Commentary: “Quantitative” vs quantitative Headspace Solid-Phase Microextraction (HS-SPME) in food volatile and flavor compounds analysis

This commentary deals with a “quantitative” HS-SPME approach, which is found in an increasing number of papers concerning research on food volatile and flavor compounds. In these papers the concept of an “internal standard” is applied, in which peak areas of compounds extracted using HS-SPME are compared to that of the added internal standard, not bearing in mind that SPME is a partition-coefficient-based extraction technique. To show the drawback of such an approach to quantitation of 7 different compounds in water its application was compared to the results obtained using external standard (ESTD) HS-SPME quantitation. Not surprisingly, totally different results were obtained.