UAE’s first AI-enabled honey testing laboratory was launched in Abu Dhabi recently. The lab is built to ensure stringent quality checks, assurance, purity, and authenticity of local and international honey products.
Honey Quality Laboratory, opened by M42 in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council (ADQCC), is located at the Central Testing Laboratory (CTL) in Masdar City.
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The lab carries out comprehensive tests through advanced equipment to assess the quality of honey, detect any impurity, and make sure it complies with global standards. This is made possible through using AI-enhanced Lab Information Management System (LIMS), machine learning tools, and large language models (LLMs).
The unique selling point of the facility is its rich availability of data. The CTL – established to meet the market’s needs for quality infrastructure services – has been collecting data for its tests and research of different products.
Now, AI tools can be used for data analysis and augmenting and integration of massive data sets. LLMs can also scour large amounts of content to help gather information on the latest and best guidelines, advancement in production, specifications, and classifications of requirements, thereby making operations quicker and more accurate while ensuring the highest quality of honey for producers, consumers and beekeepers.
Asked about the benefits compared to traditional methods, Engineer Abdulla Al Muaini, Executive Director, Central Testing Laboratory at ADQCC, told Khaleej Times: “We probably provide more accurate results than any commercially available testing laboratories. Even the scope of the test we do is wider. We test for antibiotics, hormones, and more.”
Detecting impurity
While honey is known for its medicinal properties and health benefits, the natural sweetener is among the most impure products. The lab’s massive scope of detecting impurities in honey also includes isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) – a test for authenticity to assure no-adulteration.
Adulteration can happen due to any intentional or unintentional reasons, sugar profiling, verifying moisture content, acidity, checking the presence of hydroxymethylfurfural to determine freshness, assessing chemical adulterants such as prohibited chemicals, drugs, steroids, among other rigorous testing methods. Environmental contaminant testing detects pollutants like heavy metals, pesticides, radioactive isotopes, toxins, are also some additional factors.
The lab tests products made locally and internationally to ensure quality standards.
“If it’s locally manufactured, and the manufacturers plan to export it overseas, we can also test it against the international requirements,” Al Muaini pointed out.
Open to all
The facility, supported by M42’s Environmental Sciences team, is open for commercial entities to do honey testing and for producers to test samples from their bee farms too. It’s also open for the general public. The fully automated lab with an experienced set of scientists and experts collects samples and runs a series of tests on the massive floor including the IRMS lab, sample preparation rooms, analysis areas, washing rooms, aflatoxin lab, mass spectrometer lab, among other areas with advanced equipment.
Albarah Elkhani, senior vice president of operations, M42, noted the objective of the strategic public-private partnership with ADQCC is to support local manufacturers and ensure high-quality products.
“We are supporting our partners at Central Testing Laboratory to enable technology, to enable the analysis of the data, and enable the efficiencies in operations through the technology and the automated tools that we apply here.”
After the tests, a quality certification is issued informing the end user about the quality, safety, and authenticity of the honey products.
“We produce a report for every test, which is reviewed by the end user, and they were able to identify if they have a potential issue, how pure the honey is, or if there’s a potential contaminant, or how they need to look at their production cycles itself,” Elkhani underlined.
M42-ADQCC partnership supports various government entities, including the Abu Dhabi Food Safety Authority (ADFSA), providing critical testing services to ensure public health and safety.