruit producers need to ensure that their fruit is at optimal ripeness before it is shipped. This study demonstrates that SIFT-MS readily analyzes volatile compounds around trays of kiwifruit, yielding an accurate assessment of fruit ripeness.

SIFT-MS provides instant, direct analysis of volatile freshness markers emitted from fish and seafood, ensuring that products are fresh.

Automated, direct headspace analysis using selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry (SIFT-MS) provides rapid and economic screening of flavor mixes. This application note describes how SIFT-MS coupled with multivariate statistical analysis readily classifies various strawberry flavor mixes with analysis times of less than one minute per sample.

Syft Technologies

Syft Technologies

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) form a key component in the expression of sensory and characteristics for confectionery products. This White Paper describes the VOC analysis capabilities of Selected Ion Flow Tube Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS) that are relevant to
flavour-release research and manufacturing of confectionery. The application of these capabilities is illustrated, with results from actual analyses presented.

Beef freshness is evaluated easily and objectively by applying SIFT-MS for instant, direct analysis of evolved volatile freshness marker compounds.

Headspace-SIFT-MS can screen over 220 samples per day for volatile MOSH and MOAH compounds – nearly seven-fold more samples than the routine liquid and gas chromatography method.

We asked Mike McGinley, President, St. Croix Sensory, Inc. about his experience using SIFT-MS.  Hear what he had to say about the speed of analysis and flexibility inherent to Syft's product solutions.

SIFT-MS provides rapid, sensitive, and robust analysis of benzene and other contaminants in a wide array of commercial products. Integration with a headspace autosampler enables rapid screening of hundreds of samples per day.

The ability of SIFT-MS to monitor critical volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by a bioreactor in real-time at low parts-per-billion by volume (ppbV) concentrations is demonstrated. This application note presents the results of a pilot-scale feasibility study conducted over several weeks, demonstrating the utility of SIFT-MS for maximizing production outcomes.

We asked David Light, CEO and Founder of Valisure, about his experience using SIFT-MS and how it impacted their dry shampoo safety study.  

Automated headspace-SIFT-MS analysis can classify pelleted recycled HDPE at throughputs over 230 samples per day, offering great potential for rapid screening of recycled packaging materials.

Automated SIFT-MS analysis rapidly screens paperboard packaging for a wide range of functional groups in a single analysis, assuring that the volatile emissions meet manufacturer specifications.  This application note describes a Headspace-SIFT-MS method with throughput >10X faster than traditional GC/MS methods.

Quantitative determination of volatile aldehyde residues in paperboard is readily achieved using multiple headspace extraction-SIFT-MS analysis, with an eight-fold throughput increase over the equivalent conventional analysis.

Automated SIFT-MS analysis coupled with multivariate statistical analysis provides rapid sensory screening of paperboard packaging, overcoming the low sample throughput of sensory panels.  The ability to use HS-SIFT-MS to achieve throughput of 12 samples per hour is demonstrated.

SIFT-MS provides real-time, selective, and economic analysis of challenging volatile compounds, such as residual solvents, formaldehyde, dimethylamine, and NDMA without requiring derivatization or other special handling.

Pharmaceutical and food products are susceptible to contamination from packaging, whether from polymeric materials, printing inks, or paperboard.  SIFT-MS, a high-sensitivity direct-injection mass spectrometry technique, enables risks associated with sustainable packaging alternatives to be mitigated through economical, high-throughput automated analysis (typically a 4- to 15-fold increase over GC-MS).

MHE-SIFT-MS provides rapid, matrix-independent, quantitative determination of volatile leachables in polymers and calibrates quantitative analysis based on single headspace injections.  This approach enables over 200 samples per day to be analyzed, delivering rapid and economic analysis of volatile leachables such as residual monomers.

This app note introduces the next generation of SIFT-MS, Syft Tracer^TM, which launched at Pittcon 2023.  It revolutionizes volatile impurities analysis workflows through unparalleled speed, performance stability, and reproducibility.  Learn about how this innovation to real-time trace gas detection outpaces chromatography-based methods in the analysis of challenging analytes such as formaldehyde in a PEG excipient.

This application note describes head-to-head comparison of GC-FID and SIFT-MS analyses of Class 2A and 2B residual solvents. The techniques perform similarly for linearity and repeatability, but SIFT-MS provides superior performance for accuracy and recovery. Furthermore, SIFT-MS provides greater than 11-fold increase in sample throughput and significantly reduces the time taken to report quantitative results (over six times faster for a full calibration set).

SIFT‐MS is now recognized as the most versatile analytical technique for the identification and quantification of trace gases down to the parts‐per‐trillion by volume, pptv, range. This statement is supported by the wide reach of its applications, from real‐time analysis, obviating sample collection of very humid exhaled breath, to its adoption in industrial scenarios for air quality monitoring. This review touches on the recent extensions to the underpinning ion chemistry kinetics library and the alternative challenge of using nitrogen carrier gas instead of helium. 

SIFT-MS has been widely applied to quantitative analysis of a broad range of VOCs in applications from food products to workplace safety to environmental monitoring, and most recently to pharmaceutical testing. This review surveys the applications of SIFT-MS in odor analysis and in workplace, environmental and consumer protection, with a particular focus on the complementarity of this real-time mass spectrometry analyzer to sensor technology and conventional laboratory techniques—in particular, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC/MS).

Join us for this webinar to learn about Syft Tracer, the latest advancement of real-time, trace gas analysis by SIFT-MS which launched at Pittcon 2023. Hear how the recent product innovations unlock analytical bottlenecks and enable faster decisions to be made in critical process steps.