Vitamin E or a-tocopherol is a well-known antioxidant that is added to many foods to reduce oxidation. It is also marketed in vitamin formulas and as a nutraceutical. Many natural products such as soybeans, corn, safflowers, peanuts, wheat germ and sunflowers contain tocopherols in low concentration. Because of the high market value placed on natural tocopherols, their isolation from natural sources in a highly purified form is desired. The oily nature of these natural product matrices creates problems when isolating tocopherols. Direct injections of neat oil or oil dilutions of natural products onto reversed phase HPLC columns cause many problems including coating the stationary phase with lipids that leads to ghost peaks, unstable baselines and short lifetimes. Using reversed phase flash chromatography as the preliminary isolation step allows the tocopherols to be concentrated and have fewer oils as contaminants thereby increasing the lifetime of the HPLC columns.