Detecting Fraudulently Adulterated Honey

Elementar’s BiovisION Honey is a robust new solution developed exclusively for the detection of honey adulteration. It delivers highly reliable performance that minimises downtime and offers unparalleled cost-effectiveness.

In the current market, demand for honey adulteration testing is on the rise. Greater value is being placed on the purity of this natural, energy-rich product than ever before, with rules laid out by the Codex Alimentarius stating that no other substances or additives can be added to honey. At the same time, consumer demand for honey products is increasing in emerging markets and honeybee populations are in decline, meaning fraudulent providers are seeing considerable incentives to flood the market with adulterated products.

Biovision Honey is designed to detect the adulteration of honey with different sugar types by exploiting the unique ¹³C isotope ratio signature of the adulterating sugars and the honey. Honey can be quickly and simply adulterated at low cost using either ‘C4 sugars’ (cane, HFCS) and/or ‘C3 sugars’ (beet, rice) to improve a sugars sweetness or to stretch the honey to improve margins. Biovision Honey provides the ideal solution for detecting either adulteration technique.

The geographic point of origin of a honey may also be fraudulently declared to make the honey more saleable, thus commanding a higher price and depriving authentic honey producers of their customers. BiovisION Honey is also able to detect this mislabelling fraud by performing multi-elemental isotope analysis to reveal the unique isotope signatures contained within the honey. 

Utilising Elementar‘s extensive knowledge of high-temperature combustion chemistry, BiovisION Honey uses liquid chromatography and elemental analysis in unison to provide a significantly more robust and simpler solution than other honey testing technologies, making it quicker, cheaper and easier than ever to detect adulteration and mislabelling of honey.

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