In recent years, there has been an increased concern about the presence of toxic compounds derived from the Maillard reaction produced during food cooking at high temperatures. The main toxic compounds derived from this reaction are acrylamide and hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). The majority of analytical methods require sample treatments using solvents which are highly polluting for the environment. The difficulty of quantifying HMF in complex fried food matrices encourages the development of new analytical methods. This paper provides a rapid, sensitive and environmentally-friendly analytical method for the quantification of HMF in corn chips using HPLC-DAD. Chromatographic separation resulted in a baseline separation for HMF in 3.7 min. Sample treatment for corn chip samples first involved a leaching process using water and afterwards a solid-phase extraction (SPE) using HLB-Oasis polymeric cartridges. Sample treatment optimisation was carried out by means of Box-Behnken fractional factorial design and Response Surface Methodolog y to examine the effects of four variables (sample weight, pH, sonication time and elution volume) on HMF extraction from corn chips. The SPE-HPLC-DAD method was validated. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.82 and 2.20 mg kg-1, respectively. Method precision was evaluated in terms of repeatability and reproducibility as relative standard deviations (RSDs) using three concentration levels. For repeatability, RSD values were 6.9, 3.6 and 2.0%; and for reproducibility 18.8, 7.9 and 2.9%. For a ruggedness study the Yuden test was applied and the result demonstrated the method as robust. The method was successfully applied to different corn chip samples.
Keywords: Box–Behnken fractional factorial design; HPLC-DAD; Hydroxymethylfurfural; Response Surface Methodology; corn chips.