Acrylamide is thought to be produced during the roasting process associated with coffee production. Acrylamide has been labeled as a probable human carcinogen. Due to the use of roasted coffee beans in making coffee and the high consumption of coffee worldwide, brewed coffee could be a source of daily exposure to acrylamide. Acrylamide determination has been shown to be challenging due to presence of coextractives in the final extract. Manual solid phase extraction followed by LC-MS/MS analysis has been reported as a successful method for the determination of acrylamide from brewed coffee samples. However, performing solid phase extraction manually can be tedious and time consuming and there is increasing demand for automation of these methods.

In this study, we show that a manual SPE method used for the determination of acrylamide in brewed coffee can be converted to an autosampler-compatible cartridge format and automated using a robotic autosampler controlled by user-friendly software. Calibration standards prepared in freshly brewed green coffee (unroasted) resulted in a linear calibration curve (r2=0.99) from 1 ng/mL to 500 ng/mL. Precision of the automated SPE-LC/MS/MS method was calculated as CV = 1.7 %.