• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.284-289
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• 2017

Oxidized polyethylene wax (OPEW) is, one of the food additives, used as a coating agent in citrus fruits and nuts. OPEW is authorized to quantum satis in EU, USA, and is acceptable less than 250 mg/kg in Australia and New Zealand. But OPEW is unauthorized as a food additive in Korea. This study was to establish the analytical method of OPEW and demonstrate the effective application of various food samples. We first conducted to compare the various analytical method including acid value (AV), high temperature gel permeation chromatography (HT-GPC), matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF/MS), gas chromatography flame ionization detector (GC-FID) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). This result indicated that FT-IR spectrum of OPEW treated food sample displayed absorption bands for carbonyl group (C=O, $1714cm^{-1}$), ester group (C-O, $1463cm^{-1}$), aliphatic group (C-H, $2916cm^{-1}$). Furthermore, IR spectrum of OPEW treated food sample showed similar tendency with IR spectrum of OPEW standard. Therefore, it is confirmed that analytical method using FT-IR can be detected on analysis of OPEW in food. As a result of monitoring of 111 samples using established analytical method, OPEW was not detected in the food samples.