Food Contact Materials: Building a PFAS, NIAS, and Bisphenol Library

LCGC International spoke to Marinella Vitulli—founder of Food Contact Center and Food Contact Services—about her work and her presentation at the recent ASMS conference titled, "Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS”. The talk detailed a suspect and non-target HRMS screening workflow built around proprietary spectral libraries for food contact material (FCM) safety assessment.

In this interview clip, Vitulli discusses:

• How did you decide which compounds to prioritize when building your proprietary HRMS spectral libraries, and how do you keep them updated as new PFAS and bisphenol analogues emerge on the market?

She traces her proprietary HRMS library back roughly 15 years to a single Excel spreadsheet, begun as EU Regulation (EU) No 10/2011 on plastics¹ established the first fully harmonized food contact material (FCM) category in Europe. She began by assigning molecular formulas and exact masses to compounds from public sources; within months the spreadsheet became a structured compound list, later extended to national rules—German, French, Italian, and Dutch legislation on paper and board, and the Swiss ordinance on inks—areas that, unlike plastics, still lack EU-wide harmonization.

Prioritization has always tracked where regulatory and analytical stakes are highest. As entries moved from spreadsheet to instrument database, her team purchased reference standards for its highest-priority compounds, enabling MS/MS-based confirmation alongside cross-checks against suppliers' declarations of conformity. PFAS and bisphenols became the clearest case for dedicated, continuously updated sub-libraries: PFAS regulatory classifications span more than 10,000 substances on the US EPA's master list.² For bisphenols, EU legislation³ requires screening not just bisphenol A but structurally related analogues thought to share its biological effects, prompting a roughly 50-compound bisphenol list, standard-backed for most entries. New MS/MS spectra generated during daily work are folded straight back into both libraries, keeping pace with industry's substitution of legacy structures.

References

1. Commission Regulation (EU) No 10/2011 of 14 January 2011 on plastic materials and articles intended to come into contact with food. Official Journal of the European Union, L 12, 15.1.2011, pp. 1–89.
2. US EPA, Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure. PFAS Master List of PFAS Substances, CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (~12,000 substances; retired in 2021 in favor of the successor PFASSTRUCT and PFASDEV lists).
3. Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/3190 of 19 December 2024 on the use of bisphenol A and other bisphenols and bisphenol derivatives with harmonized classification for specific hazardous properties, in certain materials and articles intended to come into contact with food.