UHPLC–IM–QTOF MS Fingerprints Scottish Honey

Honey cannot always be trusted to be what its label says. Some honey is sold with a false place of origin, mixed with other honeys, or altered in other ways, which makes it hard to trace where it really came from and erodes shoppers' trust. To tackle this problem, researchers from theRowett Institute of Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom) developed a new way to analyze Scottish honeys. It focuses on phenolics, natural plant compounds that help give honey its distinctive character and uses ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography–ion mobility–quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC–IM–QTOF MS). The method needs only small amounts of solvent to prepare the samples, and it uses each molecule's size and shape to help identify the compounds more confidently. A paper based on the team’s efforts was published in the journal Food Chemistry.¹

Why Is It Important to Test Honey's Authenticity?

Honey is a natural food with a surprisingly complicated chemical makeup, shaped by the flowers the bees visit, where the hives are, the time of year, and how the honey is handled after it's collected. Because high-quality honey can sell for a lot of money, the industry is vulnerable to fraud. Honey may be falsely labeled as coming from certain flowers or places, mixed with other honeys, or watered down with added sugars. As a result, there's growing demand for testing methods that can tell natural differences between honeys apart from signs that something is off, in a way that is reliable and easy to explain chemically. To do this well, testing needs to go beyond measuring basic ingredients and capture the full range of small molecules that make up each honey's unique chemical "fingerprint."²

Scottish honey is a good example for testing these methods. It comes from very different natural settings and flowers, from heather-covered moorland to areas where different plants bloom through the seasons, so it's likely to vary in ways that can be measured chemically. Scottish honey also sells as a premium regional product, so being able to reliably describe what is in it matters both to beekeepers and to efforts to catch fake or mislabeled honey. Past research on Scottish honey has mostly looked at a few specific features, such as its physical properties, mineral content, or health-related qualities. Few studies have taken a broad look at its full chemical makeup across different seasons. and the kinds of honey products people buy.³ “In particular,” write the authors of the paper,¹ “the extent to which Scottish honeys can be distinguished from imported, blended, or infused products using CCS-supported metabolomic evidences not been well established.”

What Did the Researchers Learn About the Chemical Makeup of Different Honeys?

The researchers analyzed 39 honey samples, including Scottish heather honey, spring and summer honeys, and other honeys commonly sold in stores, to see how honey's chemical makeup changes depending on where it comes from, when it is harvested, and what kind of product it is. Their method gave reliable, carefully checked results. To be more confident about which chemicals they were seeing, they combined several clues: each molecule's exact weight, how long it took to pass through the instrument, how it broke apart, and its size and shape.¹

By comparing spring and summer honey from the same beehive sites, the team found strong evidence that honey from each season has its own chemical "fingerprint." Heather honey also stood out as chemically different from all the others. Early results hinted that Scottish honeys differ from honeys made elsewhere, and that blending honeys or adding flavors changes their makeup. However, some of the comparison groups were small and uneven in size, so these findings should be seen as preliminary.¹

“Overall,” write the authors of the paper,¹ “the workflow provides a robust platform for characterizing seasonal variation and discovering candidate authenticity markers in Scottish honey.”

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References

1. Duft, R. G.; Griffin, J. L. Phenolic-focused Untargeted Ion Mobility LC-MS Metabolomics Reveals Season-associated Chemical Signatures in Scottish Honey. Food Chem. 2026, 532 (Pt 1), 151465. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2026.151465
2. Tsagkaris, A. S.; Koulis, G. A.; Danezis, G. P. et al. Honey Authenticity: Analytical Techniques, State of the Art and Challenges. RSC Adv. 2021, 11 (19), 11273-11294. DOI: 10.1039/d1ra00069a
3. Fyfe, L.; Okoro, P.; Paterson, E. et al. Compositional Analysis of Scottish Honeys with Antimicrobial Activity Against Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria Reveals Novel Antimicrobial Components. LWT - Food Sci. Tech.2017, 79, 52-59. DOI: 10.1016/j.lwt.2017.01.023