Portable NIR Spectroscopy to Simultaneously Trace Honey Botanical and Geographical Origins and Detect Syrup Adulteration

Fraudulent practices concerning honey are growing fast and involve misrepresentation of origin and adulteration. Simple and feasible methods for honey authentication are needed to ascertain honey compliance and quality. Working on a robust dataset and simultaneously investigating honey traceability and adulterant detection, this study proposed a portable FTNIR fingerprinting approach combined with chemometrics. Multifloral and unifloral honey samples (n = 244) from Spain and Sardinia (Italy) were discriminated by botanical and geographical origin. Qualitative and quantitative methods were developed using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and partial least squares (PLS) regression to detect adulterated honey with two syrups, consisting of glucose, fructose, and maltose. Botanical and geographical origins were predicted with 90% and 95% accuracy, respectively. LDA models discriminated pure and adulterated honey samples with an accuracy of over 92%, whereas PLS allows for the accurate quantification of over 10% of adulterants in unifloral and 20% in multifloral honey.