Acrylamide Analysis: Evaluation of the Results from an Interlaboratory Comparison Study on Crispbread samples

Abstract

The European Commission's Directorate general joint research centre organized so far several proficiency tests on the determination of acrylamide (AA) in food. This paper presents the results and outcome of a proficiency tests, which focused on the determination of AA in crispbread samples. One of the goals was the identification of the influence of different parameters such as analyte extraction or instrument calibration on the analytical results. Therefore, a set of samples containing three different crispbread samples, as well as extracts of one crispbread sample and AA standard slution, where shipped to each participant. A number of 42 european laboratories reported analytical results that were evaluated by applying internationally accepted protocols and procedures. The study rendered that for each sample, the results of 4 to 8 laboratories were outside the range formed by the target value plus/minus the twofold of the target standard deviation, thus they did not perform satisfactorily. In transferring this knowledge to the data of monitoring databases of AA in food, care must be taken that data are quality controlled as it is likely that some of them may be biased.