High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is the method of choice for the analysis of sugars. However, the HPLC analysis of sugars is not a simple task. The main concern is the co-eluting compounds that may interfere with sugar quantification. Recently a new method has been developed in which the six common sugars were separated on an XBridge BEH Amide XP Column (2.5 μm, 3.0 × 150 mm), and were quantified with an ACQUITY QDa Detector. In this work, the method have been improved and applied it to a wide range of foods, including a chicken feed sample.

This sugar analysis method offers scientists an accurate and reliable way to determine the content of fructose, galactose, glucose, sucrose, lactose, and maltose in food and animal feed samples.

The key features of this method include:

• Separation of the often co-eluting galactose and glucose so that an accurate quantification of these two sugars is possible.
• Sensitive and clean chromatogram with little background noise from sample matrix.
• Comparing to high performance anion exchange chromatography (HPAEC), this method takes only 25 min for an injection cycle, which is about half of the time that it usually takes in HPAEC.

This method could be a suitable method for the routine sugar analysis in foods and animal feeds.