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Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by...
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Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies

A special issue of Foods (ISSN 2304-8158). This special issue belongs to the section "Food Physics and (Bio)Chemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 March 2026 | Viewed by 1213

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Yoko Iijima

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Applied Chemistry, Kogakuin University, 2665–1 Nakano-Machi, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0015, Japan
Interests: food chemistry; volatiles; food aroma; flavor analysis; flavor-omics; volatilomics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The character of food aroma and flavor, determined by volatile compounds, derives from the product’s freshness, cooked, fermented, or processed condition, affecting our preference. Therefore, volatile flavor compound composition directly determines the quality of each type of food. It is impossible to infer the aroma characteristics of a food product from the quantitative differences in specific flavor compounds, because flavor is composed of a mixture of flavor compounds with different aroma characteristics and odor thresholds. This indicates that it is also necessary to conduct component complexity analyses of foods to clarify their quality. Additionally, the emission of volatile flavor compounds varies both spatially and spatiotemporally, depending on the condition of the food in question. Therefore, capturing dynamic changes in volatile composition is also necessary for food characterization.

This Special Issue, entitled “Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies", will focus on new findings on food volatile flavor compounds, using recent analytical technologies such as volatilomics, real-time analysis, and other methods. Studies employing high-speed or high-sensitivity analytical techniques for food volatiles and high-throughput food sample preparation methods are also welcome.

This Special Issue aims to collect a wide range of information on the latest innovative analytical methods and their application in the analysis of volatile flavor compounds in foods.

Prof. Dr. Yoko Iijima
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • food flavor volatiles
  • volatile analysis
  • mass spectrometry
  • solid extraction
  • flavor-omics
  • volatilomics
  • sensory evaluation

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 1633 KB  
Article
Discrimination Between Commercial Tomato Juices from Non-Concentrate and Concentrate Based on Their Volatile Profiles
by Yoko Iijima, Katsutoshi Saisho and Taiki Maeoka
Foods 2025, 14(17), 2993; https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14172993 - 27 Aug 2025
Viewed by 373
Abstract
Commercial fruit juices are categorized into juice not from concentrate (JNFC) and juice from concentrate (JFC). Tomato juice is one of the most popular vegetable juices, and its aroma is an important factor in evaluating its quality. However, differences in the aroma characteristics [...] Read more.
Commercial fruit juices are categorized into juice not from concentrate (JNFC) and juice from concentrate (JFC). Tomato juice is one of the most popular vegetable juices, and its aroma is an important factor in evaluating its quality. However, differences in the aroma characteristics of JNFC and JFC tomato juices have not been clearly identified. This study aimed to investigate the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) involved in distinguishing between JNFC and JFC using commercially available tomato juices. Furthermore, the effect of concentration on the VOC composition was evaluated using different procedures. Twenty-three commercial tomato juices were prepared for analysis of VOCs using headspace solid phase microextraction-gas chromatography mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS). Principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) were used to discriminate the samples into JNFC and JFC groups. JNFC contained 43 VOCs, which was more than twice that contained in JFC, and the quantitative variation was larger in JNFC than in JFC. In particular, the JNFC group contained significantly more alcohol and phenol compounds. On the other hand, the JFC group contained more formyl pyrrole and Strecker aldehydes. Additional GC-MS/olfactometry (GC-MS/O) and odor active value analyses indicated that (Z)-3-hexenol and 3-methylbutanal were the best VOCs to distinguish between the JNFC and JFC groups. Furthermore, different concentration procedures, including heating concentration (HC), decompression concentration (DC), and freeze drying (FD), were performed, and the corresponding VOCs were compared. HC and DC reduced the levels of most of the compounds to the levels seen in commercial JFC. These results indicate that the concentration procedure is an important processing stage, in addition to the break process, that determines the quality of tomato juice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies)
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19 pages, 3543 KB  
Article
Chemometric Approach for Discriminating the Volatile Profile of Cooked Glutinous and Normal-Amylose Rice Cultivars from Representative Japanese Production Areas Using GC × GC-TOFMS
by Takayoshi Tanaka, Junhan Zhang, Shuntaro Isoya, Tatsuro Maeda, Kazuya Hasegawa and Tetsuya Araki
Foods 2025, 14(15), 2751; https://doi.org/10.3390/foods14152751 - 6 Aug 2025
Viewed by 539
Abstract
Cooked-rice aroma strongly affects consumer choice, yet the chemical traits distinguishing glutinous rice from normal-amylose japonica rice remain underexplored because earlier studies targeted only a few dozen volatiles using one-dimensional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this study, four glutinous and seven normal Japanese [...] Read more.
Cooked-rice aroma strongly affects consumer choice, yet the chemical traits distinguishing glutinous rice from normal-amylose japonica rice remain underexplored because earlier studies targeted only a few dozen volatiles using one-dimensional gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). In this study, four glutinous and seven normal Japanese cultivars were cooked under identical conditions, their headspace volatiles trapped with MonoTrap and qualitatively profiled by comprehensive GC × GC-TOFMS. The two-dimensional platform resolved 1924 peaks—about ten-fold previous coverage—and, together with hierarchical clustering, PCA, heatmap visualization and volcano plots, cleanly separated the starch classes (78.3% cumulative PCA variance; Euclidean distance > 140). Volcano plots highlighted 277 compounds enriched in the glutinous cultivars and 295 in Koshihikari, including 270 compounds that were not previously documented in rice. Normal cultivars were dominated by ethers, aldehydes, amines and other nitrogenous volatiles associated with grainy, grassy and toasty notes. Glutinous cultivars showed abundant ketones, furans, carboxylic acids, thiols, steroids, nitro compounds, pyrroles and diverse hydrocarbons and aromatics, yielding sweeter, fruitier and floral accents. These results expand the volatile library for japonica rice, provide molecular markers for flavor-oriented breeding and demonstrate the power of GC × GC-TOFMS coupled with chemometrics for grain aroma research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Volatile Flavor Analysis on Food Quality: Application by Volatilomics and Recent Analytical Technologies)
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