A high-tech honey-testing machine unveiled Thursday in Chilliwack could help B.C. beekeepers root out “adulterated” honey imports that threaten to cheapen their product.

Using a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine, Peter Awram’s lab will be able to determine if cheap sweeteners, such as corn syrup or rice syrup, have been added to particular brands of honey to increase producers’ profits.

The machine will also create a “fingerprint” for each honey sample, which will be kept in a database to help distinguish premium B.C. honey from a flood of untested, adulterated honey entering Canada from around the world.

“We’d eventually like to see it lead to a certification scheme, where producers submit their honey for testing and get a label,” said Awram, who runs Worker Bee Honey Company with his parents, Jerry and Pia Awram. “It would give security to the people buying it.”

A study published in October in Scientific Reports found evidence of global honey fraud, calling honey the world’s “third-most adulterated food.” Researchers tested 100 honey samples from 18 honey-producing countries. They discovered 27 per cent of the samples were “of questionable authenticity,” while 52 of the samples from Asia were adulterated.

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