Rapid and Sensitive Detection of Multi-Class Food Additives in Beverages for Quality Control by Using HPLC-DAD and Chemometrics Methods

A rapid and sensitive analytical strategy combining high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) and chemometrics methods was developed for the determination of multi-class food additives in a variety of beverage samples. Different kinds of beverages, which contain diverse unknown interferences, can be directly injected into a chromatographic system after a simple dilution or pretreatment step, and the data were recorded in a short time under a simple gradient elution mode. Although peaks overlapped and changeable interferences existed in the dimension of the chromatographic and spectral in real beverages, all food additives were accurately resolved by using a second-order calibration method based on alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) algorithm, and accurate chromatographic profiles, spectral profiles, and concentration profiles were also obtained. Limits of detection for all additives were between 1.40 and 165.1 ng mL −1 , while limits of quantitation ranged from 4.20 to 500.2 ng mL −1 . The spiked recoveries were in the range of 87.3–103% (except amaranth) with RSDs less than 10.2%. Compared with the results obtained by classic HPLC method, our proposed method was more accurate. In all, the proposed method is fast, sensitive, and universal and could be used as a reliable tool to determine food additives and quality monitoring in different complex beverages.