Abstract

Food delivery is gaining popularity due to changes in lifestyle and dietary patterns. However, packages used to delivery food may contain contaminants including heavy metals, or additives added during manufacturing process which may migrate into food during processing and transportation. In this study, a total of 58 food packages for delivery were collected and tested for migration of heavy metals (lead, cadmium and arsenic), bisphenol A and phenol into food simulants. The method was validated by evaluating linearity of calibration curve, limit of detection, limit of quantification, recovery and precision. Result of heavy metal migration showed that lead was the most frequently migrated metal and the highest concentration was detected in a polypropylene sample. Although there are no specific migration limits for bisphenol A and phenol in packaging materials tested in this study, migrations of bisphenol A and phenol were detected in some packages. This may due to contamination or additives added during manufacture of packages. Risk (%) was calculated to analyze the risk associated with the migration of heavy metals, bisphenol A and phenol, and was always below 1 %. These results showed that food packages for delivery are safe in terms of heavy metals, bisphenol A and phenol migration.