Melamine is an industrial organic compound. Firstly, 1834 was obtained by heating potassium thiocyanate with ammonium chloride. Today, melamine is produced by different methods and is generally used in the production of surface coatings, plastics and kitchen materials.

However, in 2007, sudden death of cats and dogs due to renal failure occurred in America. In the researches, melamine was detected in wheat and rice concentrates used in the preparation of cat and dog foods. However, melamine was thought to be nontoxic or at least slightly toxic. After this event, it was found that melamine was added to some cereal-derived additives to increase total nitrogen concentration and to show excess protein content in animal feeds. Melamine has no nutritional value and cannot replace protein. However, this was not immediately understood since the test methods used until then only quantitatively determined the presence of nitrogen.

Following this phenomenon in animal food, it was found that dairy enterprises in China added melamine to milk to show high levels of protein in their products. In China, because of melamine added to infant formula, urinary tract stones were detected in nearly one thousand children and 300 infant died.

Although it is not toxic to human health, organisms exposed to high levels of melamine have some organ damage.

Melamine-containing plastics are used in some of the food contact packages. For the reasons described above, melamine should not be present in packaging materials or transfer quantities that would harm human health into foodstuffs.

Especially in order to detect the presence of melamine in milk and milk products, HPLC method which is a high performance liquid chromatography method is applied today. These analyzes using HPLC are used for analytical separation techniques.

Within the scope of packaging analysis in advanced laboratories, the amount of melamine contained in the packaging materials and the amount of melamine transferred to the foodstuff are determined by HPLC.