Acrylic acid (AA) chemical that endangers human health through contamination of water, soil, and foods. In this study, the extraction, purification, and detection of AA in various food products were established. The contamination level of AA in food products was investigated as well. Food matrices that were used for method validation were crop, fruit, vegetable, seaweed, beverage, sauce, paste, and pickled food, where the validation was confirmed through cross-checking between two different laboratories by checking the accuracy and precision. Furthermore, sample volume for analysis was optimized. Sonication and syringe filtering were all steps preparing headspace analyzer (HA) before GC-MS analysis. Linearity (R2), limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), accuracy and precision of AA, were > 0.99, 0.06-0.17 mg/L, 0.18-0.52 mg/L, 90.97-111.93% and 0.12-9.61 RSD% of intra, inter-day, respectively. White rice sample was the only one sample where AA detected (6.19 mg/L) among 102 food samples. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10068-022-01131-x.