Determination of formaldehyde in food and feed by an in-house validated HPLC method

Formalin is carcinogenic and is detrimental to public health. The illegal addition of formalin (37% formaldehyde and 14% methanol) to foods to extend their shelf-life is considered to be a common practice in Bangladesh. The lack of accurate methods and the ubiquitous presence of formaldehyde in foods make the detection of illegally added formalin challenging. With the aim of helping regulatory authorities, a sensitive high performance liquid chromatography method was validated for the quantitative determination of formaldehyde in mango, fish and milk. The method was fit-for-purpose and showed good analytical performance in terms of specificity, linearity, precision, recovery and robustness. The expanded uncertainty was <35%. The validated method was applied to screen samples of fruits, vegetables, fresh fish, milk and fish feed collected from different local markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Levels of formaldehyde in food samples were compared with published data. The applicability of the method in different food matrices might mean it has potential as a reference standard method.