Since many years, acrylamide is a well-known food-borne toxicant. However, during the recent years, elevated levels of acrylamide have been reported in vegetable chips. In the present study, acrylamide was quantitated via a modified derivatization procedure with 2-mercaptobenzoic acid based on stable isotope dilution analysis and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Extraction with a modified QuEChERS method, defatting with n-hexane, and a solid phase extraction clean-up with strong cation-exchange material were performed prior to the derivatization step. Limits of detection and quantitation (LoD and LoQ) were determined to be 12 and 41 μg of acrylamide/kg of vegetable chips, based on signal-to-noise ratios of 3:1 and 10:1. Thus, the LoQ of 50 μg/kg requested by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is fulfilled. Recovery rates between 92 and 101% at four spiking levels with a good precision expressed as a relative standard deviation &lt; 7% confirmed the suitability of the applied method. With this analytical approach at hand, a survey of the current acrylamide amount in 38 vegetable chips from the worldwide market was performed, showing a remarkable variability between the different vegetables, but also between different products of the same vegetable. Thereby, the acrylamide amounts ranged between 77.3 and 3090 μg/kg. The average amount of acrylamide of 954 μg/kg was distinctly higher in comparison to the amount of acrylamide in commercially available potato chips that was also analyzed in the present study (12 samples, range: 117–832 μg/kg, average: 449 μg/kg). While for sweet potato and parsnip relatively low AA amounts were found, beetroot and carrot showed rather high contents.

Acrylamide mitigation: a comparison between potato chips and vegetable chips

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ACS Fall 2022

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