Shimadzu Analysis Guidebook Food Product Analyses

Importance of Topic

Modern food analysis demands rapid, sensitive and reliable methods to ensure product quality, nutritional labeling accuracy and consumer safety. Comprehensive profiling of fats, amino acids, vitamins, sugars, contaminants and functional ingredients supports food engineering, regulatory compliance and advances in functional foods.

Objectives and Overview

This guidebook chapter covers analytical strategies for food product components including fatty acids in fish and butter, trans fats, process-induced contaminants (3-MCPD esters), milk fat by reflectance, orotic acid, organic acids, amino acids, water- and fat-soluble vitamins, nucleotides, saccharides and specialty compounds such as alliin and resveratrol. Each section presents workflow optimizations to enhance throughput, selectivity and quantitative performance.

Methodology and Instrumentation

• Gas chromatography with MS, MS/MS, PCI and GC×GC for fatty acid profiling.
• FTIR (ATR and transmission) for trans fatty acid quantitation.
• LC–MS/MS and LC–MS for process contaminants and water-soluble vitamins.
• UV-Vis-NIR reflectance with multivariate analysis for milk fat content.
• Reversed-phase, HILIC and ion-exchange LC with post-column derivatization or fluorescence detection for amino acids, saccharides and alliin.
• Ultrafast UHPLC columns (sub-2 µm, core-shell) for high-resolution separations.
• Detectors: PDA, fluorescence, ELSD, refractive index and AA/EDX for metals.

Main Results and Discussion

High-sensitivity PCI-MRM provided excellent impurity separation for trace fatty acids. GC×GC-MS resolved complex lipid isomers in butter. ATR FTIR calibration yielded trans fat quantitation with R²>0.999. Direct LC–MS/MS enabled simple, reproducible analysis of 3-MCPD esters. Spectral reflectance combined with support vector regression predicted milk fat with errors < 5%. Ultrafast UHPLC reduced run times for nucleotides, catechins, resveratrol and vitamins to under 3 min while maintaining linearity and low RSD.

Benefits and Practical Applications

These optimized workflows support high-throughput QA/QC in food production, accurate nutritional labeling, functional ingredient monitoring and contaminant screening. Automated pretreatment and overlapping injections further increase sample throughput and reproducibility.

Future Trends and Applications

Continued miniaturization, field-portable spectroscopic sensors, AI-driven method development and high-resolution mass spectrometry are expected to drive real-time monitoring, deeper component profiling and non-destructive testing in food analytics.

Conclusion

This compilation demonstrates integrated analytical approaches leveraging chromatography, spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to achieve sensitive, rapid, and robust quantitation of diverse food components. It provides a practical reference for food laboratories in research, QA/QC, regulatory and industrial settings.

References

• Shimadzu Analysis Guidebook: Food Product Analyses, Chapter C180-E059C.
• AOCS Official Methods Cd 14-95 and Cd 14d-99 for FTIR trans fatty acid analysis.