It's not easy to detect the high quality and functional compounds for control quality of food materials. The electronic nose was an instrument, which comprised of an array of electronic chemical sensors with partial specificity and an appropriate pattern recognition system, capable of recognizing simple or complex odors. It can conduct fast analysis and provide simple and straightforward results and is best suited for quality control and process monitoring in the field of functional foods. Numbers of applications of an electronic nose in the functional food industry include discrimination of habitats for medicinal food materials, monitoring storage process, lipid oxidation, and quality control of food and/or processing with principal component analysis, neural network analysis and the electronic nose based on GC-SAW sensor. The electronic nose would be possibly useful for a wide variety of quality control in the functional food and plant cultivation when correlating traditional analytical instrumental data with sensory evaluation results or electronic nose data.