Quality Survey of Commercial Honey Products

HWEI-MEI WEN, JIING-CHUAN CHERN AND *SU-HWA CHEN

Department of Food Science & Technology, Pingtung, National Pingtung Polytechnic Institute, Taiwan, R.O.C. *Department of Botany, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C.

ABSTRACT

   20 different brands of commercial honey products were inspected in this project. The sampling period was from July, 1993 to June, 1994. The results showed high variances in the compositions among samples. The range of water content was 14.7-23.6 % and 37.8-81.5 % for total reducing sugars which contained glucose(17.1-36.2 %) and fructose(20.7-46.8 %). Vitamin analysis revealed that niacin in honey was about 11ppm, whereas B1 , B2 and pantothenic acid were all only trace amounts (<2 ppm). The content of vitamin C was negligible in honey. For mineral content, K was the most abundant of which the content was as high as 533 ppm, while that of Ca and Na were 59 ppm and 28 ppm respectively. Mg ,Fe and Zn content were only trace. The content of hydroxymethylfuraldehyde(HMF), which is used as an index of heat treatment of honey, in the tested samples varied widely and ranged from 3.0-168.4 ppm of which more than 25 % were higher than the CNS indexed value(40 ppm). Analysis of pollen numbers in honey revealed that about 30% of the tested samples were possible to be mixed with syrups or other sugar products. Honey sources showed that 20% of the tested samples were the mixed-flower honey while that of Longan honey were the most important products with one source of flower. The sanitary examinations showed that there were no contamination of E.coli and Coliform. About 5% of the samples were detected to have tetracycline derivatives residues.

Key words :Honey, quality survey