The principal goals while studying Food chemistry are to quantify the chemical deterioration of foods, especially lipids, during processing and storage; to characterise the nature of flavours and off-flavours in foods and beverages; and to characterise the nature of natural food constituents. Some current projects include:

Research relies extensively on instrumental analyses, such as GC, GC-MS and HPLC. An important aspect of food flavour projects is that of linking these objective instrumental findings with those of more subjective evaluations of the foods under investigation by sensory methods, sensory evaluation being the ultimate arbiter of flavour evaluation.