New chemiometric technique applied to traceability of Sicilian honey of Sulla (Hedysarum coronarium L.)

The consumers have an increasing interest about food traceability with respect to safety, quality and typicality issues. Food traceability is an important issue in food safety and quality control, with impacts on food security, its quantity and overall availability. Furthermore, the possibility of tracing the origin of foodstuff is assuming an increasingly important role at the legislative level, as a tool that may allow to prove on product authenticity and to control adulteration. So, establish systems to trace food products through specified stages of production, processing and distribution play a key role also to ensure food safety. In the last years, several of analytical techniques have been tested to found ways to establish the geographical origin of different kinds of food and many works reported that the combination of different analytical methods associated a multifactorial analysis of the data seems to be the most promising system to establish univocal traceability systems. The honey is a natural food well appreciated in the world and the detection of potential fraud could be favored through tools linking the chemistry composition of this production to producing area. A small number of investigations regarding traceability of honey can be found in the scientific literature. Therefore, in these contest the development of fingerprinting techniques based on the determination of the specific markers of provenance analyzed whit chemometric approach represents an interesting area of research. Recent works have been demonstrated the potentiality of the study of the distribution patterns of rare earth as a promising analytical method for traceability of food products due coherent and predictable chemical behavior of these compounds. Also, have been demonstrated that their distribution in soil keeps unaltered in plants growing on that soil and eventually in agricultural products obtained from those plants and through the normalization of the REEs distribution, it is possible to appreciate their relative enrichments in soil-plant- agro food products The aim of the research was to observe if the REEs normalizated pattern of honey of Sulla (Hedysarum coronarium L.) was kept unaltered respect the soils of production to establish a correlation between geographic area and honey product. For this study, different production areas of Sulla in Sicily were considered. The production fields explored by the bees within 2 km of the hives were taken into consideration, the soil and the flowering plants were sampled. Flowers and leaves were analyzed from the plant. In the hive, pollen and honey were taken in three different days during the flowering period of the Sulla. Of same areas were sampled to the same methods in different periods where other monofloral honeys were product, these samples were used for a control. In this study the REE approach, give very intriguing results in the geographical traceability of honey samples and are the first. The results have been supported by statistical treatment.