Monitoring of food contaminants and residues has undergone a significant improvement in recent years and is now performed in an intensive manner. Achievements in the area of chromatography-mass spectrometry coupling techniques enabled the development of quantitative multi-target approaches covering several hundred analytes. Although the majority of methods are focusing on the analysis of one specific group of substances, such as pesticides, mycotoxins, or veterinary drugs, current trends are going towards the simultaneous determination of multiclass compounds from several families of contaminants and residues. This work provides an overview of relevant multiclass concepts based on LC-MS/MS and LC-HRMS instruments. Merits and shortcomings will be critically discussed based on current performance characteristics of the EU legislation system. In addition, the discussion of a recently developed multiclass approach covering >1000 substances is presented as a case study to illustrate the current developments in this area.
Keywords: Contaminants; Food safety; HRMS; MS/MS; Multiclass; Residues.