Analyzing Food-Packaging Analysis of Food-Packaging Filmby Headspace-GC/MS

Food-packaging material is typically manufactured as a thin film and coated with inks which usually contain multiple, harmful, volatile organics. Therefore, they must be carefully monitored and quantitated to ensure that the amounts are limited.

Related Vendors

Gerhard Schubert GmbH - Verpackungsmaschinen

Elementar Analysensysteme GmbH

Italvacuum, Srl

Traditionally, the test for solvent materials in food packaging film was performed using a technique of heating a square meter of the film material inside a mason jar. This jar is then opened and tested (by smell) for volatile organic compounds. Later, this test was expanded to extract a headspace sample out of the mason jar by syringe and then injected into a gas chromatograph (GC) for quantitative analysis. This produced significantly better results and provided laboratories with a quantitative number. This process is still very time-consuming and labor intensive as a result of the number of manual steps involved. The manual process of cutting food packaging, placing it in a mason jar, heating the jar, and manually collecting a sample for GC analysis dramatically limits the number of samples that can be analyzed each day. The technique demonstrated here will greatly improve the efficiency and throughput of this analysis.

This analysis can be completely automated using a PerkinElmer TurboMatrix Headspace (HS) sampler with the Clarus 500 Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS). This system passed all the requirements for food-packaging analysis.

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