Food & Beverage Analysis with Mass Spectrometry

Today's increasingly complex food supply chain requires rapid and failsafe methods of ensuring food safety and quality. Bruker’s analytical testing workflows backed by proven research-grade technology help food manufacturers navigate the ever-changing landscape to maintain the highest standards of safety and compliance.

Bruker provides workflows and solutions for targeted analysis in the regulated food safety sector, and for untargeted analysis in food quality and authenticity/adulteration control.

Fast, sensitive, and accurate analysis of food products throughout the complex and often-changing supply chain is essential to meet regulatory guidelines.

Bruker offers targeted workflows and solutions in a comprehensive system to screen for all regulated contaminants including persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and pesticides. For known allergen testing, Bruker’s automated solution, the AllergenScreener, saves manufacturers time and cost in allergen detection.

POPs, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and dioxins can pose significant risk to human and animal health and require careful monitoring to ensure that these contaminants remain below dangerous levels.

With POPs under increased scrutiny, speed and sensitivity of analysis is critical. Triple quadrupole-mass spectrometry (TQ-MS) workflows offer high levels of sensitivity and unrivalled quantitative performance, to ensure ultimate confidence in results. Targeted workflows using TargetScreener also offer serious benefits and improve productivity through ready-to-use methods for approx. 900 different contaminants.

Additionally, POP analysis can be enhanced by utilizing trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS) technology, which allows for the differentiation of isobaric compounds, such as various dioxins and PFOS.

The use of pesticides in agriculture is common; however, they can pose risks to both human and animal health if remnants remain in the food supply chain.

Simplify the analysis process while delivering reliable results faster and more cost-effectively. Targeted screening workflows, such as quantitation and confirmation of more pesticide residues, can be completed in less time than ever before with the EVOQ^® DART-TQ⁺ triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. Workflows like TargetScreener using accurate mass for pesticide detection in food and feed matrices, enable confident compound identification of contaminants.

With growing numbers of people being diagnosed with allergies around the world, and the cost impact of product recalls on manufacturers, there is increasing demand for solutions that can test and identify allergens more effectively and definitively.

Screening solutions from Bruker such as AllergenScreener, which offers automated data analysis and reporting, to rapidly deliver accurate detection of major food allergens.

The food and beverage industry sets and upholds high standards of food quality worldwide and throughout the whole production process; therefore, manufacturers need sensitive and robust solutions.

Bruker’s mass spectrometry workflows and solutions support food manufacturers in their efforts to ensure quality, reduce waste, and cut time and financial costs along the production chain. Additionally, mass spectrometry has become invaluable in the fight against food fraud.

Identifying adulteration, or food fraud, is cause for both economic and safety concerns. Regulations and laws protect the authenticity of certain foods and manufacturers, producers, importers and exporters are responsible for ensuring products are not misrepresented to consumers.

MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry provides flexibility and sensitivity to detect a variety of different analyte types including markers of authentic product and adulterants, for robust and reliable results.

QC of raw ingredients, production, processing, and finished product testing ensures that products meet the required quality standards.

Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART) supports QC testing laboratories. DART allows for confident decisions in seconds, increasing throughput and maximizing efficiency.

Bruker offers a range of chromatography-free workflows to screen samples quickly and accurately. The EVOQ DART-TQ⁺ contains an integrated DART ion source, which bypasses the need for conventional liquid chromatography (LC) or GC analysis and streamlines food analysis by providing a simple pass/fail result.

Going chromatography-free delivers:

Time savings

• Sample screening in 30 seconds
• Minimal sample preparation
• Reduced instrument clean up and downtime

Cost savings

• No expensive solvents required
• High throughput allows for more sample runs

Improved sustainability

• Solvent waste and disposal  greatly reduced
• Shorter run times means less electricity consumption

Around the world, government regulatory bodies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Committee (EC) impose strict legislation about the presence of contaminants such as pesticides and POPs. Bruker instruments and workflows support accurate and sensitive detection of regulated contaminants.

