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3-methylpentanoic acid

dairy acid

Found in 4 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis structure of 3-methylpentanoic acid
2D Lewis Structure
Formula
C6H12O2
Molecular weight
116.16 g/mol
PubChem CID
7755 — full record on PubChem

Properties

Odor description
butter, roasted, chemical, green, burnt, apple
Odor threshold
113.49 ppb (1 source, non-SIDA)
Volatility
high
CAS number
105-43-1
Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

✓ Exact match
FEMA number
3437
GRAS publication
GRAS 8
FEMA primary name
3-METHYLPENTANOIC ACID

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

Source: FEMA GRAS publications 1-33.

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.

Also filed as
3-methyl-pentanoic acid

Same molecule, unified here — previously counted and displayed as separate compounds.

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.

butter, roasted, chemical, green, burnt, apple shown above FlavorDB 2.0
2
chemical Flavordb Odor Column
—
green, butter, roasted, burnt, apple Flavordb Odor Column
—
butter, roasted Flavordb Odor Column
—

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

Where you'd actually smell it

Odor Activity Value = measured concentration ÷ odor threshold (113.49 ppb). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food Concentration (ppb) OAV Source
cheese 30000.0 264 ⚡ Corpus paper

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-methylpentanoic acid. 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-methylpentanoic acid in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

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