Rapid Flavour profiling for sustainable food product development.

The flavours and aroma of food derive in part from human sensing of complex mixtures of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Flavour is critical for consumers yet is challenging to define quantitatively; small changes in the amounts and types of VOCs in a foodstuff can profoundly alter how it is perceived by consumers. Evaluating aroma chemistry is currently very time consuming and labour intensive, often needing panels of highly training individuals to directly sample and evaluate products one by one. This is often a rate limiting step in new product development. This joint PhD project between University of York and Nestle Confectionary will explore how state of the art analytical instrumentation, particularly on-line and real-time mass spectrometry, can help automate flavour detection and accelerate more sustainable product testing and development in the food industry. On-line chemical ionisation mass spectrometry will be combined with innovative data techniques, including machine learning, to provide new methods for reliable categorisation of products and other critical diagnostics such as consumer perception and impurity detection.

The PhD will be based in the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories, part of the Department of Chemistry. The labs provide world leading analytical facilities for gas and aerosol measurements and have a long history of leading new developments in the detection of VOCs in air, combustion emissions, fuels, personal care and food products. The PhD will blend periods of laboratory analytical science with development of data driven methods and be linked closely to commercial applications and end user at Nestle (also located in York).