Simultaneous Determination of B Group Vitamins in Supplemented Food Products by High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Diode Array Detection

A simple HPLC-DAD method was developed and validated to determine B group vitamin content (thiamine, riboflavin, nicotinamide, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine and folic acid) in supplemented food samples, i.e., infant formula, cereal, low-calorie food, a multi-vitamin pill and a vitamin drink. In this study, the most significant advantages were simultaneous determination of the six B group vitamins in various food matrices and a small number of sample treatment steps that required only an organic solvent, acetonitrile. Moreover, this method prevents reduction of column durability, because the mobile phase does not contain ion-pairing reagents. Analytes were separated on a Develosil RPAQUEOUS $C_{30}$ (4.6 mm ${\times}$ 250 mm, 5 ${\mu}M$ particle size) column with a gradient elution of acetonitrile and 20 mM phosphate buffer (pH 3.0) at a flow rate between 0.8 and 1.0 mL/min. Detection was performed at 275 nm, except for that of pantothenic acid (205 nm). The calibration curves for all six vitamins showed good linearity with correlation coefficients ($r^2$) higher than 0.995. The developed method was validated with respect to linearity, intra- and inter-day accuracy and precision, limit of quantification (LOQ), recovery and stability. The method showed good precision and accuracy, with intra- and inter-assay coefficients of variation less than 15% at all concentrations. The recovery was carried out according to the standard addition procedure, with yields ranging from 89.8 to 104.4%. This method was successfully applied to the determination of vitamin B groups in supplemented food products.