Determination of fat in infant formula by robotic automated method

Abstract

Abstract A method has been developed for the determination of fat in infant formula using a commercially available robotic system. The procedure and chemistry at large are the same as the manual method, Official Methods of Analysis 16.064, by the Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC). Both liquid and powder forms of milk‐protein‐based and soy‐protein‐based matrices were analyzed in this study. The robotic operations are described in detail. The evaluation of the accuracy is accomplished by comparing the data obtained by the robotic automated method to those obtained by the official manual method. The analysis of variance does not indicate a statistically significant difference (p‐value 0.0620, mean difference 0.0056%) between the mean results of the two methods for the milk‐protein‐based infant formula. The results of other matrices tested by both methods agreed within 1% relative of each other. The precision of the robotic automated method is slightly better than the manual method as shown by the overall relative standard deviation (RSD) of 0.167% vs 0.269%. The ruggedness of the instrument has been satisfactory. The results of this study suggest that the robotic automated method is suitable for this application.