Abstract: Formalin is extensively used by traders to preserve various food items like fish and mushrooms, but it has serious health hazards. Detection of formalin content in foods is a challenging problem and in the proposed work, an electrochemical sensor based on a molecular imprinted polymer of acrylonitrile over graphite platform (MiPAN@GP electrode) is pioneered for the recognition of formalin (FAL). The synthesized MiPAN@GP electrode material was characterized with Fourier transform infra-red (FTIR) spectroscope, UV-visible (UV-vis) spectroscope, and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The analytical performance of the electrode was evaluated by a three electrode system using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). A wide linear range from 10 μM to 1000 μM with a limit of detection of 0.63 μM was obtained. The MiPAN@GP sensor exhibited various advantages, such as low cost, high repeatability, high reproducibility, long term stability, and good selectivity. The practical applicability of the MiPAN@GP electrode was tested with mushroom and fish extracts which yielded satisfactory results and high accuracy (&8776; 99%) when compared with the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis results