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Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Food and Beverage System Review: Current Occurrence Data, Detection Challenges, and Implications for Consumer Exposure
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This review compiles occurrence data for microplastics and nanoplastics across the food and beverage supply chain — from infant formula and bottled water to dairy and hot beverages — and argues that current laboratory detection methods are too slow and matrix-limited to support the scalable monitoring needed to characterize cumulative dietary exposure, especially in infants.
Microplastics (MPs, <5 mm) and nanoplastics (NPs, <1 µm) are now documented as ubiquitous emerging contaminants throughout the global food and beverage supply chain. Sources include environmental deposition, plastic packaging migration, processing equipment, and consumer handling (e.g., heating in polypropylene bottles). Recent studies report detectable levels in infant formula (typically 4–55 MPs/100 g powder), bottled water (hundreds of thousands of particles per liter, predominantly NPs), dairy milk (~350 MPs/kg), fruit juices/soft drinks (9–183 particles/L), and hot beverages. Traditional laboratory methods for MP/NP analysis—requiring destructive digestion, filtration, and matrix-specific optimization—are labor-intensive, low-throughput, and poorly suited to the complex colloidal emulsions, high turbidity, lipids, and proteins characteristic of many consumer liquids. This review synthesizes peer-reviewed occurrence data (2020–2026), highlights analytical and regulatory gaps, and underscores the urgent need for rapid, non-destructive, multi-matrix detection platforms. While current evidence does not demonstrate acute health risks at detected levels, the high relative exposure in infants and cumulative dietary intake warrant scalable monitoring tools. Ongoing work with the EcoExposure optical assay demonstrates proof-of-concept feasibility even in the most challenging matrices.
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