Migration of two antioxidants from packaging into a solid food and into Tenax®

The migration of chemicals from packaging materials into foods is an important issue in food safety and quality. European legislation sets specific migration limits which compliance must be assessed, surveyed and controlled by industry and authorities. Recently, the new Regulation UE 10/2011 included a new simulant - the Modified Polyphenylene Oxide (Tenax®) for solid dry foods. The objective of this work was to compare the migration kinetics of two antioxidants into Tenax® as compared to rice at 3 temperatures: 23, 40 and 70 °C. The application of two different solutions of the 2nd Fick's law to describe and simulate the migration of the migrants to the present systems was studied. Diffusion coefficients ranged between 4.80E-13 and 2.84E-11 cm2/s for the migration into Tenax® and between 6.90E-18 and 4.33E-17 cm2/s for the migration into rice. The partition coefficients ranged between 6 and 29 for Tenax® and were over 1000 for rice. The activation energy for the migration into rice was half of that for Tenax®. The models described relatively well the experimental data (ε < 12% and < 30% for rice and Tenax®, respectively). Results indicate that the food simulant tends to overestimate migration values and thus can be safely used to assess materials compliance when materials are intended to contact with rice. However, results also indicate that Tenax® is a much more severe simulant in representing rice.