Detection techniques for adulterants in honey: Challenges and recent trends

Abstract Honey is a nutritious natural sweetener from honey bee-collected nectar from a variety of flowers. The health benefits and high value of honey, however, have motivated fraudulent acts of honey adulteration by either a direct or secondary inclusion of cheaper sweeteners. Therefore, stringent quality controls must be in place to ensure authenticity of honeys while safeguarding the wellbeing of consumers. To detect adulterants in honey, researchers are continually exploring rapid, sensitive and efficient recognition systems using chemometric-integrated spectroscopic techniques. These techniques have garnered significant attention of researchers for use in categorizing and detecting honey, as well as the incorporated adulterants. This paper provides an all-inclusive overview on the challenges for effective detection and quantification of a wide-ranging sugary adulterants in honey, worldwide. The advantages and drawbacks of diversified analytical techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, sensor-based methods and chromatography with different sample pre-treatments for distinguishing the adulterants in honey are also discussed. This article also compares and deliberates on the performance among the reported techniques to detect adulterants in honey, specifically highlighting the concepts used for detection, along with the modifications that were made which led to their success and failure.