Petroleum Flavour Standard

The Petroleum Flavour Standard is a professional sensory reference used to identify and train the detection of petrol, diesel, or motor-fuel-like off-flavours in beverages and liquid food products. It enables accurate recognition of contamination or flavour degradation that can compromise product safety, quality, and brand trust.

Developed using only natural, food-grade flavour compounds, this standard contains no real fuel or mechanical substances, making it safe for controlled sensory training.

We ship globally – shipping costs may apply depending on your region

Minimum Order: £275

Petroleum Flavour Standard Overview

Petroleum flavour refers to an undesirable, fuel-like aroma and taste resembling petrol, diesel, or motor oil. It is not a natural flavour profile in beverages and is always considered a fault.

This off-note is typically described as:

Chemical
Oily
Mechanical
Solvent-like
Motor fuel–like

What Causes Petroleum Off-Flavour?

Petroleum off-flavour can occur due to several contamination and processing issues, including:

Fuel or oil taints entering packaging or storage environments
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas contamination from pumps, compressors, or pressurisation systems
Contaminated transfer lines or valves
Flavour breakdown in finished or stored products
External exposure during transportation or warehousing

These issues are most common in carbonated drinks, bottled beverages, and liquid flavour systems.

Using the Petroleum Flavour Standard for Sensory Training

The Petroleum Flavour Standard is used to train panels to:

Detect fuel-like taints at very low thresholds
Differentiate petrol notes from other chemical off-flavours
Improve early fault detection
Strengthen sensory consistency across production sites

It is widely used in blind tasting, triangulation tests, and off-flavour reference calibration.

How to Recognise Petroleum Flavour: Sensory Terms

WCR Sensory Lexicon:

Specific chemical aromatic associated with crude oil and refined fuels
Heavy oil characteristics

FlavorActiV Sensory Terms:

P-Cymene
Motor Fuel
Petrol
Motor Oil
Mechanical
Diesel

What Are the Professional Applications of the Petroleum Flavour Standard?

The Petroleum Flavour Standard serves multiple professional applications:

Beverage quality control teams use it to detect petrol, diesel, and motor-fuel taints in soft drinks, bottled water, beer, and carbonated beverages, helping to prevent contaminated products from reaching the market.
Brewers, cider makers, and distillers rely on it to identify petroleum-like off-notes caused by gas contamination, equipment issues, or flavour breakdown during fermentation, carbonation, or storage.
Packaging technologists and material specialists use it to assess whether packaging materials, seals, or storage containers contribute to fuel-like taint through migration or external contamination.
Flavour developers and R&D teams use it as a reference point to differentiate actual petroleum contamination from other chemical or solvent-like off-flavours during new product formulation and stability testing.
Sensory analysts and training managers apply it in professional sensory training programmes to calibrate tasting panels, improve detection of low-threshold faults, and ensure consistent off-flavour detection across production sites and laboratories.

Other Information

Please note that this flavour only contains natural food-grade flavours—it does not contain petrol taste or other mechanical fuels.

FlavorActiV refers to Petroleum as Diesel / Motor Fuel.

FlavorActiV GMP Flavour Standards

Only Pharmaceutical Quality GMP Flavour Standards provide sufficient quality for professional sensory panels to train and validate with.

We produce encapsulated GMP (Pharmaceutical Good Manufacturing Practice) Flavour Standards that are safe to both smell and drink. The compounds within our capsules impart the aroma, taste and mouthfeel of a specific defect or positive flavour into a beverage for the purposes of taster training, calibration and quality control.

Our individual flavour GMP Flavour Standards are sold by flavour, each flavour pack contains 5 capsules, each separately blister packaged. Our sensory kits contain a mixture of flavours, each separately blister packaged, read the product description for flavour details.

We ship globally, and have over 20 years of experience at it. Our GMP Pharmaceutical Flavour Standards are produced to the highest standards, and as such, their shelf-life is strong and their quality consistent.

FlavorActiV’s flavour centre is the world’s only pharmaceutically run facility dedicated to the production of flavour reference standards. The Flavour Centre is a state-of-the-art facility housed within the campus of world-renowned Quay Pharma near Liverpool in the U.K.

The Flavour Centre was designed by FlavorActiV from the ground up at the direct request of global customers as they looked to move away from inferior food grade ‘certified flavour standards’ to GMP Pharma, a standard that ensures safe, stable, traceable, consistent and long shelf-life products.

All FlavorActiV’s industry-leading encapsulated flavour standards are manufactured following GMP at our Flavour Centre. All aspects of manufacture are overseen by Quay Pharma who are audited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory agency (MHRA). We also welcome customer audits.

Only FlavorActiV GMP flavour standard capsules bear our mark of authenticity.

We brand each of our capsules so that our customers know they’re getting the Pharmaceutical GMP Quality that only FlavorActiV provide.

Industry leading packaging and shelf-life

FlavorActiV flavour standards are blister packaged, which extends shelf-life and protects capsules from potential contamination. The average shelf-life of FlavorActiV flavour standards is 18 months to 4 years, depending on the flavour compounds.

We will never ship in pots or plastic packaging, here’s why…

Blister packaging protects capsules from the environment until they are ready for use. Blister packaging greatly reduces the amount of headspace for possible flavour escape. As each capsule individually blister packaged, making use of one capsule still leaves all others protected. FlavorActiV Flavour Standard packaging is 100% recyclable, as opposed to polypropylene which is not widely recycled.

Pots are semi-porous, they allow molecules to pass through and flavour to be lost, their significant headspace also adds to substantial flavour escape as a gas, even when using just one capsule all those remaining in the pot are exposed.

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