What’s in my gummies? Part 1
With gummy candies becoming more common as a matrix for things like cannabinoids and multivitamins, it’s important to have a simple, fast, and repeatable sample preparation in order to obtain reliable values for analytes of interest in these gummies.
I started with a multivitamin fiber gummy, and I thought to myself, how do I get the vitamins out normally? I would normally eat the gummy, so I started there. I knew that the average body temperature is approximately 98 °F or 37 °C and that humans digest things using mostly water. I know that our stomach contains dilute hydrochloric acid as well as enzymes, but water is a simple starting point.
I decided to use the Lucidity SimplePREP to prepare my samples, and I programmed the SimplePREP as follows:
| Lucidity SimplePREP Conditions | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Temperature | 37 ℃ | ||
| Time | 60 minutes | ||
| Volume | 35 mL | ||
| Agitation | ON | ||
| Washes | 3 | ||
| Pretreat Volume | 0 mL | ||
| Filtering | OFF | ||
| Settling | 0 minutes | ||
With the SimplePREP, getting the gummy candy into solution is as easy as:
- Get the mass of the sample
2. Place sample in a 50 mL Centrifuge Tube
3. Add flat magnet and add SimplePREP cap on the centrifuge tube
4. Load the sample into the SimplePREP and Press Start
5. Remove the sample and prepare for analysis.
The SimplePREP also has the ability to filter your sample and dispense it into a 2 mL GC/LC vial, but I decided not to use this function for this method because I knew that I would need to dilute the sample before injection.
In one of our next blogs, I’ll be detailing the analysis portion of this experiment as we explore quantitating the amount of different vitamins present in different multivitamins via the Lucidity LC-UV. Although the work is underway, I thought it would be interesting to put this portion of the work out as its own blog, since sample preparation of gummies has come up as a concern from several of our customers.
Stay tuned!
Daniel Iversen R&D Chemist Lucidity