How Food Packaging Affects Food Flavor

摘要

Food packaging has a major impact on flavor: gases and moisture migrate into and out of the food, rearranging fatty acids, changing volatile organic compounds, and affecting flavor impact. Some packaging materials are meant to assure long shelf life, and others, such as those used in fast-food service, are designed for rapid turnover. Certain structures control migration of atmospheric oxygen, and others control water and moisture. The technical literature is rich in references covering the isolation, concentration, identification of important chemicals, eliminating artifacts, and characterization of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and non-volatile organic compounds (N-VOs) from a wide variety of aqueous and lipid sources. Unanticipated interactions between flavors and packaging materials that are encountered in industry are not generally described in the published literature. A graph of expected interactions is shown in Fig. 1.