Consumers have a definite appreciation of what constitutes freshness, based upon their individual experiences. For food & flavor science PTR-MS can be the ideal tool to link descriptive sensory analysis with objective fingerprinting of food volatiles. Scientists* have shown that for bread an objective understanding of the freshness can be derived by relating consumer freshness judgments to sensory descriptive analysis and volatile composition.
* Heenan S., Dufour J.-P., Harvey W., Delahunty C., University of Otago