As part of a quality control process, manufacturers routinely analyze many aspects of their products, e.g. weight, density, color, purity, etc. An aroma profile acquired from a typical high quality product sample will provide a fingerprint of the aromas associated with the sample. This profile can be used in several ways: to identify aroma compounds that are critical to the acceptability of the final products, to determine critical information for future investigation of the product should an aroma quality excursion occur or to confirm that changes in the manufacturing process do not adversely affect the acceptability of the product.

Displayed below is an overlay of the aroma profile (black trace) with the GCMS total ion chromatogram (red trace) acquired from the headspace of a coffee sample. While there are many aroma notes present in the headspace, the importance of the measurement is show for the retention times above 18 minutes. The aroma analysis identified the presence of four compounds whose concentration was below the detection limit of the mass spectrometer detector under these survey conditions. These compounds could be vital to the overall aroma of this sample but they would be missed if the analysis relied only on the GMCS component.

As part of the benchmark analysis, a table is compiled which tentatively identifies the chemical compound that is responsible for each of the sensed aroma notes.