The European Union (EU) Directive 94/35/EC, along with four amendments: 96/83/EC, 2003/115/EC, 2006/52/EC, and 2009/163/EU restrict the level of sweeteners in specific types of food. The EU Commission Regulation 1129/2011 lists the maximum level of the sweeteners permissible in various food products. Hence the determination of the amount of these sweeteners in foods is also important in order to ensure consistency in product quality.

The most common method for the detection of sweeteners is HPLC coupled to a UV detector. This configuration enables the detection of some sweeteners such as acesulfame-K, aspartame, saccharin, and neotame. However cyclamate and sucralose cannot be analyzed by UV because they lack a chromophore. The ability to analyze all of these sweeteners using a single method with mass detection would be ideal. Waters has developed the ACQUITY QDa Detector to allow food and beverage scientists to incorporate mass detection into their existing chromatographic workflows.

The ACQUITY QDa Detector not only allows for the detection of all sweeteners in a single run, but it also brings improved discrimination to the analysis, thereby eliminating the requirement of baseline separation of all compounds.

The combination of the ACQUITY Arc System with the ACQUITY QDa Detector is extremely beneficial for food and beverage manufacturers for the identification and quantification of sweeteners in their products using a single analysis method. In this application note, a fast, reliable and sensitive method was developed to analyze sweeteners in food and beverage products.