In today’s society reduced sugar and salt are one of the main elements of a healthy lifestyle.  With the busy lives that people have resorting to a ready meal is a quick option at the end of a long hard day. Consumers and media have focused on healthy living and food manufacturers have addressed this and developed lines of ready meals that have reduced salt and sugar. The challenge for manufacturers is creating a great tasting product with the added benefits of reduced salt and or sugar. The starting point is an original recipe that is popular with consumers and then altering the components of salt and sugar.

Reducing sugar and /or salt can lead to overall desired flavours changing.  Sensory panels are then required to determine how the flavour of the ready meal has changed from the original recipe flavour standard.

Sensory panels are expensive, and time consuming, therefore a rapid analytical approach to determine flavour changes would be beneficial.