Differentiation of the botanical origin of honeys by fast, non-targeted 1H-NMR profiling and chemometric tools as alternative authenticity screening tool

Abstract

The globalization of trade of foods with its overwhelming variety has led to an increased demand for authentic products by all parts of the food value chain. In particular high-priced products are commonly adulterated, mislabeled or completely substituted. Honey is a typical example for such foods, which show an increasing number of adulterations, mostly related to the declaration of the botanical origin. A non-targeted 1H-NMR-based screening, combined with multivariate statistical analysis was applied as a fast and simple comprehensive approach to verify the botanical origin of honey samples. The NMR fingerprints of honey sample were processed by taylor-made chemometric tools, based on principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in custom MATLAB routines. The results obtained by PCA-LDA showed very good discrimination between the different honey types with 98.9 % correct overall classification rate of the samples. Hence, this NMR based screening approach could be an effective alternative to traditional, laborious methods.