Advances in Characterizing Food Packaging at US-FDA

Description:
Developing food packaging and assuring its safety requires its characterization and measurement of potential migrants to food: with new materials/designs, when material/product safety is tested, and as end-of-life/circular use is developed. Analytical methods are needed at numerous steps to characterize packaging, its reaction products, migrants, and quality. In the last decade direct mass spectrometric methods (direct-MS) have been developed and used to bring mass spectrometric strengths directly to physical samples (food & packaging). Since then, direct-MS techniques and traditional analyses have been studied & compared, food and packaging analysis applications developed, and methods applied. The diversity of advancements in direct-MS can give food/packaging scientists more effective tools to rapidly answer material and product safety questions. In reviewing advances in direct MS techniques for food and packaging safety, we review the research into direct-MS and its packaging and food safety applications. We characterized DART-MS techniques for robustness and ion formation mechanisms. Applications studied and developed include polymer additive/formulation detection and identification, photo-initiator/formulation detection and identification, set-off detection, contaminant identification, primary aromatic amines screening, grease-proofer screening, polyamide type identification, and BFR/WEEE contamination screening and identification. Direct comparisons with packaging/polymer sample sets were made between DART-MS and HPLC-MS/MS, UPLC-DAD/HRMS, GC-MS, TD-GC-MS, XRF, LA-ICPMS, as well as with reference materials. The limits and utility of these direct-MS methods will be reviewed and discussed. In particular, the polymer identification, ion mechanism, and WEEE identification applications represent recent advances which give food packaging scientists new and useful tools to help address the migrant, byproduct, and circularity challenges for food packaging.

Speaker: Luke Ackerman - US-FDA Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition
A Research Chemist in the Office of Regulatory Science at the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Luke is passionate about using the scientific method and analytical measurements to understand our food and environment, and improve food safety and chemical measurements.