Progress toward the Rapid Nondestructive Assessment of the Floral Origin of European Honey Using Dispersive Raman Spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy was investigated for its ability to discriminate between honey samples from different floral and geographical origins. The major vibrational modes in the Stokes Raman spectra were assigned and could be attributed to the four main sugars found in the honeys. The chemometric clustering method of discriminant function analysis indicated that the major differences between the honeys was due to their botanical origin rather than their country of origin, and this was confirmed by artificial neural network analyses. We consider the noninvasive nondestructive analysis of honey by Raman spectroscopy to be an alternative to the laborious and highly specialized mellisopalynology typing method currently used to identify the floral origin of honey.