The authenticity and adulteration of dairy products are attracting broad attention in recent years. There is a need to develop rapid, simple and accurate analytical methods for the detection of authenticity and adulteration of dairy products. To discriminate between milk powder samples, Raman spectra of FIRMUS, Nestlé and Being Mate milk powder were collected. The nearest neighbor algorithm (NN)combined with the characteristic peaks were employed for the design of a model. On the basis of 10 cross validation, the average recognition rate was 99.56%. In order to achieve the analysis of the adulteration of milk powder, FIRMUS milk powder was mixed with Nestlé milk powder according to the mass ratio 0∶1, 1∶3, 1∶1, 3∶1 and 1∶0 to get five kinds of the adulterated milk powder samples. Then, fat was extracted from the adulterated milk powder samples. Raman spectra of the fat were collected, then two methods were employed for the design of models. One was the nearest neighbor algorithm combined with the characteristic peaks, another was the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) combined with NN. On the basis of 10 cross validation, the average recognition rate reached 93.33% and 98.89%, the average operation time was 0.085 and 0.104 s. The results of this work showed that the nearest neighbor algorithm combined with the characteristic peaks can be applied for the determination of the authenticity of milk powder while Raman-KPCA-NN model can provide a simple, accurate and rapid method to investigate the adulteration of milk power.