Differentiation of the botanical origin of honeys by fast, non-targeted 1H-NMR profiling and chemometric tools as alternative authenticity screening tool

Author Summary: The globalization of trade of foods with its overwhelming variety has led to an increased demand for authentic products by all parts of the food value chain. In particular high-priced products are commonly adulterated, mislabeled or completely substituted. Honey is a typical example for such foods, which show an increasing number of adulterations, mostly related to the declaration of the botanical origin. A non-targeted 1H-NMR-based screening, combined with multivariate statistical analysis was applied as a fast and simple comprehensive approach to verify the botanical origin of honey samples. The NMR fingerprints of honey sample were processed by taylor-made chemometric tools, based on principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in custom MATLAB routines. The results obtained by PCA-LDA showed very good discrimination between the different honey types with 98.9% correct overall classification rate of the samples. Hence, this NMR based screening approach could be an effective alternative to traditional, laborious methods.