Hydrophobic paper-based SERS platform for direct-droplet quantitative determination of melamine

•A paper-based SERS substrate with good activity and reproducibility was proposed.•The SERS platform can be reused to construct the super-hydrophobic surface.•Direct droplet-detection realizes quantitative SERS determination.•The detection limit of melamine in milk is down to 1 ppm. A novel hydrophobic-SERS substrate platform based on silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) functionalized commercially available filter paper was reported. Compared with conventional substrates, not only could this novel SERS substrate meet the requirements of simple and large-scale preparation, but also realized direct droplet-detection with reusable property. In this work, the fabrication, physical characterization, and SERS sensitivity of the substrates to spot-on food determination were studied. The experimental results show the method exhibited high reproducibility with less than 9% spot-to-spot variation in Raman intensity. Furthermore, the method was successfully applied to detect melamine in diluted milk with the instrument detection limit (IDL) down to 1 ppm in a linear correlation (1 ppm–1000 ppm). In addition, this SERS substrate could also be applied successfully in other fields, such as the determination of pesticide (thiram) and dye (malachite green) in real environment.