cuminaldehyde

green aldehyde Key food odorant

Found in 23 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C10H12O
Molecular weight: 148.20 g/mol
PubChem CID: 326 — 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: Spicy, cumin, green, herbal and vegetable-like
Odor threshold — in a food matrix: 0.500 ppb – 1212 ppb median 38.5 ppb · 6 published values · see all 6 with sources
Volatility: high
CAS number: 122-03-2
Retention index: 1241

Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

✓ Exact match

FEMA number: 2341
GRAS publication: GRAS 3
FEMA primary name: CUMINALDEHYDE

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

cumin aldehyde

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.

acid, sharp Flavornet Cas

—

Spicy, cumin, green, herbal and vegetable-like shown above FlavorDB 2.0

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 acid, sharp, 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

6 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

0.500 ppb – 1212 ppb

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

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
0.500 ppb	water (food: chocolate)	Literature corpus	17482441, 27941612, 33987543 +11
12.0 ppb	water (food: lemon)	Literature corpus	34853254
33.9 ppb	water (food: grape)	Literature corpus	17482441, 27941612, 33987543 +11
43.1 ppb	water (food: unknown)	Literature corpus	17482441, 27941612, 33987543 +10
177 ppb	water (food: litsea pungens fruit)	Literature corpus	17482441, 27941612, 33987543 +11
1212 ppb	water (food: tomato)	Literature corpus	17482441, 27941612, 33987543 +11

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 (38.545 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 6 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
grape	1238.0	32.1 ⚡	Corpus paper
tomato	1215.0	31.5 ⚡	Corpus paper
lemon	2.5	0.06	—
chocolate	0.1	0.00	—

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 cuminaldehyde. 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 cuminaldehyde in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

578 cmpds

24 cmpds

28 cmpds

38 cmpds