UHPLC-MS/MS quantification of acrylamide in various foodstuffs: formation and strategies of mitigation.

Since acrylamide has been reported to occur in cooked foods in 2002 it has become a public health concern mainly because the International Agency on Research on Cancer classified it as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A) [1]. For this, international food agencies and food industries provided code of practices and guidelines to control and reduce the acrylamide formation at industrial levels. However, the acrylamide formation and its mitigation strategies are still matter of attention from the science community and industrial sector especially for certain categories of foods known for high acrylamide contents, i.e., potato chips, coffee and baked products. Hence, the present research aimed to optimize an analytical method for acrylamide quantitation by UHPLC-MS/MS system in three different types of cooked foods, i.e., potato chips, roasted coffee and biscuits with the final goal to study its formation and mitigation. In detail, various mitigation approaches such as dipping in water, dipping in Aureobasidium pullulans L1 yeast water suspension, dipping in water or in yeast water suspension after pulsed electric fields (PEF), have been employed to reduce the acrylamide formation in potato chips. At the same time, different roasting degree (light, light-medium, medium, medium-dark, dark) in two different coffee bean types (arabica and robusta) and diverse cooking methods (ventilated and static mode for 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 min) for biscuits have been investigated for evaluating how these processes influenced the acrylamide formation. The yeast water suspension determined a reduction of acrylamide content in potato chips mainly at the longest dipping time (676.4 ± 42.3 µg/kg at 15 min vs 1384.3 ± 65.0 µg/kg of control) while PEF treatment followed by water dipping was the most promising approach (886.8 ± 9.9 µg/kg at 5 min and 572.0 ± 8.8 µg/kg at 15 min) [2]. On the other hand, at the first roasting degrees (light and light-medium) higher content of acrylamide was found (730 ± 30 µg/kg for arabica and 1130 ± 10 µg/kg for robusta both at light-medium degree) while it decreased by prolonging the heating process (85% and 88% of decreasing from light-medium to dark roasting in arabica and robusta, respectively) [3]. Ventilated mode determined higher contents of acrylamide than static in biscuits cooked for 20 and 22 min likely because the heat was distributed more evenly compared to the static one [4]. The present research reports how different strategies and processing methods can influence the acrylamide formation in three categories of cooked foods and provides important knowledge which the food industry can benefit from.