AROXA FLAVOUR STANDARDS
Cara Technology Founder, Dr Bill Simpson, developed the world’s first stabilized flavour standards. For over 25 years they’ve been used by taste panel leaders in more than 180 countries to improve the performance of their professional taste panels.
We develop and manufacture more than 350 flavour standards for the food and beverage industry. These range from a wide variety of origins, including off-flavours, taints & positive flavours.
Our certified range of flavour standards features those flavours most commonly found in your processes, and are crucial to your quality control.
Our new range of 6-pack flavour standards has allowed us to provide a more extensive range of flavour standards to the market, enabling our customers to train on all of the possible flavours found in their product.
WHAT ARE FLAVOUR STANDARDS?
Flavour standards are sensory-pure powdered flavourings which can be added to a wide range of food and beverage products to impart specific flavour notes at precise concentrations. Flavour standards are used to train assessors in taste panels around the world to recognize and scale the intensity of individual flavour notes.
Our range of certified flavour standards contain a precise quantity of powdered sensory-pure flavour material, made in our pharma-GMP, ISO17025 facility, and nano-encapsulated for stability.
AROXA certified flavour standards are easy to use and require no specialist facilities. All you need is your product (beer cider, wine, water, soft drinks etc), clean bottles or flasks, some glasses and, of course, some tasters to taste the samples.
Our certified flavour standards are provided with full instructions and are very easy to use. The concentration of each and every material is tailored to the product for which it’s intended. Thus a beer flavour standard for diacetyl (2,3-butanedione) is delivered at one concentration while that for wine is delivered at a different concentration.
WHY SHOULD I USE FLAVOUR STANDARDS?
Nano-encapsulation ensures that our flavour standards have an average shelf life of 12 months.
They do not need to be refrigerated or stored in a particular way. Just ensure that they are kept in a dry room below 30oC.
A significant advantage to flavour standards is that they can be used by anyone. They do not need to be prepared in a lab / clean room environment, or handled by someone with a scientific background. The capsules simply need to be opened and added to the product to release a smell or odour.
They are also ready to use once opened, ensuring that sensory preparation is not a time consuming task.
Our flavour standards are sensory pure, which therefore allows tasters to identify if they are ‘anosmic’ (smell blind) to specific flavour compounds. Chemicals bought from retailers such as Sigma Aldrich are only 99% pure and will still contain a trace of other odours and tastes. This is a problem because you may believe you are training your panellist on ‘dimethyl sulphide’ for example, yet if they are anosmic to that compound they may pick up something else and identify it as DMS.
By using flavour standards you avoid the risk of harm posed by dangerous raw chemicals. Some chemicals are dangerous to handle, but are also time consuming to prepare for sensory. Flavour standards are nano-encapsulated and ready to use from point of purchase.
Using flavour standards, and the AROXA descriptors helps assessors use a common terminology. They can be used to train a panel to describe the same chemical compound using one identifiable language.
HOW TO USE FLAVOUR STANDARDS
FLAVOUR STANDARDS ARE EASY TO USE, AND SAFE TO SMELL AND TASTE.
TO USE THEM, SIMPLY OPEN THE CAPSULE, AND ADD A CAPSULE TO A LITRE OF PRODUCT.
Hold capsule upright and tap gently to make sure the powder settles to the bottom of the capsule.
Carefully loosen the two halves of the capsule using a twisting action. Gentle handling is all that is required – there is no need to squeeze the capsule.
Remove the top half of the capsule. Be careful not to spill any of the powder.
Pour the entire contents into the pitcher. Swirl gently.
Wait about two minutes to allow the flavour standard to completely dissolve.
Divide the sample among your assessors, serving approximately 100 ml to each of them.
Evaluate the flavour by first assessing its aroma – then its taste and after-taste.