Spectroscopy NIR and MIR toward predicting simultaneous phenolic contents and antioxidant in red propolis by multivariate analysis

•Red propolis was characterized by infrared-spectroscopy.•Infrared-spectroscopy achieved power comparable to the chromatography method.•Infrared-spectroscopy was used for the fast determination of phenolics in propolis.•The antioxidant activity of propolis was modeled by regression with spectroscopy. Conventional methods for determining phenolics and their bioactive properties are expensive, time-consuming, and laborious. This hinders the quality control of red propolis, recognized for having different types of phenolic constituents with different bioactive properties, for example, its antioxidant properties. In this sense, we present a new application of near and medium infrared spectroscopy to predict phenolic constituents, total flavonoids, gallic acid, kaempferol, pyrocatechin, quercetin, and different antioxidant tests (DPPH radical, reducing power and protection of the β-carotene: linoleic acid system) of red propolis using chemometry. The optimized models showed good predictive capacity with a minimum correlation coefficient of 0.70, low associated error, and figures of merit that indicate the good predictive capacity in the validation of the models. These data show infrared spectroscopy as efficient to simultaneously predict nine quality analyzes of red propolis quickly and simply. This also avoids tedious procedures for traditional chromatographic and spectrophotometric tests.