Menu-census approach

Determining the level to which the constituents of an essential oil should be identi ed depends upon estimates of intake of food or avor additives. These estimates are traditionally calculated using a volume-based or a menu-census approach. A volume-based approach assumes that the total annual volume of use of a substance reported by an industry is distributed over a portion of the population consuming that substance. A menu-census approach is based on the concentration of the substance (essential oil) added to each avor, the amount of avor added to each food category, the portion of food consumed daily, and the total of all exposures across all food types. Although the latter is quite accurate for food additives consumed at higher levels in a wide variety of food such as food emulsi-ers, the former method provides an ef cient and conservative approximation of intake, if a fraction of the total population is assumed to consume all of the substance. 

---