Application Notes: Food and Beverage

Plastics and other polymers are used in a wide spectrum of applications from industrial usage to packaging, including the packaging of food and pharmaceutical products.

Red wine is a challenging matrix that contains organic acids, sugars, phenols, and pigments such as anthocyanins. This application note describes a simple, fast, novel, and effective method to clean up red wine co-extractives.

Triple quadrupole LC/MS analysis of aflatoxins in food samples eliminates the need for expensive immuno-affinity cleanup columns and reduces the probability of false positives to almost zero.

The resolution, sensitivity, and mass accuracy of the Agilent 7200 GC/Q-TOF system provide rapid, simple, and reliable analysis of trace levels of sulfur compounds in coffee.

Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDD) and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDF) are fat-soluble, highly toxic, ubiquitous environmental contaminants found at trace levels in all foodstuffs and animal feed.

Wine is a beverage produced and consumed throughout the world and is a highly valued commodity. Its classification and authenticity can be very important.

Whether the goal is food safety, ensuring quality or establishing provenance, measuring the trace element content of foods and beverages that we all consume is of paramount importance.

More than 1000 pesticides are currently used worldwide in the treatment of soil and crops. Many countries have established allowable levels of those pesticides in food to protect consumers. While these maximum residue levels (MRLs) vary, the default tolerance is 10 parts per billion (ppb).

Thermo Scientific Application Note

Omega-3 and -6 fatty acids are essential compounds required for normal growth. Omega-3 consumption is purported to have a number of health benefits, e.g., cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease prevention, and improved immune function. Although both omega-3 and -6 fatty acids can give rise to eicosanoid-signaling molecules (prostaglandins, prostacyclins, thromboxanes, and leukotrienes), the omega-6 eicosanoids are generally proinflammatory. A person's diet requires a balance of omega fatty acids at suitable levels.

The benefits of olive oil as part of a healthy diet reaches back to the 1950's. Methods were developed to determine benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes and styrene (BTEXS) by static headspace methods.

Various triarylmethane and fluorescent dyes are used in aquaculture as antibacterial, antifungal, and anthelmintic agents for the treatment of fish disease. The FDA has banned the importation of certain fish from several countries due to possible contamination of these food products.

By identifying maturation tracers and molecules commonly responsible for taste defects, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) augments expert opinion with objective and quantitative information. When using a solid phase micro extraction (SPME) method, GC–MS requires very small sample sizes and a minimum of sample preparation while providing rapid analysis of target molecules. GC–MS can provide an automated technique with repeatable results for detecting all of these compounds.

Blueberries are extracted into acidified methanol and analyzed for anthocyanins with a methanol/formic acid gradient via UHPLC/MS; four different Agilent ZORBAX RRHD stationary phases are quickly evaluated.

The types and amounts of sugar in animal feeds are as important as the amount of protein, minerals, and fats in the determination of nutritive value. We developed a simple and sensitive HPLC method for analyzing six sugars in animal feeds – sucrose, fructose, glucose, galactose, maltose, and lactose. Post-column derivatization reagents convert reducing and nonreducing sugars into fluorescent derivatives, which greatly improves the sensitivity and selectivity of the detection.

The iDQuant? Standards Kit for pesticide analysis of certified reference material (ISP Guide 34, IOS/IEC 17025, and ISO 9001:2008) includes 204 pesticides in 10 mixes at a concentration of 100 ?g/mL. This kit has been designed to eliminate the need to source pesticides individually, and measure each one manually. This allows users to setup, verify, and validate the performance of pesticide screening methods faster.

Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) extracts are high in anthocyanin content and are widely used in nutritional supplements for improving visual acuity and treating circulatory disorders.

With more than 800 pesticides currently in use there is growing concern by government agencies about the effect of pesticide exposure on human health. While analytical techniques like GC or GC–MS have traditionally been used for pesticide analysis, LC–MS-MS has become the technique of choice due to speed, increased sensitivity, and reduced sample preparation. The following describes an LC–MS-MS method for screening of 534 pesticides in food products.

The popularity of diet soft drinks containing aspartame requires the analysis of thousands of samples for quality control purposes each year. These analyses are typically carried out with some fraction of organic modifier in the eluent, leading to the generation of thousands of gallons of hazardous organic waste. This note shows the "green" analysis of several commercial diet soft drinks in combination with a 100% water mobile phase.

In December 2008, the United States FDA recognized rebaudioside A (reb. A) purified from Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni) as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) as a sugar substitute in foods. As a result, stevia products have become popular tabletop and beverage sweeteners. Two steviol glycosides, stevioside and reb. A, are largely responsible for the desired sweet flavor, with reb. A preferred for sweeteners (1).

The method described employs a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer equipped with hyperbolic quadrupole rods for increased selectivity to prerform a trace level screening method for PCDD/Fs and PCBs and follows the well-established United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) Method 1613A.

The QuEChERS method of food sample preparation was used in conjunction with comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GCxGC–TOFMS) to successfully identify PAH contaminants spiked in liquid commercial infant formula.

AGPC column and organic solvents are used to selectively pass large macro molecules such as lipids, resins, waxes, and other compounds from sample extracts while retaining the smaller target analyte molecules in the pores of the gel.

Sweeteners are low or zero-calorie sugar substitutes that are added in drinks to provide the sweet taste of sucrose or table sugar.

This application note demonstrates the extraction of sour cream, cream cheese, coffee creamer, heavy whipping cream, and low fat milk using an ASE 350 Accelerated Solvent Extractor technique developed by Dionex and compares results to the traditional Mojonnier technique.

A modified QuEChERS-type extraction method is used with an additional concentration step to detect 38 anthelmintic (nematicides, flukicides, endectocides) drug residues, consisting of benzimidazoles, avermectins, and flukicides in milk. UHPLC–MS-MS instrumentation detects most analytes at <1 µg/kg.

With Americans becoming increasingly health conscious and concerned with their exposure to chemicals, businesses have made movements to create more products that are safer for the consumer and the environment.

Aflatoxins occur naturally in peanuts, cottonseed, corn, and dried chili pepper, as well as many mixed or processed foods and feeds.