Abstract
As a functional food, honey is a food product that is exposed to the risk of food fraud. To mitigate this, the establishment of an authentication system for honey is very important in order to protect both producers and consumers from possible economic losses. This research presents a simple analytical method for the authentication and classification of Indonesian honeys according to their botanical, entomological, and geographical origins using ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy and SIMCA (soft independent modeling of class analogy). The spectral data of a total of 1040 samples, representing six types of Indonesian honey of different botanical, entomological, and geographical origins, were acquired using a benchtop UV-visible spectrometer (190–400 nm). Three different pre-processing algorithms were simultaneously evaluated; namely an 11-point moving average smoothing, mean normalization, and Savitzky–Golay first derivative with 11 points and second-order polynomial fitting (ordo 2), in order to improve the original spectral data. Chemometrics methods, including exploratory analysis of PCA and SIMCA classification method, was used to classify the honey samples. A clear separation of the six different Indonesian honeys, based on botanical, entomological, and geographical origins, was obtained using PCA calculated from pre-processed spectra from 250–400 nm. The SIMCA classification method provided satisfactory results in classifying honey samples according to their botanical, entomological, and geographical origins and achieved 100% accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Several wavelengths were identified (266, 270, 280, 290, 300, 335, and 360 nm) as the most sensitive for discriminating between the different Indonesian honey samples.
Highlights
According to the Codex Alimentarius Commission [1], honey is defined as “the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honey comb to ripen and mature”
To evaluate the classification performance of the analyses investigated between all the different honey samples collected in terms of botanical, entomological, and geographical origins, we considered six classes of honey: rubber tree, longan, durian, Jambi, Muara Enim, and acacia
PCA and SIMCA were performed on UV spectral data from Indonesian honey samples of different botanical, entomological, and geographical origins
Summary
According to the Codex Alimentarius Commission [1], honey is defined as “the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honey comb to ripen and mature”. The main components of honey are carbohydrates (e.g., glucose and fructose in nearly 75% w/w), organic acids, amino acids, vitamins, volatile oils, and minerals [2,3,4]. Its minor components and appearance are highly affected by different sources of nectar (botanical origin), different types of honeybees, and geographical factors, such as beekeeping practices, climate, and storage conditions [5]. In terms of botanical origin, honey can be categorized into two broad types, namely monofloral and multifloral honey. Due to limited production and availability, monofloral honey is more valued and has a higher market price than multifloral honey [3,6]. In general, is more expensive than Apis mellifera honey due to its infrequent production and massive deforestation. The main area of production is the island of Sumbawa, which accounts for almost 80% of total national honey production in Indonesia
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