EU Coordinated action to deter certain fraudulent practices in the honey sector
Analytical testing results of imported honey
In this EU coordinated action 15 EU Member States plus Switzerland and Norway randomly sampled 320 honey consignments originating from 20 exporting countries, and sent to JRC for analysis with several methods (EA/LC-IRMS, HPAEC-PAD, 1H-NMR) to detect the presence of exogenous sugar syrup.
147 (46%) were suspicious of being non-compliant with the provisions of the EU Honey Directive 2001/110/EC.
The suspicion rate was considerably high in comparison to an earlier EU coordinated action conducted in 2015-17, where 14% of the analysed samples were suspicious. However, a different set of methods with improved detection capability was used in the present study, which may explain this difference.
Stable carbon isotope ratio analysis by EA-IRMS (AOAC method 991.41), a method that has frequently been used to detect sugar syrups made of maize starch or sugarcane, was not effective in this study. This is a clear indication that such sugar syrups are no longer used to extend honey and have been replaced by syrups made mostly from rice, wheat or sugar beet.
The highest absolute number of suspicious consignments originated from China (66 out of 89, 74%), although honey originating from Turkey (14 out of 15, 93%) had the highest relative proportion of suspicious samples.
Although a substantially high number of honey consignments imported into the internal market was tested, the obtained results represent the situation during the sampling period (10/2021 to 02/2022) and shall not be generalised or extrapolated to other situations.
ŽDINIAKOVÁ Tereza;
LOERCHNER Carolin;
DE RUDDER Olivier;
DIMITROVA Tatyana;
KAKLAMANOS Georgios;
BREIDBACH Andreas;
RESPALDIZA HIDALGO María Aránzazu;
VAZ SILVA Ines Maria;
PAIANO Viviana;
ULBERTH Franz;
MAQUET Alain;
2023-03-23
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC130227
978-92-68-01292-5 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 31461 EN,
OP KJ-NA-31-461-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130227,
10.2760/184511 (online),
Additional supporting files
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