Design of High‐Productivity Mixed Tocopherol Purification from Deodorized Distillates by Tandem Reverse Phase Chromatography

Currently, there is a great demand for high‐purity natural tocopherols in food supplements due to their antioxidant and Vitamin E activity. Deodorized distillate (DOD), a by‐product of the vegetable oil refining process, is a major source of these natural tocopherols. Isolation of pure tocopherols from DOD is challenging due to their lower concentration and presence of large quantities of polar and hydrophobic components. Several multistep methods are known in the art for the purification of tocopherols from DOD and crude feed stocks. This work presents a single‐step tandem reverse phase chromatography method for high‐purity tocopherols from DOD containing 4–8% of tocopherols (mixture of α, β, γ, and δ isomers). Tandem chromatography involved two consecutive chromatography columns, in which the first column is operated in frontal adsorption mode for maximum loading with partial removal of impurities and the second column operated in step wise separation mode causing high purity. The Developed tandem two‐column process produces 60% and 95% purity tocopherol grades at a high loading of 381 (g of DOD) per (L of resin). The developed method recovers up to 77% of loaded tocopherols in purified form with a productivity of 3.4 g L−1 hour−1.