Food testing labs work endlessly to test our food supply for hazardous chemicals and contaminants to ensure human and animal safety. For a routine food testing laboratory, this typically means they must prepare hundreds of food samples daily for analysis, analyze those samples for hundreds of contaminants, and do it all with a fast turnaround of results. In recent years, innovations in microflow liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to mass spectrometry has created opportunities for laboratories to do more with less — more sensitivity, higher throughput, and more robustness in their analyses but in less time, with lower cost, and with less hazardous solvent consumption. For a high-throughput food testing laboratory, microflow LC coupled to mass spectrometry is an innovation that can push routine food testing analysis to the next level. Here, we describe how a food testing laboratory can transition routine high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods to microflow LC and show performance results that showcase improved sensitivity, throughput, and robustness of analysis, with the added benefits of reduced solvent waste and overall analysis costs.

Food is a vital part of life, and many food scientists and chemists work hard each day to test food products and ingredients for safety and quality. From pesticides to antibiotics, allergens to natural toxins, and so many others, the number of contaminants that can often be found in foods, ingredients, and assorted consumer products continues to increase.

As the demand to test more products for more types of contaminants increases, the workload on food testing laboratories increases as a direct result. With this increase, food testing scientists are continuously looking for new methods and technologies to improve their workflows. From more efficient and effective ways to extract contaminants and remove matrix components in sample preparation, to faster and higher quality chromatography as well as more sensitive and selective detection approaches, food testing scientists are in constant pursuit to test more samples with faster turnaround of results with the highest level of accuracy and reliability.

Fortunately, advances in modern analytical instrumentation can relieve some of these strains on routine food testing laboratories. From better sample preparation approaches to new liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS-MS) technology, food testers now have better accessibility to techniques that will save them time, save them money, and give them better results than ever before.

LC has been a preferred methodology for food testing laboratories for many years, allowing ideal separation, identification, and detection of contaminants in complex food samples. Routine food testing laboratories run samples around the clock, which results in considerable resource consumption, excessive expenses in consumable costs, and considerable production of organic solvent waste.

New innovations in LC technology, such as microflow LC, present laboratories with a more efficient alternative to higher-flow LC methods. Microflow LC requires significantly less solvent usage and less analytical sample consumption, without sacrificing any of the performance features of normal-flow LC, making it substantially more cost and time efficient for a high-throughput testing laboratory while still providing the best analytical results. Furthermore, the reduced solvent and chemical consumption has a reduced environmental impact, making microflow LC a leaner, "greener" choice for environmentally conscious laboratories.

In this article, we present a research study that shows how routine food testing methods, such as pesticide analysis in spices, can be transferred from traditional LC–MS-MS to microflow LC–MS-MS to save laboratories time, money, and resources without sacrificing analytical performance and quality of results.