The production of concentrated apple juice is associated with major physical and chemical losses of aroma compounds, due mainly to evaporation, which results in a product with an inferior sensory quality. One method of improving the sensory quality of the juice is to recover the lost aromas by pervaporation and to feed them back to the final product. The purpose of this study was to investigate the performance of six different pervaporation membranes for the recovery of apple juice aromas by pervaporation. As pervaporation of natural apple juice would cause analytical problems, a model apple juice aroma solution was developed, by identification of aroma compounds in apple juice by GC and GC-MS, and used in the experiments. Two polyoctylmethyl siloxane membranes with different porous support layers and a polydimethyl siloxane membrane proved to have very good performance, resulting in 100-fold to 1000-fold enrichment of aromas from the model apple juice aroma solution with mass transfer coefficients up to 300 kg/m(2) h. Further investigations on the long-term effects, the influence of the temperature and the effect of interaction between the membrane and the apple juice, must be performed. Economical aspects must also be considered.