IAEA helps Chile protect honey with nuclear fingerprinting

Honey is supposed to be one of the simplest foods on the shelf, but in Chile it is now being checked with tools that usually belong in a nuclear lab. Using stable-isotope analysis and specialist instruments, scientists are building a national database to verify where honey comes from and whether it has been cut with cheaper sweeteners. The work is designed to protect consumers, support honest beekeepers and make fraud easier to spot before it reaches export markets.

The push came into focus around World Bee Day, when the International Atomic Energy Agency highlighted its cooperation with the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission, known as CCHEN, and the University of Chile through the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. The agency says food fraud costs the global food industry an estimated US$10 billion to US$15 billion a year. It has used stable-isotope methods for food authenticity since the early 1970s, and says that work supports consumer protection, international trade and SDG2, SDG1 and SDG3.

For honey, the method is especially useful because adulteration often means dilution with high-fructose corn syrup or other inexpensive substitutes. By comparing isotopic fingerprints in bulk honey and related protein fractions, scientists can distinguish authentic honey from product that has been tampered with. The IAEA supplied an FTIR spectrometer and an energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer so Chilean researchers can measure those fingerprints and look not only for added sugars but also for trace-element clues that may point to contamination or geographic origin.

The Chilean sector gives the project real economic weight. University of Chile reporting says the country had 5,690 registered beekeepers and 1,129,954 registered hives in 2024, and exported more than 4,100 tonnes of honey worth US$14.7 million. Export volume and value both rose by more than 70% year over year, with Germany, the United States and France as the main destinations. Chile’s honeys also carry a clear identity of their own, drawing on native flora such as ulmo, quillay, tevo, chañar and corcolén, which gives local honey both market value and a reason to defend its origin.

The CCHEN says the work sits inside technical cooperation project CHI5056, which is focused on verifying the authenticity and origin of food. That matters far beyond the lab bench: the IAEA has pointed to a 2019 case in New Zealand, where isotope methodology helped support the first successful prosecution of a major manuka honey producer for fraudulent enrichment. Chile’s honey database is meant to give the same kind of scientific backbone to its own sector, turning invisible fingerprints into a practical shield for one of agriculture’s most familiar products.