What are the methods used to detect adulteration in honey?

In this study, surface plasmon resonance based on Kretschmann configuration is employed as an alternative method to detect adulteration of pure honey. The adulterated honey was prepared by diluting three types of sugar adulterants (fructose, glucose and sucrose) into pure honey. The concentration of each adulterant is tested from 2% until 10% adulteration with 0% adulteration represents the reference for pure honey. All the resonance angles of adulterated honey demonstrated similar behavior by shifting to smaller angle than pure honey. The measured sensitivities are 0.1266°/%, 0.1065°/%, and 0.0988°/% for fructose, glucose and sucrose adulterants, respectively. The shift of resonance angle as a function of adulterants concentration in pure honey was plotted with linear regression greater than 0.95 for all samples. The outcome has disclosed a real-time, rapid and non-destructive sensor to be promoted as well-developed honey sensor.

The food adulteration is a common practice nowadays. Honey is an important food product that is getting adulterated. The substances most often incorporated into honey are sugar syrups as they are readily available. The added syrups lower the quality of the honey. Since the sugars have the same chemical composition, as the sugars in honey, there may not be many changes in the chemical parameters of pure honey and honey adulterated with sugar syrup. In this work, we are analyzing the feasibility of using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectra of the samples for detection of honey adulteration with sugar syrup. The EPR spectrums of the samples are obtained by incorporating a paramagnetic nitroxide radical.

The determination of honey authenticity is of importance to ensure its quality and safety. There is an urgent need of effective methods to detect adulterated honey. A simple, rapid, and effective HPLC-DAD method was developed to detect honey adulteration by rice syrup, using a characteristic compound from rice syrup, which is presently difficult to detect by current analytical methods. The characteristic compound was identified as 2-acetylfuran-3-glucopyranoside (AFGP) by MS and NMR. Based on HPLC analyses, the average concentration of AFGP was 92 ± 60 mg/kg in rice syrup. However, AFGP was not detected in any of the natural honey samples, so it could be used as a marker for the detection of honey adulteration by rice syrup. The developed method enabled a rapid detection of honey samples adulterated with 10% rice syrup. Using the developed method, 16 out of 186 honey samples from some markets were found to be adulterated with rice syrup.

Honey is defined as the natural sweet substance produced by honeybees. Honey consist mainly sugars but also contains some amounts of acids, phenolic contents, HMF (Hydroxyl Methyl Furfural), minerals and water. Honey adulteration is a global concern and developing countries are at higher risk associated with it due to lack of detection methods, awareness of people and policies. Honey adulteration occurs by direct addition of sucrose syrups that are produced from sugar beet, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), maltose syrup or by adding industrial sugar (glucose and fructose). Adulterants can be classified as intentional, unintentional, metallic and microbial based on type of adulterants in honey. Nowadays honey is being adulterated in more sophisticated ways that more difficult to detection of adulterants in simple methods. This paper presents a detailed review of common honey adulterants in honey as well as different methods to detect the adulterants both qualitatively and quantitatively. It also gives knowledge on awareness on honey adulterants, how adulterants are identified in quick methods including advanced recent techniques. Types of adulterants, reason and impact of adulterants are also included in this review. Honey composition is based on floral source which bees are collect nectar from and this make more difficult to detect adulterate in different honey.

Honey is characterized as a natural and raw foodstuff that can be consumed not only as a sweetener but also as medicine due to its therapeutic impact on human health. It is prone to adulterants caused by humans that manipulate the quality of honey. Although honey consumption has remarkably increased in the last few years all around the world, the safety of honey is not assessed and monitored regularly. Since the number of consumers of honey adulteration have increased in recent years, their trust and interest in this valuable product has decreased. Honey adulterants are any substances that are added to the pure honey. In this regard, this paper provides a comprehensive and critical review of the different types of adulteration, common sugar adulterants and detection methods, and draws a clear perspective toward the impact of honey adulteration on human health. Adulteration increases the consumer’s blood sugar, which can cause diabetes, abdominal weight gain, and obesity, raise the level of blood lipids and can cause high blood pressure. The most common organ affected by honey adulterants is the liver followed by the kidney, heart, and brain, as shown in several in vivo research designs.

Every living thing requires food to survive. Clean, fresh, and healthy foods are important to human health. Today, food is affected by various counterfeits. Adulteration of food is the intentional deterioration of the quality of food offered for sale by either the addition or substitution of an inferior substance or by the omission of a valuable ingredient. Economically motivated adulteration is the intentional adulteration of food for financial gain, and has enormous public health implications, making it an important issue in food science. Almost every food, including milk and dairy products, fats and oils, fruits and vegetables, grain foods, coffee, tea, honey, etc., is susceptible to adulteration. It is difficult to find food that is free from adulteration. Consumption of adulterated food contributes to numerous diseases in society, ranging from mild to life threatening. Therefore, detection of adulteration in food is essential to ensure the safety of the food we consume. To provide consumers with food that is free of adulterants, various detection methods such as physical, chemical, biochemical, and molecular techniques are used to identify adulterants in food. This review aims to provide up-to-date information on food adulteration, its impact on health, and the analytical techniques used to detect adulteration in food.

