The Biggest Gap in NIAS Testing for Food Contact Materials

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:

• What is the biggest current gap in NIAS analysis for food contact materials?

Asked to name the biggest current gap in NIAS analysis for food contact materials, she points not to instrumentation or spectral coverage but to the absence of formal cross-laboratory proficiency testing. Her lab already participates in comparison exercises organized through technical associations, but she's careful to draw a distinction: these are not, strictly speaking, formal proficiency tests. Participating labs receive samples without a specified testing approach and, critically, without confirmation that those samples are homogeneous across participants — a prerequisite she considers non-negotiable for any inter-lab comparison to be statistically meaningful.

That gap is defined precisely in ISO/IEC 17043,² the international standard governing how proficiency testing schemes should be designed, including the rules an organizing body must follow, and the statistical evaluation required to interpret results across participating labs. Food Contact Services is pursuing accreditation to that standard, which she expects to have in place by the end of the year, after which the company intends to organize proficiency testing schemes of its own for the FCM community — but only once sample homogeneity can be properly verified and documented from the outset. She frames this as the statistical foundation on which new standard test methods eventually get validated and published for the industry to adopt.

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. ISO/IEC 17043:2023. Conformity assessment — General requirements for the competence of proficiency testing providers.

Watch the full interview series here:

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

Confidence Framework for Suspect and NIAS Identification in Food Analysis

Migration vs. Extraction: Comparing Contaminant Profiles

Assessing NIAS Risk When Toxicological Data Are Limited

Quality Control to Rule Out False-Positive NIAS Findings

The Biggest Gap in NIAS Testing for Food Contact Materials