Thermal generation of flavour can be monitored on line (using the MS-Nose) under controlled conditions of temperature, moisture and time. There is a system designed to process simple mixture of amino acids and sugars to study the fundamental chemistry of the reaction using milligram quantities of reagents.

A second system is designed to process low moisture food samples (<40%) such as doughs and milk powder preparations on a 1-5g scale. Both systems give precise processing conditions and show the generation of volatile compounds with time providing “clean” data for kinetic models or an understanding of the pathways involved in flavour generation.

More recent work on monitoring products from the Maillard and Strecker reactions e.g. flavours and acrylamide were presented at ACS meetings (Channell & Taylor in Process and Reaction Flavours, Eds Weerasinghe & Sucan, ACS 2005, pp181-191. Also, Cooke et al in Chemistry and Safety of Acrylamide in Food, Eds Friedman & Mottram 2005, pp 303-316). The data from both papers has been used to build kinetic models to understand the pathways of formation and to predict the amounts of materials formed under prescribed processing and compositional conditions.