Magnetic Mixed Hemimicelles Solid-Phase Extraction of Three Food Colorants from Real Samples

Introducing a specific clean extraction procedure with a minimal matrices effect for food colorant determination is still a challengeable topic and highly recommended. Mixed hemimicelle solid-phase extraction method, based on cetyltrimethylammonium bromide-coated Fe3O4/SiO2 nanoparticles as a novel, simple, and fast preconcentration method, was applied for preconcentration and fast isolation of three synthetic food colorants in foodstuff matrices prior to HPLC-UV-vis determination. The influence of different parameters on extraction efficiency such as surfactant amount, sample pH, time of extraction, desorption condition, and nanoparticles concentration was optimized. Under the optimized conditions, a preconcentration factor of 100 was achieved by extracting 10 mL sample. The limit of detection for the three synthetic food colorants including Tartrazine, Sunset yellow FCF, and Quinoline yellow is 2.50, 1.25, and 2.12 μg/L, respectively. The proposed method was applicable for extraction and preconcentration of three food colorants in various food samples with the food dye contents in the range of 13–105 μg/L.