Vanillin

Description

Vanillin is found in many plants, such as the tuber of Rhizoma Gastrodiae (Tian Ma), the whole herb of Equisetum (Mu Zei), Ulva pertusa (Kong Shi Chun), and sugar beets, vanilla beans, Peru balsam, and so on .

Description

Vanillin, as its name implies, is the major flavor component of vanilla. The three oxygen atoms in this small aromatic compound are in different functional groups: alcohol, aldehyde, and ether. It is a white crystalline solid with a melting point of 81–83 oC.
The Aztecs used vanilla to flavor chocolate as early as the 16th century, but vanillin was not isolated until 1858, when French biochemist Nicolas-Theodore Gobley crystallized it from vanilla extract. In 1874, German scientists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann determined its structure and synthesized it from coniferin, a component of pine bark.
Flash forward to today: Almost all vanillin used in foods is manufactured, mostly from petrochemical feedstocks. But the food industry is on a tear to label more and more products as consisting entirely of “natural” ingredients. This trend puts the agricultural industry under pressure to genetically modify plants to produce greater amounts of vanillin. To find out how they’re doing it, see Melody Bomgardner’s?cover story?in the September 12 issue of C&EN.

The Uses of Vanillin

Labelled Vanillin. Occurs naturally in a wide variety of foods and plants such as orchids; major commercial source of natural vanillin is from vanilla bean extract. Synthetically produced in-bulk fro m lignin-based byproduct of paper processes or from guaicol.

What are the applications of Application

Vanillin is an intermediate and analytical reagent