gamma-butyrolactone

dairy lactone

Found in 52 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

Properties

Odor description: caramel, creamy, fatty, oily, sweet
Odor threshold — in a food matrix: 8.8 ppb – 1614 ppb median 550 ppb · 7 published values · see all 8 with sources
CAS number: 96-48-0
Retention index: 943

Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

? Partial match

FEMA number: 2372
GRAS publication: GRAS 3
FEMA primary name: 4,4-DIBUTYL-Y-BUTYROLACTONE-4,4-Dibutyl-4

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.

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.

caramel, creamy, fatty, oily, sweet shown above FlavorDB 2.0

Milky, creamy with fruity peach-like afternotes FlavorDB 2.0

creamy oily fatty caramel 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.

Published thresholds

8 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

8.8 ppb – 1614 ppb

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

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
5.0 ppb	water (food: coffee)	Literature corpus	26973023
Flagged: 110× from the median of this group. Excluded from the range above pending re-check against the source publication — shown rather than hidden.
8.8 ppb	water (food: rice)	Literature corpus	26973023
86.0 ppb	water (food: lamb)	Literature corpus	26973023
550 ppb	water (food: unknown)	Literature corpus	26973023
820 ppb	water (food: olive oil)	Literature corpus	26973023
1609 ppb	water (food: bread)	Literature corpus	26973023
1614 ppb	water (food: cocoa)	Literature corpus	26973023

Other matrix

2000 ppb

Measured in a non-aqueous medium (oil, starch, cellulose).

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
2000 ppb	wine (food: red wine (cabernet sauvignon))	Literature corpus	26973023

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 (550.5 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 8 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
lamb	1057.0	1.92	—
olive oil	808.5	1.47	—
cocoa	23.9	0.04	—
coffee	6.3	0.01	—
bread	1.0	0.00	—
rice	0.6	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 gamma-butyrolactone. 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 gamma-butyrolactone in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

265 cmpds

507 cmpds

24 cmpds

26 cmpds