cis-3-hexenal

green aldehyde Key food odorant

Found in 419 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

See cis-3-hexenal in food:

Olive’s compound profile → Compare olive and bok choy

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C6H10O
Molecular weight: 98.14 g/mol
PubChem CID: 643941 — full record on PubChem

Key food odorant (intermediary)

Dunkel et al. 2014

Identified in the meta-analysis of 227 food samples as one of 57 intermediary odorants — appears in 5–25% of foods. Characteristic odor: green, grassy.

Source: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 7124–7143

Properties

Odor description: green, grassy, sharp
Odor threshold: 0.004 ppb
Varies by food: 0.004 – 26 ppb across the ingredients we hold it in. The figure shown is the lowest of those, not a measurement for any single food.
Volatility: high
CAS number: 6789-80-6
Retention index: 771

Regulatory · United States

FEMA GRAS — Generally Recognized As Safe for flavoring use

~ Isomer match

FEMA number: 3923
GRAS publication: GRAS 19
FEMA primary name: 3-HEXENAL

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

(z)-3-hexenal 3-hexenal, (z)- z-3-hexenal

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

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.

green, grassy, sharp shown above Flavornet Cas, Flavornet Name, FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 4 sources agree

apple, fatty, fruity, grassy, green, leaf, weedy FlavorDB 2.0

384

Bars are the share of ingredient records carrying each description. High agreement means the sources replicate each other — not necessarily that they are right.

Where you'd actually smell it

Odor Activity Value = measured concentration ÷ odor threshold (0.004 ppb). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
olive	20000.0	5000000 ⚡	DOI
extra virgin olive oil	11000.0	2750000 ⚡	Corpus paper

Concentrations from PubMed Central Open Access papers (free literature corpus, MIT-style licensed). Copper = OAV ≥ 10 (strongly perceptible). Green = OAV ≥ 1 (perceptible).

These OAVs depend on which threshold you divide by. Published values for this molecule span 0.004–26 ppb and the column above uses the lowest, which makes every OAV as large as it can be. At the high end each figure would be 6500× smaller, and rows near the line would cross it. Read the colours as “worth a look”, not as a measurement.

Thresholds in published tables

Numbers printed in open-access papers, grouped by the medium the table states. Median and full range of the values; “agree” means two or more papers whose middle 80% of values sit within 100×. Not reviewed.

Medium	Median	Range	Values	Papers	Papers agree?
air	0.25 µg/L air	0.25–0.25	1	1	one paper
ethanol solution	45 ppb	45–45	1	1	one paper
food matrix	1.7 ppb	3e-05–1.72	6	6	no (4.8 decades)
unstated	0.254 ppb	0.21–45	11	11	yes
water	0.25 ppb	0.12–4.5	12	12	yes

Found in

Measured impact first, then profile share

Every ingredient known to contain cis-3-hexenal. 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 cis-3-hexenal in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

olive

measured · OAV 5000000.0

370 cmpds

18 cmpds

19 cmpds

23 cmpds