Identification Testing of Health Food Ingredients Using FTIR: Support for GMP

Introduction

The Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines describe the requirements that companies must observe across all processes from ingredient acceptance to packaging and shipping of products in order to guarantee that products are produced appropriately, safely, and with consistent quality. The pharmaceutical industry is already under obligation to comply with GMP and carries out testing to confirm that products contain pharmaceutical components and content as labeled and have no safety and quality issues. Health foods and nutrition supplements are mainly available in tablet and capsule form and share similarities with pharmaceuticals in terms of these manufacturing processes. Recently in Asian countries, GMP is now imposed by law even on health foods. This article introduces an identification of L-glutamic acid, an ingredient in health foods, using the LabSolutions software which controls Shimadzu's FTIR instruments. The IR software includes the JP identification test program as standard to enable identification testing in accordance with the Japanese Pharmacopoeia (JP). In addition to the pharmaceuticals described in the JP, this program can also be used for acceptance inspections of raw materials and pre-shipment inspections of products by specifying distinctive peaks.

July 8, 2019 GMT