Acrylamide is a thermal process contaminant formed in foodstuff during heating at temperatures exceeding 120 °C. It is detected especially in French fries, potato chips, bread, and crispbread, as well as in coffee and coffee surrogates. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies it as probable human carcinogen and the EU has established indicative values for different foodstuffs.
This AppNote presents a partially automated analysis method based on DIN EN ISO 18862 for the determination of acrylamide in ground coffee and cereal coffee. Following the initial manual extraction steps, the final SPE cleanup was performed automatically by the GERSTEL MultiPurpose Sampler (MPS) using CHROMABOND ABC18 cartridges from MACHERAY-NAGEL. Subsequently the clean extracts were analyzed by LC-MS/MS. 
The applicability of the method has been proven for three different coffee samples: Filter coffee, espresso, and cereal coffee. Automation of the complete workflow by the MPS and available modules is feasible but was not pursued within the scope of this work.