Assessment of hydroxymethylfurfural and furfural in commercial bakery products

• Reliable extraction and quantification of hydroxymethylfurfural and furfural.
• Survey of a wide variety of commercial bread, biscuits, cakes and pastry.
• Cake/pastry and bread contain lower amounts of HMF than biscuits.
• Bread presents higher furfural content when compared with cake/pastry and biscuits.
• High amounts of furfural were found in bakery products containing chocolate.

A survey was conducted on the presence of hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) and furfural in bread and bakery products; for this purpose a reliable extraction procedure followed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was applied. The performance of the method was evaluated in terms of linearity (r always > 0.99); detection limits (0.001 mg L−1 for furfural and 0.006 mg L−1 for HMF); recovery percentages (98.5–100.5% for HMF and 94.9–98.9% for furfural); intraday precision (<4.65%) and interday precision (<7.51%). Two batches of a wide variety of products commercially available were analysed (a total of 88 samples). HMF and furfural levels presented high variability between products and batches of the same product. Cake/pastry samples showed the lowest HMF content (3.0 mg kg−1 fw) while biscuits showed the highest content (7.8 mg kg−1 fw) (p < 0.05). Regarding furfural, bread samples presented the highest furfural content (5.3 mg kg−1 fw) (p < 0.05), cake/pastry and biscuits showed the lowest content (1.9 and 3.0 mg kg−1 fw, respectively). Chocolate containing samples presented higher amounts of furfural (>20 mg kg−1). These results indicate that special attention should be given to furfural content of bread (due to its daily high consumption) and re-evaluation of dietary exposure.