High-performance liquid chromatography — Ultraviolet method for the determination of total specific migration of nine ultraviolet absorbers in food simulants based on 1,1,3,3-Tetramethylguanidine and organic phase anion exchange solid phase extraction to

• The sample pretreatment of weak acidic compounds like UV absorbers in olive oil simulant was challenging due to glyceride.
• A novel OPAE SPE procedure has been developed to remove glyceride and enrich or purify the nine UV absorbers from olive oil.
• In the OPAE SPE procedure, the anion exchange was performed in the organic phase environments instead of an aqueous solution.
• The OPAE SPE omits time-consuming and challenging extraction of the UV absorbers with an aqueous solution from olive oil.
• The total specific migration of the nine UV absorbers was determined by the OPAE SPE/HPLC-UV method for the first time.

The glyceride in oil food simulant usually causes serious interferences to target analytes and leads to failure of the normal function of the RP-HPLC column. In this work, a convenient HPLC-UV method for the determination of the total specific migration of nine ultraviolet (UV) absorbers in food simulants was developed based on 1,1,3,3-tetramethylguanidine (TMG) and organic phase anion exchange (OPAE) SPE to efficiently remove glyceride in olive oil simulant. In contrast to the normal ion exchange carried out in an aqueous solution or aqueous phase environment, the OPAE SPE was performed in the organic phase environments, and the time-consuming and challenging extraction of the nine UV absorbers from vegetable oil with aqueous solution could be readily omitted. The method was proved to have good linearity (r ≥ 0.99992), precision (intra-day RSD ≤ 3.3%), and accuracy(91.0% ≤ recoveries ≤ 107%); furthermore, the lower limit of quantifications (0.05–0.2 mg/kg) in five types of food simulants(10% ethanol, 3% acetic acid, 20% ethanol, 50% ethanol and olive oil) was observed. The method was found to be well suited for quantitative determination of the total specific migration of the nine UV absorbers both in aqueous and vegetable oil simulant according to Commission Regulation (EU) No. 10/2011. Migration levels of the nine UV absorbers were determined in 31 plastic samples, and UV-24, UV-531, HHBP and UV-326 were frequently detected, especially in olive oil simulant for UV-326 in PE samples. In addition, the OPAE SPE procedure was also been applied to efficiently enrich or purify seven antioxidants in olive oil simulant. Results indicate that this procedure will have more extensive applications in the enriching or purification of the extremely weak acidic compounds with phenol hydroxyl group that are relatively stable in TMG n-hexane solution and that can be barely extracted from vegetable oil.