Key Points:
- Honey adulteration highlights ongoing challenges with food fraud and authenticity in the global food industry, said Tarun Anumol, director of the Applied Markets Segment Group at Agilent, during the ASMS Conference.
- Changing consumer preferences toward health, wellness, and specialty foods—driven largely by Millennials and Gen Z—are increasing demand for organic and plant-based products, which require new and more sensitive testing methods.
- Automation and artificial intelligence are helping to overcome workforce shortages and simplify complex sample preparation and data analysis in food testing laboratories.
- Collaboration between industry, academic researchers, and standards organizations is essential to develop improved methods for detecting food fraud and contaminants, ensuring food safety and quality.
If you’ve browsed the aisles of high-end grocery stores like Whole Foods lately, you may have noticed jars of manuka honey—an increasingly popular monofloral honey derived from the Manuka bush native to New Zealand. What sets Manuka honey apart is its unusually high concentration of methylglyoxal, a compound believed to give the honey antibacterial and wound-healing properties. In recent years, it has surged in popularity, touted by health and wellness influencers as a superfood staple. However, Manuka honey doesn’t come cheap—and spotting counterfeits, even those sold unknowingly, can be surprisingly difficult.
Honey, in general, is one of the most adulterated foodstuffs worldwide, said Tarun Anumol, director of the Applied Markets Segment Group at Agilent. Common adulteration methods include substituting real honey with cheaper syrups like rice or corn syrup, adding nonauthentic substances to increase volume, accelerating evaporation during harvesting, and mislabeling products to appear more premium or pure than they are (1). Adulteration can be intentional or accidental—even well-meaning producers may unknowingly contribute when supply chain issues arise, Anumol noted.
This challenge with honey exemplifies a broader shift in the food industry. Although food analysis has long been a cornerstone of the analytical chemistry community and a key market for instrument vendors, the industry is undergoing significant transformation. Increasing consumer demand for healthier and specialized products, growing concerns over contaminants such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and persistent workforce challenges are intensifying the focus for many instrument manufacturers.
“Food is basically intricately involved in anything we do,” Anumol said during an interview at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) Conference. “Any change to any system has an impact on food. Whether it’s the supply chain, human behavior, or new drugs on the market that impact our health—it’s this intersection of human quality of life, human health, politics, and macroeconomics.”
In this article, we explore major trends in food analysis from an industry perspective, providing a broader market overview for analytical chemists working directly or indirectly in this field.
Read More: Analysis of PFAS in Locally Acquired Food Containers
Exploring Growth Opportunities
Detecting adulterated or counterfeit food is a critical analytical challenge—especially as fraud involving products like honey, olive oil, and milk becomes more widespread. While this has long been a core area of focus for instrument makers like Agilent, the company is now expanding into new territory, Anumol said.
One of the biggest areas for growth is supporting specialty food producers in pinpointing unique quality traits and nutritional signatures that make their products stand out.
“There is a lot of distinctive testing,” Anumol said. “We are seeing more and more that a certain company wants to test their products to know that it’s unique from someone else’s.”
This trend is expected to accelerate as younger consumers—particularly Millennials and Gen Z—continue to outspend older generations on health and wellness products. Indeed, millennials spend more on nutrition than any other generation, according to McKinsey data (2). Overall, approximately 58% of all respondents said they are placing greater emphasis on health and wellness compared to the previous year, according to the McKinsey survey (2).
This has made both food companies and consumers more selective about organic products and increasingly aware of PFAS contamination. At the same time, it has driven growing demand for plant-based foods—such as meat alternatives—which may require new or different testing methods.
“With plant alternatives, there’s more focus on things like flavor and fragrance, because it has to smell and feel the same,” Anumol said.
Food regulators worldwide are increasingly imposing stricter limits on allowable contaminants in food products. These tighter regulations demand more sensitive and precise testing methods to ensure food safety and compliance. As a result, food manufacturers and testing laboratories must continuously upgrade their analytical capabilities to meet evolving standards and protect public health. Changes in the political landscape can also have major impacts on the industry, Anumol said.
“In the US, we’re seeing the new administration on the Department of Health and Human Services side ban a lot of additives and food colors, we see that happening in Europe as well,” he said.
Focusing on Automation
Another major challenge facing the food manufacturing industry is a shortage of skilled workers. As the largest sector of U.S. manufacturing by employment, food manufacturing experiences high turnover rates—particularly in laboratory settings. Many workers operating analytical instruments or machinery are not trained chemists, which can create gaps in expertise and efficiency.
While most modern mass spectrometry instruments are designed for push-button operation, sample preparation and data analysis remain complex challenges for many laboratories. This is particularly true in the food industry, where sample preparation can vary significantly depending on the type of product being analyzed, Anumol noted.
To address this challenge, Agilent is focused on automating both data analysis and sample preparation to make their technology more accessible to non-expert analysts. One key approach involves integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into data processing, alongside automating sample preparation to adhere to precise, standardized protocols.
“How can we reduce the manual intervention of sample prep and then the backend automation on data processing?” Anumol said. “We’re incorporating AI into a lot of our tools. That’s becoming a time saver for a lot of these labs.”
Forging Strategic Partnerships
Anumol also highlighted the vital role of collaboration between these sectors, especially as more researchers at academic institutions engage with these critical challenges. He stressed that by joining forces and pooling resources, both sides can more effectively address and solve these pressing issues.
Agilent, for example, has partnered with several academic institutions, including Stéphane Bayen, associate professor and chair of McGill’s Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry, to explore better ways to identify fraudulent honey products using technology like AI. Now, the Bayen’s group is working on profiling 100 different kinds of honey as part of a collaboration with Agilent, Anumol said.
“Honey is one of the most fraud-prone commodities in global trade. It often involves mislabeling where it was produced or the types of flowers that bees collected nectar from,” said Bayen in an interview about the research.
Anumol said the company continues to collaborate with academic laboratories and standards organizations such as the Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) INTERNATIONAL to develop and validate various methods. For example, they are partnering with AOAC to create a reliable method for detecting PFAS in vegetables.
As analytical tools become increasingly automated, it is essential for food chemists to maintain a strong grasp of the underlying science behind their work. Rather than relying solely on technology, chemists must engage critically with the data and methodologies to uphold scientific rigor and adapt to emerging challenges in food analysis.
“Keep that spirit of innovation and have the base foundation of analytical science so that you can troubleshoot and fix things when needed,” Anumol said.
References
- The Truth about Honey. https://www.agilent.com/about/features/en/honey-supplies.html (accessed 2025-06-04).
- Callaghan, S.; Doner, H.; Medalsy, J.; Pione, A.; Teichner, W. The Trends Defining the $1.8 Trillion Global Wellness Market in 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/the-trends-defining-the-1-point-8-trillion-dollar-global-wellness-market-in-2024 (accessed 2025-06-04).
