Flavour scalping is the absorption of strong flavours from food by its packaging — the pack stealing the product’s taste. Polymer films and plastic containers soak up the volatile aroma compounds that make food taste of itself: the citrus notes vanishing from orange juice in a plastic bottle, the d-limonene migrating into polyethylene, the spice character fading from a curry in a plastic tub. The chemistry is partition — flavour molecules dissolving preferentially into the packaging polymer — and it works in reverse too, with packaging taints migrating into food. Manufacturers fight scalping with barrier materials, glass, and flavour over-dosing; the consumer meets it as the juice that tastes flat or the leftovers that taste of container. It is the quiet theft of flavour by the very material meant to protect it.