Recent trends in aroma release and perception during food oral processing: A review

Abstract

The dynamic and complex peculiarities of the oral environment present several challenges for controlling the aroma release during food consumption. They also pose higher requirements for designing food with better sensory quality. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the basic rules of aroma transmission and aroma perception during food oral processing and its behind mechanism. This review summarized the latest developments in aroma release from food to retronasal cavity, aroma release and delivery influencing factors, aroma perception mechanisms. The individual variance is the most important factor affecting aroma release and perception. Therefore, the intelligent chewing simulator is the key to establish a standard analytical method. The key odorants perceived from the retronasal cavity should be given more attention during food oral processing. Identification of the olfactory receptor activated by specific odorants and its binding mechanisms are still the bottleneck. Electrophysiology and image technology are the new noninvasive technologies in elucidating the brain signals among multisensory, which can fill the gap between aroma perception and other senses. Moreover, it is necessary to develop a new approach to integrate the relationship among aroma binding parameters, aroma concentration, aroma attributes and cross-modal reactions to make the aroma prediction model more accurate.

Keywords:

• Aroma perception
• aroma release
• oral processing
• sensory evaluation
• olfactory receptor

Authors’ contributions

Dandan Pu, Yuyu Zhang: Investigation; methodology; writing—review and editing; Yimeng Shan and Juan Wang: Investigation; data processing; Baoguo Sun: Resources; Wangang Zhang, Youqiang Xu: Review and editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32122069 and 32102118), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M690265), and the Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program (No. BJJWZYJH01201910011025).