Since the discovery of acrylamide in foods was made public in April 2002 (Tareke et al., 2002), several research groups were involved in rapidly developing methods to reliably quantify acrylamide at relatively low levels in a large variety of different foodstuffs. Although numerous methods have already been published based on either GC­MS or LC­MS/MS techniques, many of them do not perform satisfactory analytical results for the determination of acrylamide in difficult matrices. Therefore, development of a generic sample preparation (extraction and cleanup) for an accurate, precise and reliable determination of acrylamide in all foods is still challenging. The results obtained during the course of acrylamide method development studies in our laboratory were reviewed and discussed in details comparing the results recently published by other researchers. This paper summarizes the matrix dependent difficulties encountered during the analysis of acrylamide and describes a generic sample preparation (extraction and cleanup) procedure with improved liquid chromatographic conditions coupled to MS detection. The generic method proposed here entails extraction with methanol, purification of extract with Carrez I and II solutions, complete evaporation of methanol followed by reconstitution in water, and SPE cleanup with Oasis HLB cartridge prior to LC-MS analysis