Dilute-and-Shoot Liquid Chromatography Approach for Simple and High-throughput Analysis of 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural in Fruit-based Baby Foods Mateus Henrique Petrarca 1 & Adriana Dillenburg Meinhart 2 & Helena Teixeira Godoy 1 Received: 7 August 2019 /Accepted: 21 January 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract The present work focuses on a cost-effective and environment-friendly approach for the determination of 5- hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) in baby foods, a process-induced food compound of toxicological interest. The proposed method includes acetonitrile-based extraction followed by dilution of the extract with water in order to minimize the interference from other co-extracted matrix components and eliminate the demand for further clean-up procedure, and then high-performance liquid chromatography analysis with diode array detection (HPLC-DAD). Adequate performance characteristics were achieved including limits of detection and quantification of 0.02 and 0.04 μgg -1 , respectively; recoveries from 98 to 102% and precision (RSD values ≤ 4%) under repeatability and within-laboratory reproducibility conditions. The application of the validated method to commercial fruit-based baby foods and the detection of HMF in all samples (contents between 2.3 and 195.4 μgg -1 ) demonstrated their suitability for baby food control as well as it contributed to the first data on HMF in fruit-based baby foods available in the Brazilian market. Keywords Food analysis . HPLC-DAD . Infant foods . Processing contaminant . Sample preparation . 5-Hydroxymethyl-2-furaldehyde Introduction In the last years, green analytical chemistry has received grow- ing interest and efforts have been directed to improve the classical methodologies in order to obtain more cost- effective and environment-friendly approaches. The sample preparation has been considered the most critical step of ana- lytical process which influences significantly on the quality of results obtained as well as it contributes to the “greenness” of the entire procedure (Filippou et al. 2016; Ramos 2012). In this way, several sample preparation aspects have been ex- plored including reduction or elimination of use of reagents and/or hazardous substances; reuse and recovery of organic solvents; replacement of usual solvents by ionic liquids and supercritical fluids; miniaturization, integration and automa- tion of analytical operations; and application of pressure, mi- crowave and ultrasound radiation aiming high process effec- tiveness in a shorter time (Płotka et al. 2013). Within the green chemistry context, dilute-and-shoot pro- cedure has been an attractive sample preparation strategy for routine analysis due to its easy, fast and simple operation which consists in the dilution of aqueous or liquid matrix with a suitable solvent followed by mass spectrometry analysis (Dubascoux et al. 2018; Seraglio et al. 2016; Suzuki et al. 2019). The dilution minimizes the matrix effects and thus eliminates the need for further clean-up procedure; nonethe- less, it can result in reduced analyte detectability. Therefore, the dilute-and-shoot strategy has been used for substances that show good ionization efficiency and with high detection levels, particularly, in biomonitoring of human exposure to different chemicals and analytical toxicology (Deventer et al. 2014). 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a heterocyclic aldehyde, is one of the most important process-induced compound oc- curring in ascorbic acid– and carbohydrate–rich foods. This furanic compound is an intermediate product in the Maillard * Mateus Henrique Petrarca petrarcamh@gmail.com 1 Department of Food Science, School of Food Engineering, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, SP 13083 862, Brazil 2 Department of Food Science and Agrotechnology, Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL), Pelotas, RS 96105-900, Brazil Food Analytical Methods https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-020-01713-7