Aroma Analysis of Cooked Ground Beef and Plant-Based Meat

Aroma analysis is of paramount importance in the plant-based meat industry. The ability to replicate flavors and mimic real meat is vital in appealing to consumers. To capture the aroma profiles of cooked meat, analysts may often resort to equilibrium-based headspace extraction approaches such as headspace-solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) instead of dynamic purge approaches like dynamic headspace (DHS) sampling, despite the potential of the latter for higher recovery and sensitivity. The concern about using DHS for cooked meat or other food with considerable water content arises from the risk of moisture build-up in the sorbent tube potentially disrupting the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. This study aims to showcase how the GERSTEL LabWorks Platform with automated DHS option and its unique dry purge feature, can effectively address this issue using both cooked ground beef and plant-based meat as examples. Additionally, a workflow for optimizing DHS settings relevant to this study is presented. The aroma profiles of cooked ground beef and plant-based meat are analyzed and compared.