A symposium titled "Advances in the Understanding of Dairy and Cheese Flavors" was held in September 2013 at the American Chemical Society's 246th National Meeting in Indianapolis, IN, USA. The symposium, which was sponsored by the Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, was to discuss the state of the art in the detection and quantitation of flavor in dairy products. The authors of two of the presentations have been selected to expand on their talks by submitting full papers about their research.