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Honey is a natural product produced by honey bees from floral nectar or honeydew secretions, highly valued for its nutritional and functional properties.1 Due to its high market value, honey is frequently adulterated with inexpensive sugar syrups or through indirect bee feeding practices, making the development of reliable methods for authenticity assessment and adulteration detection increasingly important.2 NMR have been developed during the last three decades for the detection of honey adulterants. However, these technique require highly trained stuff and special conditions. Compared to conventional high-field NMR systems, benchtop NMR spectrometers offer several advantages, including lower cost, compact size, easier operation, minimal maintenance requirements, and no need for liquid helium or other cryogens. Additionally, they enable rapid, non-destructive analysis on site, making them highly suitable for routine quality control and honey authenticity studies at honey collection points.3
Two different polyfloral honeys (pure – natural from beekeeper and adulterated – commercially purchased with adulteration history) were submitted to benchtop NMR analysis in order to demonstrate feasibility of benchtop NMR as a fast and easy-to-use method for adulteration determination.
The 1H NMR spectra revealed clear differences between the pure honey sample and the sample adulterated with sucrose. Significant increase of intensity of the sucrose signal (around 5.4 ppm) was observed in the adulterated sample.
These results demonstrate the potential of benchtop NMR spectroscopy as a rapid and non-destructive tool, and first of all a cheap method for detecting honey adulteration.
Keywords: honey, adulteration, benchtop NMR analysis.
References:
1) Codex Alimentarius Commission. Codex Standard for Honey (CODEX STAN 12–1981); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and World Health Organization: Rome, Italy, 2001.
2) Crăciun, M. E.; Parvulescu, O. C.; Donise, A. C.; Dobre, T.; Stanciu, D. R. Characterization and Classification of Romanian Acacia Honey Based on Its Physicochemical Parameters and Chemometrics. Sci. Rep. 2020, 10 (1), 20690.
3) Yu, H.-Y.; Myoung, S.; Ahn, S. Recent Applications of Benchtop Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. Magnetochemistry 2021, 7 (9), 121.