Oral Presentation Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Australasia 2021

Characterizing chemical migrants from major baby food pouch brands available in the Australian market (#33)

Cheng Tang 1 , María José Gómez Ramos 2 , Sarit Kaserzon 1 , Cassandra Rauert 1 , Jochen Mueller 1 , Amy Heffernan 1 , Chun-Yin Lin 1 , Xianyu Wang 1
  1. Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  2. University of Almería, La Cañada de San Urbano, Almería, Spain

In recent years, the market share of multilayer plastic packaging is rapidly growing, especially in the baby food packaging sector. The combination of multiple different materials increases the number of chemical migrants thus lead to potential health risk. Infants, as their endocrine system are still developing, are the most vulnerable to these chemical migrants.  However, the risk assessment is hard to proceed with most of the chemical migrants’ profile remain unknown. To better understand the migrant profile, 79 pouch samples featuring 24 different brands from both online seller and offline retail store in Australia were tested under the protocol described by the European committee regulation No 10/2011. Samples were extracted by four different simulants then analyzed using a SWATH method. A total of 26 chemical migrants including 23 non-intentionally added substances were identified (NIAS). Among the 23 NIAS compounds, eighteen of them were classified with a Class III toxicity under the Cramer classification. It is also noticed that the migrant profile for baby food pouches in Australia differs from the ones in Europe, as chemicals containing caprolactam component were only detected in the Australian market [1,2]. Two NIAS compounds, namely NPG-AA and AA-DEG were semi-quantified while seven bisphenol and seven phthalates were targeted analyzed. None of the quantified chemicals’ concentration exceeded the migration limit made by the EU committee regulation. Furthermore, the concentration of the same chemical from different pouches also clustered into groups, with the brands being the most significant grouping factor. This study is the first of its kind to widely screening baby food pouches products in Australia, producing a more comprehensive migrant profile. The profile is beneficial to further toxicity studies and risk assessments, understanding the source of identified chemicals and making of future government regulations.

 
  1. Gomez Ramos, M. J.; Lozano, A.; Fernandez-Alba, A. R., High-resolution mass spectrometry with data independent acquisition for the comprehensive non-targeted analysis of migrating chemicals coming from multilayer plastic packaging materials used for fruit puree and juice. Talanta 2019, 191, 180-192.
  2. Bauer, A.; Jesus, F.; Gomez Ramos, M. J.; Lozano, A.; Fernandez-Alba, A. R., Identification of unexpected chemical contaminants in baby food coming from plastic packaging migration by high resolution accurate mass spectrometry. Food Chem 2019, 295, 274-288.