Daniel McMillan,a, Daniel Fliegel,b, Jamie Foss,c
a PerkinElmer, UK;
b PerkinElmer, Norway
c PerkinElmer, USA
Email: daniel.mcmillan@perkinelmer.com
As global food safety regulations tighten and consumer expectations rise, analytical laboratories face mounting pressure to deliver rapid, reliable results across diverse and complex food matrices. The detection of emerging contaminants—including PFAS, pesticides, veterinary drug residues, and other chemical hazards—requires highly robust LC-MS/MS workflows capable of maintaining sensitivity and accuracy despite matrix challenges such as high fat content, heavy particulates, and complex processing additives. These conditions can compromise method performance, reduce instrument uptime, and hinder routine high-throughput testing.
This study explores how a contamination-resistant LC-MS/MS platform designed specifically for demanding food contaminant analysis can maintain sensitivity and precision requirements even under heavy matrix load. This will be demonstrated through the analysis of common and emerging food contaminants in a wide variety of complex food matrices. Long-term stability data encompassing more than 21,000 continuous injections of PFAS in complex food matrices using a modified QuEChERS extraction, designed to increase matrix load onto the instrument, will be presented.