Objective - Honey has been identified statistically, from an extensive record of scholarly journals and media reports, as one of the most adulterated ingredients. It has a long history of dilution, substitution, misrepresentation of floral sources, and geographical origin. Despite the growing reported honey adulteration cases, the global honey market has been retaining its dominance. According to Market Research Future, honey demand estimates to flourish at a substantial growth rate of 7.22% during the forecast period of 2017-2023. Increasing demand and commercial value of honey motivate falsification and adulteration in honey. This paper aims to examine the underlying factor of honey fraud's existence and prevalence by reviewing the core issues in honey quality assurance from a commercial standpoint. Methodology/Technique - This paper reports on the industry scale of honey fraud using data from existing food fraud databases. Honey fraud cases from Food Adulteration Incidents Registry (FAIR) and Food Fraud Summary Month Reports were extracted, reviewed, and summarized. Finding - The findings begin with an overview of past cases and current standing of honey fraud, followed by identification of the types of fraudulent practices on honey, and lastly, highlighting the challenges in fighting honey fraud. Findings conclude the scale of honey fraud which is widespread and interconnected across the world. Honey fraud includes fraudulent admixing with sugars or lower quality honey and incorrect labeling of honey's geographical origin or floral source. Challenges in combatting honey fraud are primarily due to financial motivations for producing and selling fraudulent honey and low control measures in the traceability system. Novelty - This paper reports on the scale of honey fraud in the industry using data from the existing food fraud database. Compared to the abundance of research reporting on the latest most advanced detection method for honey authenticity, this paper examines the underlying factor on the existence of honey fraud and the fundamental control measure to be taken. Type of Paper - Review Keywords: Fraudulent Honey; Honey Adulteration; Industrial Malpractice; Apiculture JEL Classification: Q10, Q18. URI: http://gatrenterprise.com/GATRJournals/GJBSSR/vol9.2_1.html DOI: https://doi.org/10.35609/gjbssr.2021.9.2(1) Pages 99 – 113

The growing phenomenon of honey adulteration prompts the search for simple methods to confirm the authenticity of honey. The aim of the study was to evaluate the changes in thermal characteristics, physicochemical parameters, antioxidant and enzymatic activity of honey subjected to artificial adulteration. Two series of products were prepared with the use of two different sugar syrups with an increasing dosage of adulterant (0 to 30%). After 24 months of storage, the quality of adulterated samples (partially crystallized) was assessed in comparison to the control honey (solid). Used adulteration changed physicochemical parameters and reduced antioxidant and enzymatic activity of honey (p < 0.05). The admixture of syrup and invert (p < 0.05) reduced the viscosity of liquid phase of delaminated honey in a dose-dependent manner. In the study, artificially adulterated honeys were controlled using the standard differential scanning calorimetry, DSC. In all adulterated honeys, a specific glass transition, TG, was observed in the range of 34-38.05 °C, which was not observed for control honey and pure adulterants. Moreover, the additional Tgs were observed in a wide range from -19.5 °C to 4.10 °C for honeys adulterated by syrup only. In turn, the Tg in range of 50.4-57.6 °C was observed only for the honeys adulterated by invert. These specific Tg seem to be useful to detect honey adulteration and to identify the kind of adulterant used.

Nowadays, adulteration of honey is a frequent fraud that is sometimes motivated by the high price of this product in comparison with other sweeteners. Food adulteration is considered a deception to consumers that may have an important impact on people’s health. For this reason, it is important to develop fast, cheap, reliable and easy to use analytical methods for food control. In the present research, a novel method based on headspace-ion mobility spectrometry (HS-IMS) for the detection of adulterated honey by adding high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been developed. A Box–Behnken design combined with a response surface method have been used to optimize a procedure to detect adulterated honey. Intermediate precision and repeatability studies have been carried out and coefficients of variance of 4.90% and 4.27%, respectively, have been obtained. The developed method was then tested to detect adulterated honey. For that purpose, pure honey samples were adulterated with HFCS at different percentages (10–50%). Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) showed a tendency of the honey samples to be classified according to the level of adulteration. Nevertheless, a perfect classification was not achieved. On the contrary, a full classification (100%) of all the honey samples was performed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). This is the first time the technique of HS-IMS has been applied for the determination of adulterated honey with HFCS in an automatic way.

Honey adulteration causes serious economic losses for the industry, and it is difficult to detect various syrup adulteration. There is no doubt that the research on honey adulteration has scientific significance for maintaining the market order of honey and syrup and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. Hyperspectral images from pure and adulterated samples were captured using a hyperspectral imaging system (400–1000 nm). In this study, hyperspectral imaging and chemometrics were combined to detect honey adulteration, and the prediction model of honey adulteration detection was established. The pure nectar mixed 0 %, 5 %, 10 %, 15 %, 20 %, 30 % and 40 % of adulterants (fructose syrup and sucrose solution). By samples set partitioning based on joint X-Y distances (SPXY), the pure honey samples and the data fusion adulterated samples were assigned to the calibration set (560) and validation set (280) at the ratio of 2:1. The collected hyperspectral images were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) to preliminarily detect honey adulteration. Based on effective wavelengths, the adulterated sample analysis model of pure honey and adulterated honey was established. The results showed that the classification accuracy of LIBSVM model for honey adulteration was 92.5 %, which realized the detection of honey adulteration. Partial least square regression (PLSR) was used to establish adulteration level prediction model. The validation accuracy of this model was 0.84 and the root mean square error (RMSEV) of validation was 5.26 %. Therefore, it is feasible to detect honey adulteration by hyperspectral imaging. This method has the advantages of accuracy, simplicity, and greenness.