Solvent-assisted flavor evaporation (SAFE) is a well-established, standard procedure for isolating volatile compounds from food matrices, and is particularly important for the extraction of food aroma compounds, also known as odorants. While SAFE has been used in food labs for more than 20 years as a relatively easy and effective way to isolate aroma compounds, while limiting the loss of thermally labile odorants and generation of thermal artifacts, the manual procedure still involves the risk of contamination due to human error, and can show decreased yields of high-boiling point compounds, or when isolating from lipid-rich food extracts. A research team from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology (LSB) at the Technical University of Munich has recently developed a new automated SAFE method (aSAFE) that both increases yield and reduces contamination risk through the use of an electronically-controlled pneumatic valve.
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