Kalsec^® is the leading global producer of natural spice and herb flavor extracts, colors, antioxidants, and advanced hop products for the food and beverage industry. Kalsec^®’s high-quality, innovative ingredient solutions enable their customers to improve the taste, appearance and shelf-life of a highly diverse range of end products.

In an effort to develop a new assay for capsaicinoids that would address the shortcomings of their legacy HPLC-UV/FLR approach, Kalsec^®’s Analytical R&D laboratory successfully implemented a new method utilizing UltraPerformance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC) separation coupled with ACQUITY QDa mass detection.

As a result of implementing this new approach to sample analyses, the company has noted several scientific and operational benefits, including:

• The UPLC-MS based capsaicinoids assay can be completed in 4 minutes compared to the legacy HPLC-UV/FLR method which required 15 minutes – a 73% reduction in run time.
• The inclusion of mass detection in the new method has improved sensitivity, enabling the quantitation of capsaicinoids present at very low levels in some of the formulations.
• Co-eluting analytes that had appeared as single peaks and could have been missed by optical detection are now discernible.
• Variances to the capsicum extracts composition encountered during manufacturing can now be investigated and adjusted more rapidly, helping to ensure product consistency and quality.