Geographical and entomological differentiation of Philippine honey by multivariate analysis of FTIR spectra

Honey is a product that is sought after by consumers because of its desirable properties. However, due to the high demand and limited supply, honey is often the target of falsification. The properties of honey are ultimately tied to its botanical, geographical, and entomological origins. Thus, accurate knowledge of these information is a step towards identifying honey adulteration. This work reports the successful discrimination of Philippine honey samples based on their geographical and entomological origins through the multivariate analysis of their FTIR spectra. Application of the principal component analysis (PCA) led to the distinct separation of samples. In the presented method, no other preprocessing of the FTIR spectral data was performed, yet the observed discrimi-nation is comparable to works with spectral preprocessing. Application of hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) also led to the separation of the honey samples into distinct clusters. The observed clustering in the dendrogram was found to correspond more on the species difference rather than the geographical location. This work has successfully demonstrated the discrimination of Philippine honey samples in terms of their geographical and entomological origins using FTIR spectroscopy and chemometrics.