Evaluating the usefulness of next-generation sequencing for herb authentication

•Food fraud and adulteration are rapidly spreading with the increased food demand.•DNA-based food authenticity approaches can provide fast results at larger scale.•We developed pipeline and customised barcode database that identify herbal plant taxa and ingredients.•The pipeline performance was tested with publicly available datasets as well as newly sequenced herbal plants and products.•Improvements to plant sequence databases remain needed to implement DNA testing more routinely.