GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN AUTHENTICATION OF HONEY PRODUCED IN ARGENTINA USING MULTIELEMENT AND MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

FECHNER, DIANA CORINA; HIDALGO, MELISA JAZMIN; RUIZ DIAZ, JUAN DANIEL; GIL, RAUL; PELLERANO, ROBERTO GERARDO

FOOD BIOSCIENCE

ELSEVIER

Año: 2020 vol. 33

2212-4292

Traceability of food has become a very important issue to the world market. In particular, the traceability of natural products has become a critical topic considering the high number of possible sources of environmental pollutants which these products are exposed during the production process. Honey is a product of animal origin whose chemical composition and organoleptic characteristics are strongly influenced by its geographical origin. Currently, multivariate statistical techniques applied to multielement data are widely used in different areas of food chemistry. These techniques can identify natural clustering pattern, or find discriminant functions for predictive models. In this study, the results of multielement analysis were used to verify the geographical origin of honeys produced in Argentina. Thus, a chemometric model was developed and validated to authenticate Argentinean honeys based on chemical composition using multivariate techniques. The linear discriminant analysis (LDA) performance to multielement data of honey samples from Northeast region of Argentina classified honey in three groups. Cross-validation method leave one out classify correctly 76.0% of samples. Additionally, LDA used to multielement data fusioned to physicochemical classified correctly 94.0% of samples.