Determining the amount of inorganic ions in aqueous media is important in the food industry and environmentally. In the environment high levels of ions like nitrate, nitrite, and phosphate can lead to unhealthy conditions for aquatic species. Similarly, high levels of nitrate and nitrite can cause health issues in humans. One method for determining nitrate levels in aqueous samples involves reducing the nitrate species to nitrite via a redox reaction with finely divided zinc powder followed by conversion to a diazonium salt and complexation with 1-napthylamine to form a colored complex. In the work described herein, this modified version of the Griess reaction was used to spectrophotometrically determine the amount of nitrate in several environmental and food samples.