Advances in infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics for honey analysis: a comprehensive review

Honey analysis plays a crucial role in ensuring its quality, authenticity, and compliance with regulatory standards. Traditional methods for honey analysis are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and require complex sample preparation. Infrared spectroscopy is used in the food sector as a fast and reliable technique for the analysis of food. Multivariate analysis applied to infrared spectroscopy has proved to be effective in analyzing honey. In this paper, recently published studies using mid- and near- infrared spectroscopy for the analysis of honey will be reviewed. Honey analysis covers the following objectives: the determination of the physiochemical properties, the determination of the antioxidant activity, the detection of adulteration, the determination of 5-(hydroxymethyl) furfural (HMF) and diastase activity, and the determination of the botanical and geographical origins. A summary of the basic principles of infrared spectroscopy is presented. Different data preprocessing techniques are described. Moreover, this article emphasizes the wide application of chemometrics or multivariate analysis tools for data treatment.