More than a decade ago, the analytics of mineral oil saturated and aromatic hydrocarbons (MOSH/MOAH) found its way into contract laboratories, official authorities, and food producers all over the world. As of today, legally binding limits are still not established. Originally developed in Switzerland, this type of analytics quickly gained attention anyhow. The regulative upper limits discussed by the European Commission will be challenging for a broad variety of matrices. To that end, a lot of harmonization work was done in last years resulting in a standardized method for vegetable oils and fats (ISO 20122) generally providing good inter-laboratory comparability. Nevertheless, official methods for other type of matrices are not available. Beside the hyphenation of HPLC and GC-FID needed for the quantitation of MOSH and MOAH, automation of the highly complex and variable sample preparation protocol can help to improve precision, robustness, and sample throughput. The presented work discusses all required sample preparation steps in terms of necessity, performance, and automatability. A generic sample preparation protocol derived from the ISO method is shown and its applicability for a broad range of food matrices subjected to HPLC-GC-FID afterward.  Additionally, examples for unusual findings in foodstuffs will be outlined and which tools are available to deal with possible limitations and obstacles.