SUMMARY: The practice of “adulterating” honey or maple syrup for economic reasons has long been known and is a severe problem in the industry. Unscrupulous dealers will add a low cost syrup (cane, corn, beet, rice, tapioca or others) and resell this mixture as pure honey or maple syrup. This has a devastating economic effect on those that are distributing pure products as they will be at a price disadvantage compared to those that are distributing low cost mixtures and mislabeling the product as pure. Purchasers of these products can inadvertently believe they have received a good price on what they thought to be pure a product. Food manufacturers who purchase these ingredients can mistakenly label their product(s) as containing pure honey or maple syrup when in fact it may contain various other ingredients the consumer is not aware of nor desires to ingest.

An analytical technique that has proven to detect these adulterants is infrared spectroscopy. Unfortunately the calibration and mathematical techniques are quite complex to employ and have typically been beyond the scope of people in the industry to readily apply. Polarmetrics Corporation has developed a complete analyzer which as proven to detect adulterants accurately and timely. Advantages of this technique are:

·Requires less then 5 minutes to produce a result from any sample
·Requires no sample preparation
·Does not require expensive consumables (chemicals, gases, columns, and energy to
operate the analyzer)
·The unit is pre-calibrated so users are not tasked with this complex process
·Software interface can be learned in a matter of minutes

Experimental
1. Numerous honey samples were adulterated with a variety of known adulterants at different percent levels to build a calibration database. This process was repeated for maple syrup with the exception that cane and corn syrups were modeled as the adulterants.
2. A drop of sample was placed on the temperature controlled sampling interface of the Polarmetrics vIRtuous infrared analyzer. All samples were evaluated in duplicate
3. Sophisticated mathematical treatments were applied to the data sets for calibration and verification.

Conclusion
The Polarmetrics Virtuous adulteration analyzer accurately, rapidly and easily measures the purity of honey along with the concentration of the adulterant syrup.

The user is not required to calibrate the unit nor burdened with the task of learning sophisticated algorithms or spectroscopy techniques. The unit is complete and can be used by anyone with only minutes of training. Distributors, blenders, food manufactures, testing labs and governmental bodies can now easily test for adulterations in honey and maple syrup deterring the illegal act of mislabeling and adulteration of these products.