Fresh Flavour Standard

Fresh Flavour Standard

The Fresh Flavour is a green aromatic associated with freshly cut grass and leafy plants, characterised by a sweet, pungent note. This fresh flavour standard trains professional tasters to establish the correct balance between sweet and pungent flavours in food and beverages. In non-alcoholic drinks, this flavour is imparted due to water contamination with vegetation and other plant matter.

The compounds in our Fresh Flavour Standard capsules impart the aroma, taste, and mouthfeel of a specific defect or positive flavour to a beverage for taster training, calibration, and quality control.

£75.00 GBP

Quantity:

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

Minimum Order: £275

Fresh Flavour Standard Overview

The FlavorActiV Fresh Flavour Standard replicates the aroma, taste, and mouthfeel of fresh green vegetation using encapsulated flavour compounds. When released into a neutral liquid, it creates a controlled reference point for:

  • Sensory panel training
  • Off-flavour detection
  • Product calibration
  • Beverage quality assurance

It is especially valuable in non-alcoholic beverages, where fresh off-flavours commonly originate from water contamination.

What Is Fresh Flavour?

Fresh flavour is a green aromatic profile commonly associated with:

  • Newly cut grass
  • Leafy plants
  • Crushed green vegetation

It is typically described as:

  • Sweet
  • Pungent
  • Green
  • Herbaceous

In controlled amounts, freshness can be perceived as positive. However, when excessive or unintended, it becomes an off-flavour defect, particularly in beverages.

What Causes Fresh Off-Flavour?

The most common cause of fresh off-flavour in non-alcoholic beverages is:

  • Water contamination with vegetation
  • Plant matter entering water systems
  • Organic residues during processing

These contaminants release green aromatic compounds that result in unintended fresh, grassy notes, leading to product rejection or inconsistency.

Using the Fresh Flavour Standard for Sensory Training

Sensory professionals use the Fresh Flavour Standard to:

  • Train tasters to identify fresh flavour defects
  • Calibrate panels with a consistent flavour reference
  • Improve detection thresholds for green aromatics
  • Establish acceptable vs. unacceptable freshness levels in beverages

This ensures panel accuracy, repeatability, and product consistency across production batches.

How to Recognise Fresh Flavour: Sensory Terms

Standard descriptive sensory terms include:

  • Leaf trimmings
  • Mowed lawn
  • Crushed green leaves
  • Fresh grass
  • Green vegetation

These descriptors align with the WCR Sensory Lexicon, ensuring consistent use of sensory language.

What Are the Professional Applications of the Fresh Flavour Standard?

The Fresh Flavour Standard serves multiple professional applications:

  • Beverage quality control teams use it to detect and assess unwanted fresh off-flavours linked to water contamination, ensuring flavour consistency and preventing grassy or vegetal defects from reaching consumers.
  • Water treatment and bottling specialists rely on it to monitor how source water quality, filtration efficiency, and storage conditions affect final product taste, particularly in bottled and purified water.
  • Soft drink and functional beverage manufacturers use it to verify that clean, neutral flavour profiles are maintained and that plant-derived contamination does not compromise product integrity.
  • Product development and R&D teams use it during formulation trials to understand how fresh, green notes interact with flavour systems and to prevent unintended vegetal characteristics during scale-up.
  • Sensory analysts and professional training coordinators apply it in structured sensory training programmes to build detection accuracy, align panel performance, and support ongoing calibration across production sites.

Other Information

The Fresh Flavour Standard helps train tasters to balance sweet and pungent flavours. Its encapsulated compounds also aid in beverage quality control.

FlavorActiV refers to Fresh as Freshly Cut Grass.

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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