[Simultaneous determination of six food additives in meat products by high performance liquid chromatography]

A novel method was proposed for the simultaneous separation and determination of six food additives, benzoic acid, sorbic acid, saccharin sodium, acesulfame potassium, ponceau 4R and allura red AC, by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). After optimized the separation conditions of HPLC, the separation can be completed within 18 min by using a ZORBAX Eclipse Plus C18 column (150 mm x 4.6 mm, 5 microm) with 20 mmol/L ammonium acetate (pH 6.9) and methanol as the mobile phases. The gradient elution was performed by 8% methanol (0-2 min), 8%-50% methanol (2-3 min), 50% methanol (3-9 min), 50%-8% methanol (9-12 min) and 8% methanol (12-18 min). The detection wavelength was set at 235 nm. This method has been successfully applied to the analysis of meat products and the average recoveries ranged from 80.7% to 94.4% at high and low spiked levels. The relative standard deviations (RSDs, n=3) were between 2.0% and 7.1%. The method is simple, rapid, accurate and suitable for the simultaneous determination of the six food additives in meat products.