Site-specific carbon isotope measurements of vanillin reference materials by nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry

Abstract

Vanillin, one of the world’s most popular flavor used in food and pharmaceutical industries, is extracted from vanilla beans or obtained (bio)-synthetically. The price of natural vanillin is considerably higher than that of its synthetic alternative which leads increasingly to counterfeit vanillin. Here, we describe the workflow of combining carbon isotope ratio combustion mass spectrometry with quantitative carbon nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry (13C-qNMR) to obtain carbon isotope measurements traceable to the Vienna Peedee Belemnite (VPDB) with 0.7‰ combined standard uncertainty (or expanded uncertainty of 1.4‰ at 95% confidence level). We perform these measurements on qualified Bruker 400 MHz instruments to certify site-specific carbon isotope delta values in two vanillin materials, VANA-1 and VANB-1, believed to be the first intramolecular isotopic certified reference material (CRMs).Graphical abstract