3,5-dimethylpyrazine

Key food odorant

Found in 3 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

Key food odorant (individualist)

Dunkel et al. 2014

Identified in the meta-analysis of 227 food samples as one of 151 individualist odorants — appears in <5% of foods, carries the diagnostic signature of specific ingredients.

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

Properties

Odor description: roasted, nutty, cocoa, coffee
Odor threshold — orthonasal, in clean water: 246 ppb – 1100 ppb median 673 ppb · 2 published values · see all 4 with sources
CAS number: 14667-55-1

Not in FEMA GRAS publications 1-33. Of 3,367 listed flavoring substances, none match this compound name. May still be food-safe under other regulatory routes (FDA 21 CFR 172, EFSA, JECFA) — check femaflavor.org for the authoritative current list.

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.

burnt FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree

roasted, coffee FlavorDB 2.0, Flavordb Odor Column 2 sources agree

almond, hazelnut, burnt, butter FlavorDB 2.0

roasted, nutty, cocoa, coffee shown above Llm Adjudicated

—

almond, hazelnut Flavordb Odor Column

—

butter 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

4 measured values 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.

Orthonasal, in clean water

246 ppb – 1100 ppb

The reference measurement — smelled in water. OAV is computed against this.

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
246 ppb SIDA	water	Rychlik 1998 · 2 studies	—
1100 ppb	water_odor	Leffingwell	—

Retronasal / in-mouth

71.0 ppb

Tasted rather than smelled — a different sense, not comparable.

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
71.0 ppb SIDA	water_retronasal	Rychlik 1998 · 1 studies	—

Other matrix

290 ppb

Measured in a non-aqueous medium (oil, starch, cellulose).

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
290 ppb	oil (sunflower oil) (food: cocoa beans)	Literature corpus	—

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 (245.5 ppb, the engine's canonical value — see the 4 published values). OAV ≥ 1 = perceptible.

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
bread	3500.0	14.3 ⚡	PMID 38840722
peanut	3280.0	13.4 ⚡	DOI
lard	2500.0	10.2 ⚡	PMID 31304252
sunflower seed	1300.0	5.30	PMID 31383910
wheat	1.0	0.00	Corpus paper

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

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	6390 µg/L air	1.02–5.4e+04	3	2	no (4.7 decades)
ethanol solution	790.5 ppb	400–1.93e+03	6	5	yes
food matrix	200 ppb	0.4–1.37e+04	16	16	no (3.7 decades)
oil	951 ppb	130–8e+03	3	3	yes
unstated	718 ppb	0.4–5.4e+04	34	29	no (2.9 decades)
water	559 ppb	6–9e+03	16	16	no (2.5 decades)

Found in

Measured impact first, then profile share

Every ingredient known to contain 3,5-dimethylpyrazine. 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 3,5-dimethylpyrazine in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

128 cmpds

201 cmpds

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