It possesses a strong ammoniacal smell, and on digestion with alcohol, the carbamate is dissolved leaving a residue of ammonium bicarbonate.

Ammonium bicarbonate is used in the food industry as a leavening agent for flat baked goods, such as cookies and crackers.

[6] Compared to baking soda or potash, hartshorn has the advantage of producing more gas for the same amount of agent, and of not leaving any salty or soapy taste in the finished product, as it completely decomposes into water and gaseous products that evaporate during baking.

It cannot be used for moist, bulky baked goods however, such as normal bread or cakes, since some ammonia will be trapped inside and will cause an unpleasant taste.

It is commonly used as an inexpensive nitrogen fertilizer in China, but is now being phased out in favor of urea for quality and stability.

Ammonium bicarbonate is still widely used in the plastics and rubber industry, in the manufacture of ceramics, in chrome leather tanning, and for the synthesis of catalysts.

[citation needed] It is also used for buffering solutions to make them slightly alkaline during chemical purification, such as high-performance liquid chromatography.

Relatedly it is also useful as an alkaline buffering agent for analytical LC–MS as its volatility allows it to be rapidly removed automatically from the sample stream in the low pressure spray chambers used by many standard mass spectrometry detectors found at the end of typical LC-MS systems, such as electrospray ionization detectors.

Ammonium bicarbonate decomposes above about 36 °C into ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water in an endothermic process and so causes a drop in the temperature of the water: When treated with acids, ammonium salts are also produced: Reaction with base produces ammonia.

[10] Ammonium bicarbonate from China used to make cookies was found to be contaminated with melamine, and imports were banned in Malaysia following the 2008 Chinese milk scandal.