Nutritional composition analysis is a critical testing competency of food manufacturers and contract testing laboratories as it helps to ensure product compliance with regulations, accuracy of ingredient labelling, and product consistency.
This industry faces a variety of challenges, including a growing number of food contaminants, more stringent regulations, protection of trade markets, preservation of brand image, and increased competition. Therefore, laboratories must operate with scalable procedures and adapt quickly to changes brought in by reformulations and alternative products. Ultimately, they must deliver high-quality and thorough results in a timely manner so that product release is not delayed. Key to achieving this is top-of-the-range analytical technology.
The below resource outlines five different aspects of food composition analysis – sugar, additive, vitamin, organic acid, and amino acid testing – and highlights how comprehensive analytical solutions from Waters are designed to identify these diverse chemical compounds, meet compliance requirements, decrease operation costs, increase productivity and, most importantly, help ensure consumer safety.
The identification and quantification of monosaccharides and disaccharides in a sample is of particular importance in the food and beverage industry to ensure:
There are several considerations for accurate and reliable sugar analyses. These include minimizing matrix effects, optimizing sample preparation, and complying with stringent regulatory standards. It is important to be in the know about the latest methods and technologies that will provide your lab with optimized workflows and the analytical tools that fit your unique needs.
Explore the resources below to find a method that demonstrates how UHPLC-MS is suitable for lactose determination in dairy products, discover an accurate and reliable method for determination of sugar content in food and animal feed samples, and gain top tips and tricks to choosing the best liquid chromatography solution for your beverage analysis application.
Additives in foods encompass a wide range of substances such as colorings, antioxidants, preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, gelling agents and thickeners, sweeteners, and flavor enhancers. The analysis of such additives is important to ensure a product is within specification.
In terms of product flavor, sugar substitutes are used to provide the desired sweet taste with a reduced energy content. These substitutes have become of increased interest since the introduction of sugar taxes. It is important that the concentration and relative ratio of these different substitutes and sweeteners are standardized during manufacture to ensure consistency in product flavor.
Explore the resources below to gain information into the latest tools, technologies, and techniques to optimize sugar substitute and additive analysis. The methods detailed promise to enable fast and accurate analysis and give you confidence in results.
To comply with stringent regulatory requirements, the clear labelling of nutritional content is essential. This includes indicating any vitamins that have been added.
Once a product has been formulated, rapid, reliable, and cost-effective methods must be implemented to monitor the nutritional content and ensure that the product label claims can be met.
Explore the resources below to discover how instrument and service solutions from Waters are designed to enable beverage testing labs to create efficient vitamin testing methods, supporting beverage manufacturers in:
Whilst organic acids can occur naturally, they are often added to food and beverage products to act as preservatives, antioxidants, buffers to regulate acidity, flavor enhancers, and sequestrants.
The structures of different organic acids vary in number of hydroxy or carboxyl groups and carbon-carbon double bonds. This gives rise to distinct properties and hence different functions within products.
The analysis of organic acids is a useful test to ensure the quality, authenticity, and reproducibility of beverage products. Ensuring your lab has top-of-the-range analysis solutions enables your beverage testing labs to efficiently analyze organic acids, ensuring product authenticity and maintaining consistency of quality and flavor profile.
Download the resources below to explore how the Waters ACQUITY range can benefit your analysis of organic acids in beverages. This includes the fast and accurate determination of citric acid, the analysis and separation of fourteen distinct organic acids, and the evaluation of performance characteristics of the analytical method.
Amino acids are found in food and beverages as free amino acids or the bound monomer units of proteins. The quality of a protein is often determined via its amino acid composition; therefore, accurate amino acid analysis is crucial.
The analysis of amino acid content of a protein requires the hydrolysis of amino acids from the protein backbone, the separation of each amino acid through chromatography, and finally, the detection and quantification of the separated amino acids.
Waters offers a number of manual and automated solutions for easy amino acid testing using pre-column derivatization, enabling laboratories to:
The resources below provide information about the latest methodology, technology, and automated solutions to implement in your amino acid analysis for a simplified and accelerated workflow.
A step change in chromatographic performance, lab efficiency, and risk control
The Waters™ ACQUITY Premier System uses multi-dimensional technology for UPLC/UHPLC separation of metal-sensitive compounds.
A simplified solution for quantitating soft drink additives
The Waters Beverage Analysis Kit is a comprehensive, easy-to-use kit for rapid quantitation of 6 commonly used additives (acesulfame-K, saccharin, caffeine, benzoate, sorbate, and aspartame)in soft drink formulations.
High-efficiency separations and quality data
Meet your regulatory requirements with confidence with the Arc HPLC system, which is designed to allow you to easily replicate and improve the performance of existing LC methods without compromising data quality.
Accurate amino acid composition analysis
The AccQ•Tag Ultra Columns are designed for reversed-phase separation of amino acids derivatized with AccQ•Tag Ultra reagent to deliver rapid separation of amino acids with superior resolution.
A mass detector built around the needs of analytical scientists
Minimize the risk of unexpected coelutions or components and confirm trace components with the analytical confidence of the ACQUITY QDa Mass Detector.
Empower your chromatography with the universal language of the lab
The Empower Chromatography Data Software is designed to make it easier than ever to run samples and produce meaningful results without experiencing downtime for training, re-engineering workflow, or adding new software to support instruments or advanced chromatographic techniques.
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