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Beekeepers halt honey awards over fraud in global supply chain
- DennisP 2y agoThis is why I buy my honey from a local beekeeper I trust.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoAgreed, I always felt honey was one of the easiest and best products to buy locally.
- Kapura 2y agowow, it's almost like cutting taxes and disassembling the regulatory state creates bad outcomes anywhere it's profitable.
- hackernewds 2y agoyou mean interfering with the free market
- mmooss 2y agoRegulation is necessary to a free market. Otherwise powerful forces in the market will make it non-free for everyone else or make it non-free for honest business by forcing them to do illicit things to be competitive.
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoOf course. Free markets in the sense of being completely unregulated, are logically incompatible with regulated ones. As a consumer, I want a regulated market. I want product safety and a lack of fraud.
- CamperBob2 2y agoIf you want to put your local beekeeper out of the business of selling honey, then by all means, complain about an inadequate regulatory state. Because that's who the bureaucrats will go after.
- russdill 2y agoRegulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete. How the hell is my local beekeeper supposed to compete against people selling jars of corn syrup?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Regulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete Regulation adds fixed costs. That always increases barriers to entry. The aim is to make that barrier worth it. (You can also directly mitigate it, but this is less common.) But in the cases of food and medicine, regulation has absolutely forced consolidation. The pitch from Big Pharma and Big Ag when buying out biotech and food start-ups (or small producers) is they've mastered the global compliance network, and can thus scale and thus outcompete small producers. What it does seem we need is liability by large distributors around selling fraudulent products. That still adds a barrier to entry, since those distributors will have a testing programme. But at least you get multiple programs that have an incentive to reduce costs.
- mmooss 2y agoIt increases one barrier which can reduce others - the illicit market power and practices of unregulated competitors.
- RHSeeger 2y agoWord of mouth. Not the best option, but it's balanced against the cost of regulation. The cost of complying with regulation (not changes in the product, but proving you comply) can destroy any hope of profit from a smaller business; but the cost doesn't increase at the same rate as business size, so the big businesses have no issue. Regulations are important, but they have a distinct cost.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoWhat are you talking about? None of those things have happened in the EU where this fraud is being discussed, in fact it’s the opposite over there
- andrewclunn 2y agoSimplest approach is to make two categories blended and pure. With contestants only being allowed to enter one. This would incentivize otherwise would be cheaters yo enter the category they can legit compete in, reducing the amount pf testing required to only those in the pure category, which would keep costs down.
- cbzbc 2y agoNot really; there'd still be a premium for the "pure" category and so incentive for people to continue to cheat.
- Etheryte 2y agoHere's a very straightforward guide to buying honey. If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you see honey online, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you find an old dude with a small stand and a bunch of (most likely unlabelled) jars who only accepts cash, that's where you get real honey.
- School-Cotton 2y agoHow do you know this? Is there actual reporting on what percentage of honey in supermarkets is adulterated, rather than just anecdotal reports that at least some is?
- pbronez 2y agoFrom the article: An EU investigation published last year found 46% of imported sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent, including all 10 from the UK. Samples used in October by the UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network for a novel form of DNA testing found that 24 out of 25 jars from big UK retailers were suspicious.
- trimethylpurine 2y agoSome part of the verbiage here is unscientific. We're in need of a percentage of suspicion that applies to a percentage of jars and whether that percentage of suspicion is based on the presence or absence of certain adulterants. Otherwise these percentages give more ambiguity than insight about the products.
- buran77 2y agoAlso: > Regulators in the UK have not published detailed results of official tests, but rejected claims of significant fraud. If I remember correctly this was already the situation in Germany already decades ago. At least half of the honey on the German market was (to use the term from the present article) adulterated as EU investigations at the time showed. The investigators was even hidden camera footage with importers admitting they knew this was the case. Then a lot of lobbying money moved around between importers, distributors, and local authorities, and the honey kept flowing. The labs that did the testing were good for far more delicate work so it wasn't a matter of precision and accuracy, more a matter of Germans loving their honey. Stopping the flow of cheap, even if adulterated honey from China and at the time I think also Ukraine would be a big hit to the industry's wallet. I bet all those involved just told themselves "sweet is sweet" and went about their profit making business.
- Michelangelo11 2y agoFeels like wherever you turn, you see a high-trust society disintegrating into a low-trust one.
- Rygian 2y agoTo my untrained eye, this is a natural consequence of focusing on profit above all. So a natural consequence in cultures where such focus exists.
- Michelangelo11 2y agoYeah, and maybe also a focus on grabbing all you can now, without regard for the future.
- tenpies 2y agoAnd yet, this has happened since we've been around. One of the most ancient examples of the written words we have is from a copper merchant complaining about the quality of the ingots he received[1]. The tablet could just as easily have been a complaint about the quality of honey purchased. This is a reversion to the mean. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
- aucisson_masque 2y agoI'd argue there is much more fraud with product coming from china than what is locally produced. Fraud always existed but now it's more prevalent than before, simply because some countries don't really try to enforce simple rules. For instance, Chinese mother refuse to buy powder milk in china since there has been so much fraud. Manufacturer put melamine (a plastic chemical) in powder milk for years to make them appear with more protein than reality, inducing kidney damage to newborn. That kind of thing doesn't happen in civilized society, this require a complete lack of morality and wide corruption.
