Soft drink products serve as a major revenue stream for food and beverage manufacturers, with a global market size of USD 237 billion in 2021. Due to the popularity and wide consumption of these products, product consistency, which drives customer satisfaction, is of the utmost importance. For quality control purposes and to ensure product consistency, it is critical to analyze six major additives during production to ensure they fall within specified target concentration ranges.
This application note demonstrates a simple, fast, and robust green chemistry method for the accurate quantitation of these six additives in diet soft drinks using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with photodiode array (PDA) detection. The method is ideal for users bottling soft drinks who are seeking an intuitive method that can be performed by users of varying skill levels, while also reducing hazardous solvent waste in support of social responsibility initiatives.
Although this work focuses on the analysis of finished soft drinks, the method can be easily adapted to the analysis of syrups, or concentrates, by further dilution of the syrup with mobile phase. This allows the method to be applied earlier in the production process at beverage bottling plants as a quality measure, ensuring target specifications are met prior to the bottling phase. Identifying a batch that does not meet specification prior to bottling can save the bottling plant thousands of dollars.