salicylaldehyde

green aldehyde

Found in 29 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C7H6O2
Molecular weight: 122.12 g/mol
PubChem CID: 6998 — full record on PubChem

Properties

Odor description: cinnamon, cooling, medical, spicy, wintergreen
Odor threshold — in a food matrix: 0.612 ppb – 1041 ppb median 521 ppb · 2 published values · see all 2 with sources
Volatility: high
CAS number: 90-02-8
Retention index: 1040

Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

✓ Exact match

FEMA number: 3004
GRAS publication: GRAS 3
FEMA primary name: SALICYLALDEHYDE

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

2-hydroxybenzaldehyde

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

Published thresholds

2 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

0.612 ppb – 1041 ppb

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

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
0.612 ppb	water (food: peach)	Literature corpus	—
1041 ppb	water (food: unknown)	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 (520.806 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 2 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
peach	347.8	0.67	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 salicylaldehyde. 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 salicylaldehyde in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

10 cmpds

33 cmpds

41 cmpds

45 cmpds