TargetScreener Workflows

• QTOF with TargetScreener 3D: Bruker’s TargetScreener can be used in tandem with quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF) technology to detect and quantify contaminants in one run. The highly curated TargetScreener database allows for robust screening, with more than 3,000 entries.
• timsTOF Pro 2 with TargetScreener 4D: TargetScreener 4D is Bruker’s latest addition to its trapped ion mobility spectrometry (TIMS) range. The TargetScreener 4D provides an additional dimension of separation power and offers ultimate confidence in compound identification by enabling high resolution ion mobility and collisional cross section measurements, alongside retention time, molecular weight and fragment ions and their masses.

MRM-Quant with Triple Quads

• With more multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transitions per run, and improved sensitivity with more compounds or more datapoints for each chromatographic peak, triple quad instruments perform small molecule targeted screening and quantitation at exceptional speed with ultra-high sensitivity.

Allergens are a growing concern for consumers and manufacturers alike. Bruker’s AllergenScreener solution can help to identify the presence of allergens accurately and efficiently.

Combining sample preparation, screening and results interpretation in one automated workflow, AllergenScreener offers simplified analysis alongside time and cost savings.

The automated five-step workflow standardizes sample preparation and analysis across all food types to deliver consistent, reliable and repeatable results, in an easy-to-read visualization.

Bruker’s robust EVOQ DART-TQ⁺ brings a range of benefits to food analysis, from a low cost of ownership to increased productivity. The chromatography-free workflows enabled by direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) leverage the sensitivity and speed of the EVOQ DART-TQ⁺, to maximize sample throughput while also removing reliance on solvents – which offers both cost savings and improved sustainability.

The new impact II VIP QTOF provides ultimate performance in contaminant detection analysis, and has an unrivalled dynamic range to enable a detailed insight into a complex sample. It offers the highest sensitivity due to its VIP-HESI ion source. By combining a new Vacuum Insulated Probe (VIP) with Heated ElectroSpray Ionization (HESI), this ion source offers efficiency improvements in ionization and fragmentation reductions, which results in improved sensitivity compared to conventional ion sources.

Bruker offers a range of triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (TQMS) systems, which provide high sensitivity and specificity to enable comprehensive food sample analysis. Both the EVOQ LC-TQ and the EVOQ GC-TQ can detect compounds that are only present in small amounts, which is essential for identifying trace amounts of contaminants and maintaining compliance with regulations.

Bruker’s compact QTOF instrument provides an outstanding dynamic range for food analysis, allowing for definitive trace analysis from complex sample matrices. Improved robustness allows for reduced sample preparation, which is desirable in high-throughput environments, while full sensitivity resolution means that analysts don’t have to choose between sensitivity or resolution in results. 

Trapped ion mobility spectrometry-time of flight (TIMS-TOF) technology from Bruker provides a robust solution for food analysis, where fast, highly sensitive, and sustainable workflows are required.

Bruker’s timsTOF Pro 2 combines the power of the high-resolution mass spectrometry with the trapped ion mobility separation, to simplify complex sample analyses and deliver high-quality results for food sample testing.

Matrix-assisted laser desorption / ionization-time of flight (MALDI-TOF) offers versatility and reliability for rapid analysis of challenging food samples. MALDI-TOF allows for analysis on a wide range of compounds, from small molecules to intact proteins larger than 100 kDA.

The autoflex maX MALDI-TOF MS system offers flexibility for sample type analysis alongside the speed of chromatography-free workflows. Its improved dynamic range delivers a more complete picture of molecules present in a sample, while its small footprint makes it a small yet powerful analytical tool for a range of applications.

Bruker’s ecTOF system is the world’s first GC-HRMS system that offers simultaneous electron ionization (EI) and chemical ionization (CI) accurate spectral information in a single GC run. This means that the ecTOF can add accurate molecular mass CI data to EI fragment data in the same run, to boost unknown compound identification yields and certainties.

Analysts can enjoy unsurpassed confidence in results from simple and easy-to use instrumentation, and high sample throughput for food testing applications.