Chemistry and Technology of Honey Production

This Brief explains and discusses honey and its production from a chemical perspective. It outlines why honey is a special and unique food, being produced by bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants. Although glucose and fructose are the main constituents of honey, its overall composition is far from being simple or uniform: other substances such as organic acids, enzymes, or minerals are found in varying amounts. 

In this Brief, the author addresses the factors that influence the composition of the honey as well as the consequences that the composition has on properties such as color, crystallization, density, viscosity, or the refractive index. This Brief also introduces some of the most commonly used quality parameters for the determination of ageing and/or overheating: 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) and diastase. Other recently proposed constituents for quality parameters are also mentioned, e.g. 1,2 dicarbonyl compounds (3 deoxyglucosone, methylglyoxal, glyoxal) and furosine, also named 2-furoylmethyl lysine.

Ettore Baglio holds a MSc from the University of Catania (Italy), and he has been working in the food industry and analytical services since 2009. His main activities in the food sector are devoted to dairy and cheese products, and include the study of the analytical composition of cow's milk cheeses in terms of lipidic content and protein amount, the development and improvement of original production methods in the field of traditional cheeses, and the use of innovative food additives in cheese composition without deviation from historical recipes. After five years of continuous consultancy activities, he has been appointed as Field Development Representative (Food & Environmental Business) at Mérieux Nutriscience Italia (Italy), in which he is mostly conducting analytical services and scientific support to the industrial food sector (chemistry, microbiology, regulatory, and organoleptic features). Ettore Baglio has published the first book of the SpringerBriefs Series in Chemistry of Foods, 'Chemistry and Technology of Yoghurt Fermentation', in 2014.