Use of Tenax® films to demonstrate the migration of chemical contaminants from cardboard into dry food

ABSTRACT

Contaminants in food packaging are a challenge of our time since the packaging material itself has been found to represent a source of food contamination through the migration of substances from it. Before first use, packaging materials destined for the packaging of dry foods can be evaluated by performing migration experiments with the simulant for dry foods, Tenax®. This simulant is commercially available as a powder that is more difficult to handle during the migration experiments. This paper reports the development of a Tenax film. The film can be applied to the cardboard surface to conduct the migration test. After the migration is completed, the film can be easily extracted to determine the concentration of the contaminants in the film. Finally, the performance of the Tenax film was compared with the conventional Tenax powder for the evaluation of 15 model migrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenax®
• film
• food simulant
• migration testing
• food-contact material

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Belgium Food Safety Agency (FAVV-AFSCA) [grant number FAVV_DGLABO_NRLCHEM_2012], for which the authors are grateful