Method for identifying acacia honey adulterated by resin absorption: HPLC-ECD coupled with chemometrics

Abstract Honey adulteration is a general safety and quality concern. Resin technology, as a new kind of adulteration, could remove or reduce harmful substances in honey to create substandard honey, which would enable substandard products to enter the market. Thus, it is urgently important to identify such adulterated products. In this work, raw acacia honey treated with macroporous adsorption resins (MARs) was distinguished by HPLC-ECD coupled with chemometrics. The physicochemical characterization of raw acacia honey and acacia honey treated with resins were analyzed. Furthermore, the chromatography fingerprints of honey samples were established, and samples were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) and orthogonal projections to latent structures discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). The results indicated that raw acacia honey could be distinguished from the resin-treated honey. In summary, adulteration of acacia honey with resin technology could be detected by HPLC-ECD combined with chemometrics.