Honey Fraud as a Moving Analytical Target: Omics-Informed Authentication Within a Multi-Layer Analytical Framework

Honey fraud represents a persistent and analytically challenging form of food adulteration, driven by globalised supply chains, strong economic incentives and asymmetries in regulatory oversight and analytical capacity. Conventional physicochemical, spectroscopic and isotopic methods provide legally robust tools for routine control, yet increasingly struggle to detect sophisticated adulteration strategies that are compositionally optimised to mimic authentic honey profiles. These challenges are amplified in a global context, where heterogeneous enforcement landscapes and fragmented analytical infrastructures create exploitable vulnerabilities across international trade networks. This narrative review synthesises current knowledge on honey fraud typologies and critically evaluates established analytical approaches alongside emerging omics-based authentication strategies, including genomics, metabolomics, proteomics and microbiome profiling. Omics-based approaches extend authenticity assessment beyond single-marker paradigms by capturing multidimensional biological and compositional signatures, thereby improving sensitivity to subtle and system-aware fraud (i.e., adulteration strategies that adapt to prevailing analytical detection methods and regulatory thresholds) strategies. To maintain evidentiary clarity, this review explicitly distinguishes between analytically demonstrated vulnerabilities, technically feasible adulteration scenarios and fraud practices documented in regulatory or enforcement contexts. Advanced technology-driven strategies are therefore discussed as potential system-level risks rather than confirmed large-scale honey fraud cases. This differentiation not only safeguards evidentiary precision but also highlights the structural limits of purely analytical solutions. Beyond analytical performance, honey authentication is framed as a systemic challenge embedded in global food systems. This review highlights the need for integrated, data-driven and scalable authentication frameworks that align analytical innovation with reference harmonisation, governance structures and international regulatory cooperation to support resilient and globally robust honey authenticity control.