Rapid determination of styrene and ethylbenzene in packaged yoghurt.

In this study, a headspace solid phase microextraction coupled with fast high resolution capillary gas chromatography (HS-SPME/fastGC) method has been developed for the rapid determination of styrene and ethylbenzene in yoghurt. In order to optimize the analitycal procedure the effects of various parameters on the extraction and separation efficiency, such as sample volume/headspace volume ratio, sample heating temperature and time extraction, column efficiency, speed enhancement factor etc., were studied. Styrene and other volatile compounds have been quantified using the standard addition method. The method has been applied to commercial yoghurt samples at the production time and during their shelf-life.