Honey adulteration can be very sophisticated and methods to detect it correspondingly sophisticated, expensive, and difficult to access in some countries. Basic fraud, however, such as the addition of sugar syrups is still a possibility and can be difficult to detect even with isotope ratio techniques depending on the origin of the sugar syrup plant source. In this study (open access), a relatively cheap honey authentication method based on HPLC-UV fingerprinting was developed. The authors report a 100% classification rate of honey samples against a great variety of sugar syrups (agave, corn, fiber, maple, rice, sugar cane and glucose) by partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). In addition, the detection and level quantitation of adulteration using syrups as adulterants (down to 15%) was accomplished by partial least squares (PLS) regression with low prediction errors by both internal and external validation (values below 12.8% and 19.7%, respectively).
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