tridecanoic acid

sour acid

Found in 36 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C13H26O2
Molecular weight: 214.34 g/mol
PubChem CID: 12530 — full record on PubChem

Properties

Odor description: waxy woody
Odor threshold — in air: 10000 ppb 1 published value · see all 1 with sources
Volatility: medium
CAS number: 638-53-9
Retention index: 1682

Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

✓ Exact match

FEMA number: 4336
GRAS publication: GRAS 23
FEMA primary name: Tridecanoic 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.

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.

waxy woody shown above FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree

chemical, earthy, butter, cooked, fatty FlavorDB 2.0

chemical Flavordb Odor Column

—

earthy, butter, cooked Flavordb Odor Column

—

fatty 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

1 measured value 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 air

10000 ppb

Airborne detection — not comparable to a water threshold.

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
10000 ppb	air (food: citrus-tea)	PMC open access	—

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 (10000.0 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 1 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
olive	400000.0	40.0 ⚡	DOI
mead	100.0	0.01	—

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 tridecanoic 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 tridecanoic acid in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

169 cmpds

172 cmpds

174 cmpds

176 cmpds