Migration vs. Extraction: Comparing Contaminant Profiles

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”.¹ 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 do the contaminant profiles differ between migration experiments and solvent extraction, and does one approach consistently reveal compounds the other misses?

She describes running extraction and food-simulant migration testing side by side wherever possible, because the two experiments answer different questions. Solvent extraction under exaggerated conditions characterizes the full chemical makeup of a packaging material, while contact and injection testing with a food simulant reflects what a consumer would realistically be exposed to. Overlaying the resulting chromatograms lets her team compare the two contaminant profiles directly, and she notes that a concentrated extract routinely surfaces a far broader compound profile than the corresponding simulant migration test—building a more defensible risk assessment before deciding whether a sample is safe.

That comparison, she notes, regularly surfaces cross-contamination introduced during sample preparation itself, particularly through filtration. Even filters whose manufacturer batch certification confirms the absence of PFAS, bisphenols, and phthalates can still contribute trace amounts of exactly those compound classes once samples are concentrated after filtration — turning what should be a clean extract into what Vitulli candidly calls "a nightmare" to interpret. Her lab therefore avoids unnecessary concentration steps whenever instrument sensitivity is already sufficient to reach the regulatory limit for a given substance. She anchors the discussion in the migration limit her lab most commonly works against in Europe: a 10 ppb (0.01 mg/kg) threshold,² the default detection limit set for non-listed substances lacking a more specific regulatory value.

References

1. Vitulli, M. Cozzolino, F.; Pratesi, F. Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS. Presented at ASMS 2026, in San Diego, California, USA. https://asms.org/docs/default-source/conference/74th-asms-final-program_as-of-may-8-2026.pdf?sfvrsn=1234fc3_0 (accessed 2026-08-06).
2. Commission Regulation (EU) No 10/2011 of 14 January 2011 on plastic materials and articles intended to come into contact with food, Annex I (default detection limit of 0.01 mg/kg for non-evaluated substances). Official Journal of the European Union, L 12, 15.1.2011, pp. 1–89.