Aryballe provides digital olfaction solutions that help unlock and leverage odor data for the Food, F&F industries. Aryballe’s global product manager, Fanny Turlure, recently spoke at the Flavorcon 2021 virtual event on how our products are helping companies leverage odor data for their organizations.
Here is a summary of the trends and use cases that Fanny presented during the conference last month.
For many consumers, the Covid pandemic and climate change have triggered an acute awareness of the consequences of our consumption habits.
Across many industries, one can see an increased demand for sustainability. Consumers want products, processes and transportation methods that do as little harm as possible to the environment and are mindful of natural resources. This goes hand in hand with an increased search for transparency on product composition and traceability of the ingredients along the value chain, from the supplier up until the evolution of a finished product.
Consumers have also gained a more acute awareness of the impact of food on their health and are demanding better-for-you options, and clean-label ingredients and products
Finally, one of the major trends affecting the industry is customer centricity: consumers are craving for new, innovative products that provide new sensory experiences. This results in more product launches than ever, for which faster development cycles are required.
When we look at the challenges that food, flavor and fragrance manufacturers are facing, we observe that the system has two major variables—both the ingredients themselves and the methods used to evaluate them.
Variation of the ingredients can come from a number of factors:
- Weather variability, as well as cultivation methods -> affects the growth of natural products and their resulting sensory characteristics
- Ingredient shortage can force companies to rethink their traditional sources, increasing the importance on second suppliers and their products
- Green chemistry/White biotechnology to replace traditional products and processes
In parallel to such ingredient variability, there is also a challenge when it comes to assessing the sensory, i.e. olfactive experience, that will be felt by a consumer. There are two primary methods for analysis—sensorial and analytical.
Sensorial methods—most often human panels—are comprised of a group of individuals that have different sensitivities & preferences. They have two major drawbacks, though:
- High inter-individual variability
- Strong impact of subjectivity
In the case of analytical methods, GC-MS remains the gold standards and method of choice for product evaluation. But does not inform on global olfactive experience, as we’ve detailed in a previous blog post.
Taken together, this means that there is an opportunity for a new solution—one that provides the consistent, digital, metric-driven data of a GC-MS, but that experiences olfaction closer to a human. We believe that digital olfaction can be of help here.
If you consider the different steps for product development and manufacturing, digital olfaction can assist at different levels.
During design phase, it can help screen formulations faster and evaluate new ingredients that were synthetized through upcycling, green chemistry, or white biotechnology processes.
At procurement, it can assist with the evaluation of suppliers to ensure that quality is constant, and when looking for alternative suppliers, as well as during incoming inspection.
Finally, for product manufacturing steps, it can help control semi- and finished products. And help monitor the evolution of product odor in time.
Digital olfaction is helping companies in these markets address these challenges with solutions that are:
- fast (shortening time to market with rapid development cycles),
- traceable (improving QMS with clear, consistent and documentable results),
- objective (reducing the variability of panel testers and allowing to measure odors over time),
- and convenient (allowing to capture data anywhere, at any time).
See the full presentation recording, including examples of how Aryballe solutions are helping address these specific use cases on the on-demand recording from Flavorcon (event registrants) or contact us for more information.
