Assessment of hydroxymethylfurfural and furfural in commercial bakery products

Abstract

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.