Conserve Italia, a European agri-food company, is using Thermo Scientific GC/MS and LC/MS systems for the fast and reliable pesticide analysis of food products.
Conserve Italia processes around 650,000 tons of raw materials each year, including fruits and vegetables, and provides the European market with finished goods such as fruit juices, canned vegetables and tomato sauces and purees.
The company is using the Thermo Scientific TSQ Quantum GC and TSQ Quantum Access Max triple-stage quadrupole mass spectrometers to achieve compliance with maximum residue limits (MRLs) specified for pesticides in food.
By using the instruments, the laboratory has increased sample throughput as well as experienced time and cost savings.
Pesticide analysis poses a number of challenges for laboratories and operators owing to the wide-ranging chemistries within the contaminants and their complex elution.
High-speed, sensitive and cost-effective analytical instrumentation is required to generate a sufficient number of data points and to ensure the reliable integration of overlapping chromatographic peaks.
Conserve Italia selected the TSQ Quantum GC and TSQ Quantum Access Max because of their ability to perform rapid and accurate GC/MS and LC/MS pesticide analysis, coping with the laboratory's high throughput of more than 10,000 samples per year.
The instruments have enabled Conserve Italia to improve productivity and to achieve substantial cost savings.
Combining the systems with the Quechers (Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged and Safe) sample preparation method has resulted in pesticide analysis that is three times faster than with previous instruments.
The speed of mycotoxin analysis has increased tenfold, reducing the total analysis time to approximately three hours.
Renzo Boni, laboratory manager at Conserve Italia, said: 'We selected the Thermo Scientific mass spectrometers for their robustness and ability to speed up the detection and analysis of pesticides and mycotoxins.
'Both instruments have become extremely important in our laboratory as they drastically reduce analysis time and their high accuracy means we can ensure that our food products are completely safe to enter the food market,' added Boni.
