3-methylphenol

spicy phenol Key food odorant

Found in 53 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C7H8O
Molecular weight: 108.14 g/mol
PubChem CID: 342 — full record on PubChem

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: fecal, plastic, medicinal, medical, woody, leather, phenolic
Odor threshold — in a food matrix: 15.0 ppb – 660 ppb median 42.8 ppb · 4 published values · see all 5 with sources
Volatility: high
CAS number: 108-39-4
Retention index: 1581

Not in FEMA GRAS publications 1-33. Of 3,367 listed flavoring substances, none match this compound name. May still be food-safe under other regulatory routes (FDA 21 CFR 172, EFSA, JECFA) — check femaflavor.org for the authoritative current list.

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

m-cresol

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.

fecal, plastic Flavornet Cas

—

chemical FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree

fecal, plastic, medicinal, medical, woody, leather, phenolic shown above FlavorDB 2.0

phenolic FlavorDB 2.0

smoky/phenolic FlavorDB 2.0

fruity, sweet, roasted, smoky, oily 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.

Unresolved

An authoritative source gives fecal, plastic, which disagrees with the description shown above. Held rather than switched: the authority is terser than the corpus here, and which should win is a rule we have not set.

Published thresholds

5 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

15.0 ppb – 660 ppb

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

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
15.0 ppb	water (food: reference standard (water))	Literature corpus	—
31.0 ppb	water (food: smoked cooked loin (pork))	Literature corpus	—
54.5 ppb	water (food: wine)	Literature corpus	—
660 ppb	water (food: longjing green tea infusion)	Literature corpus	—

In air

0.100 ppb

Airborne detection — not comparable to a water threshold.

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
0.100 ppb	air	Nagata 2003	—

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.

Found in

Measured impact first, then profile share

Every ingredient known to contain 3-methylphenol. 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-methylphenol in it.

102 cmpds

106 cmpds

107 cmpds

109 cmpds