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3-furanthiol

Key food odorant

Found in 2 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

Look up another compound — search by name, CAS number, PubChem CID, or FEMA #.

Key food odorant (individualist)

Dunkel et al. 2014

Identified in the meta-analysis of 227 food samples as one of 151 individualist odorants — appears in <5% of foods, carries the diagnostic signature of specific ingredients.

Source: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 7124–7143

Properties

Odor description
meaty, roasted, sulfurous, savory
Odor threshold — in a food matrix
0.0001 ppb – 0.002 ppb median 0.002 ppb · 3 published values · see all 3 with sources
CAS number
19872-52-7
Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

? Partial match
FEMA number
3188
GRAS publication
GRAS 4
FEMA primary name
2-METHYL 3-FURANTHIOL

Use-level matrix not extracted for this substance — check the source publication for current ppm guidance.

Source: FEMA GRAS publications 1-33. 2 related FEMA records for this name — verify the exact substance for regulatory use.

How this molecule is described

Sources disagree about odour more often than they disagree about chemistry. Rather than show one answer, here is every description on file with how many ingredient records carry it.

Descriptions on file

Ordered by how many independent descriptor streams give each wording, then by how often it appears. The bar is still replication — one source copied onto many ingredients scores high there — so the two can disagree.

chemical FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree
1
apple, geranium, meaty, cooked, coconut FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree
1
meaty, roasted, sulfurous, savory shown above Llm Adjudicated
—

Bars are the share of ingredient records carrying each description. High agreement means the sources replicate each other — not necessarily that they are right.

Published thresholds

3 measured values from the literature. Grouped by what was actually measured — a threshold smelled in clean water, tasted in the mouth, or measured in a real food are three different quantities and are not pooled.

In a food matrix

0.0001 ppb – 0.002 ppb

Measured in a real food, where the matrix shifts detection — not a clean-water value.

Threshold Matrix Source Paper
0.0001 ppb water (food: hand-squeezed grapefruit juice) Literature corpus —
0.002 ppb water (food: green tea infusion (jingshan cha)) Literature corpus —
0.002 ppb water (food: longjing green tea infusion) Literature corpus —

Only values we can attribute are listed. Where a compendium's licence does not permit public attribution its figures are omitted here, so every number on this page traces to a citable source.

Where you'd actually smell it

Odor Activity Value = measured concentration ÷ odor threshold (0.0016 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 3 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food Concentration (ppb) OAV Source
lard 55.4 34594 ⚡ —
baijiu 3.0 1875 ⚡ —
wine 1.5 919 ⚡ —
grape 0.1 37.5 ⚡ —

Concentrations from PubMed Central Open Access papers (free literature corpus, MIT-style licensed). Copper = OAV ≥ 10 (strongly perceptible). Green = OAV ≥ 1 (perceptible).

Found in

Measured impact first, then profile share

Every ingredient known to contain 3-furanthiol. Ingredients with a measured concentration come first, ranked by odour activity; the rest follow by how large a share of that ingredient's profile this molecule is. The figure beside each is how many different compounds that ingredient has in total — not the concentration of 3-furanthiol in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

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