Simultaneous Determination of Six Food Additives in Drinks by High Performance Liquid Chromatography Coupled to Diode Array Detector Detection

A reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatographic method for the successful separation and determination of 6 synthetic food additives (aspartame, acesulfame potassium, benzoic acid, sodium saccharin, tartrazine and sunset yellow) was developed. A Eclipse XDB-C18 column (250x4.6 mm I. D.; 5 mu m) was used and the mobile phase contained methanol and 0.02 mol/L ammonium acetate (pH 6.0) (30:70, v/v) was pumped at a flow rate of 0.7 mL/min at room temperature. Successful separation conditions were obtained for all the compounds using an optimized gradient elution within 10 min. The diode array detector was used to monitor the food additives at 230 nm. The method was thoroughly validated, detection limits for all substances varied between 0.03 and 1.35 mu g/mg, the intra-day precision (as RSD) ranged from 1.57% to 4.72 %, the inter-day precision (as RSD) was between 2.05 % and 4.18 %. Satisfactory recoveries, ranging from 90.00 % to 109.87 %, were obtained. The proposed system was applied to drink samples.