FLAVOR Enhancers in Food Processing: Spectrophotometric Determination of Maltol and Ethyl Maltol in Some Commercial Food Samples During Different Storage Conditions

Abstract

It is important for flavor additives to maintain adequate thermal stability under high temperature conditions. Since many excellent fragrances are organic and have relatively small molecular weights, they lack thermal stability. As a result, a rapid and accurate method has been developed for simultaneous determination of maltol and ethyl maltol by reaction with iron(III) in sulfuric acid solution. This reaction was the basis for an indirect spectrophotometric method, which followed the development of the pink ferroin product (?max = 520 nm). It appears that ethyl maltol and maltol follow Beer's law at concentrations of 0.5–20.0 mg/L according to the optimized method. According to the alternative standard method, the LOD values for maltol and ethyl maltol are 0.2 mg/L and 0.3 mg/L, respectively. Commercial food samples were successfully analyzed using the proposed methods. A study was conducted to determine how different storage conditions affected the concentrations of maltol and ethyl maltol. High temperature and sunlight lead to decomposition of these two flavor enhancer concentrations more than 10%.