Analytical Letters, vol.10, no.40, pp.1893-1903, 2007 (SCI-Expanded)
Sunset Yellow (SY), Carmoisine (C), Ponceau 4R (P), and
Patent Blue V (PB) are synthetic organic dyes which are under governmental
regulations all over the world because of their toxicity and carcinogenicity. In
this study, a simple and fast analytical procedure was proposed for the
simultaneous determination of food dyes (SY, C, P, and PB) in powder drinks by
means the partial least‐square treatment of spectrophotometric absorbance
between 450 –730 nm, taken at 10 nm intervals. The experimental calibration
matrix was constructed with 27 samples. The concentration ranges considered
were 2, 3, 4 µg · ml−1 for SY, 7, 8, 9 µg · ml−1 for C, 9, 10, 11 µg · ml−1 for
P, and 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 µg · ml−1 for PB. The method was applied to the
determination of dyes in different commercially available powder drinks. The
results obtained by the application of the PLS‐2 method were statistically
compared with those obtained by an HPLC method using the F and t tests. Very
similar values were found by two methods. No time consuming pretreatment was
needed and this method also provides rapid, accurate and economical analysis of
these colors.