safrole

spicy oxygenated compound

Found in 27 ingredients across the CompKitchen flavor graph.

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

2D Lewis Structure

Formula: C10H10O2
Molecular weight: 162.18 g/mol
PubChem CID: 5144 — full record on PubChem

Properties

Odor description: spice, sweet, warm
Odor threshold — in a food matrix: 160 ppb 1 published value · see all 1 with sources
Volatility: medium
CAS number: 94-59-7
Retention index: 1289

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.

spice, sweet, warm shown above Flavornet Cas, Flavornet Name, Flavordb Odor Column 3 sources agree

—

anise, floral, sassafrass, spice, spicy, sweet, warm, woody FlavorDB 2.0

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

1 measured value 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.

In a food matrix

160 ppb

Measured in a real food, where the matrix shifts detection — not a clean-water value.

Threshold	Matrix	Source	Paper
160 ppb	water (food: litsea pungens fruit)	Literature corpus	21151471, 26299134, 27121041 +8

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

Food	Concentration (ppb)	OAV	Source
meat preparations and meat products	15000.0	93.8 ⚡	Corpus paper
mace and nutmeg	15000.0	93.8 ⚡	Corpus paper
tea	425.0	2.66	Corpus paper
rum	17.1	0.11	Corpus paper
grains	1.1	0.01	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?
unstated	160 ppb	160–160	1	1	one paper
water	160 ppb	160–160	1	1	one paper

Found in

Measured impact first, then profile share

Every ingredient known to contain safrole. 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 safrole in it. Full concentrations are in the OAV table above.

✓1 617 cmpds

✓1 7 cmpds

21 cmpds

✓1 34 cmpds