Is your honey faking it?
By Nikki Galovic 4 September 2018
Sweet, sticky nectar of the bees, honey is a delicious naturally sweet treat that humans have been enjoying for thousands of years. But now we’re hearing that what is being sold as 100% pure honey might in fact be tainted with a sugar syrup that looks, smells and tastes just like the real deal. Winnie the Pooh would be shocked and appalled.
Fingerprinting geographical origin
Some of our food researchers recently tested eighty-two milk powder from dairy companies located in three major dairying regions of Victoria and eight milk powder samples from one region in Tasmania. Looking at the isotopes found in the milk powders, the researchers were able to ascertain which samples came from which specific locations. Each region’s product showed a distinct isotopic makeup which allowed the researchers to confirm that this approach could help with identifying fraudulent products marketed as from Australia or even from specific geographical regions.
Now what?
“CSIRO, can’t you make it an easier and clearer to determine where my food has come from?” we hear you asking. Well actually yeah we can.
We’ve been working on a new solution called the Food Provenance Platform. By using blockchain technology we could better track the place of origin of all food products as they travel along the supply chain from farm to supermarket and everywhere in between. Take a simple orange from Mildura in Victoria for example. As the fruit grows, it’s picking up a unique signature at the isotopic level. That isotopic signature contains information from the soil and the water that helped that plant grow and it carries that signature with it forever. As we confirmed in our milk research, these chemical barcodes can help us prove that the product comes from a specific location. Every time that orange moves from one place to the next, its signature still remains. If that orange then travels in a truck with all its orange buddies to a factory in another state, it is logged in the system and its place of origin recorded. Then if it’s made into a marmalade, that’s also logged in the system. And they can still safely say that the fruit came from Mildura. If we picked that marmalade up at the supermarket and tested it, we could still confirm the fruit’s place of origin. If the test failed, we could easily look back through the chain to see where things went awry.