- diggan 2y agoMaybe Ea-nāṣir was also too focused on profits, thinking more about shareholder value than the customer.
- slackerIII 2y agoWhy call it fraud when you can call it honey laundering?
- thih9 2y agoThe association with money laundering doesn’t sound good and this is already a bad buzz.
- rhdunn 2y agoIt's a sticky situation!
- 1123581321 2y agoOr embuzzling.
- ncr100 2y agoouch! (and thank you!)
- m104 2y agoOnly solution: sting operation
- layer8 2y agoCall it “rarefied honey”, that makes it sound premium.
- Sharlin 2y agoHoney is one of the most counterfeited food products in the world. Olive oil is another.
- khushy 2y ago[flagged]
- ljf 2y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286030
- thg 2y agoThat's a link to this discussion.
- abduhl 2y agoPrevious discussion of this discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351886
- ljf 2y agoGah - didn't spot that - this was originally posted 7 days ago, but seems to have been refreshed by dang - if you search 'honey' you'll see it was originally a thread 7 days ago , and note that some of the comments here are multidays old.
- dredmorbius 2y agoVarious mod intercession can cause old submissions to be re-upped. Usually that's through the Second Chance Pool, though this submission doesn't seem to have gone that route. <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool>
- zug_zug 2y agoI think the FDA should build towards mass food analysis. To sell something en masse you should have to put down a deposit, and the FDA should do an annual analysis of your food (via mass spectometry) from samples from the food store. They should mix dozens of samples from different states to get good coverage. Should you fail (illegal pesticides, ingredients differ than label, too much lead, whatever) then you lose your deposit, all profits made that year on that product, and go through a process of re-earning the right to sell that product. For small local brands I'd exempt them until the economics became viable.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> To sell something en masse you should have to put down a deposit, and the FDA should do an annual analysis of your food (via mass spectometry) from samples from the food store Why don't we see more private enforcement? Class action lawsuits against fraudulent producers and distributors?
- move-on-by 2y agoAccording to the article, the switch is occurring somewhere in the supply chain. So in your proposal, what part of the supply chain would bee on the hook for this deposit and profit reaping?
- foolfoolz 2y agowe already have this in the FDA. it’s just isolated to nutrient labels for most foods. the deposit is your business. failing a random annual FDA inspection is already extremely financially impactful what you’re looking for is deeper analysis than nutrition labels. this is actually something small local brands start with. they pay for private “certifications” like organic, non gmo, etc.
- akira2501 2y ago> failing a random annual FDA inspection What is involved in that inspection and what does it take to actually fully fail it? Is it like most government tests where the first failure means you just have to fix the problems and schedule your retest? > they pay for private “certifications” like organic, non gmo, etc. As a consumer these have the _least_ value out of anything on the label to me.
- fsckboy 2y agothe reason that adulterated honey is difficult to detect is that honey is just sugar syrup, and if you add more sugar syrup you'll get more sugar syrup than you started with. the mistaken belief is that there is something special about natural honey. people: it's sugar syrup, it'll give you diabetes as fast as a truckload of mountain dew. Now, I don't believe in homeopathy, perhaps you do. But that's what the honey cult is, homeopathic. What the govt should allow is the sale of labelled fake honeys, it would be dirt cheap and would taste indetectably different, i.e every bit as good, and no more unhealthy. (if you don't like the viscosity of your sugar syrup, change the %age of water. if you want it to crystalize, dry it out. it's rock candy, not magic)
- crazygringo 2y ago> honey is just sugar syrup That's factually incorrect. First of all, obviously it has tons of extra flavor, which indicates a whole range of additional chemical compounds. > But that's what the honey cult is, homeopathic. Honey has scientifically proven antibiotic properties [1]. > adulterated honey is difficult to detect I don't know what you mean by "difficult", but it can certainly be detected [2]. And it can be observed how the antimicrobial properties diminish as adulteration increases. Now, does this mean honey has health benefits when you eat it? Not necessarily. The antibiotic properties have traditionally been utilized when applying honey on top of a wound to prevent infection -- not by eating it. You may very well be right that consuming honey isn't any different from consuming HFCS. But it does have a lot of additional chemical compounds in it (as the antibiotic properties demonstrate), so the best answer is that we really don't know. In any case, it is demonstrably not "just sugar syrup". But yes, you're probably correct that it will give you diabetes just as fast as Mountain Dew. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Antibiotic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Antibiotic [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37107465/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37107465/
- fsckboy 2y agowhen people are sloppy with language, they're probably sloppy with the science too. >But it does have a lot of additional chemical compounds in it if a jar of honey had one sloughed off cell from the colon of a honeybee, it would have "a lot of additional chemical compounds in it" because there are a lot of chemical compounds in a single cell. As a percentage of a jar of honey it's trace amounts. Govt standards for selling grains specify the acceptable quantities of rodent feces and insect parts, because it's not practical to take those numbers to zero. Nobody talks about the benefits of eating grain because of trace chemicals from that. I'm not saying trace amounts don't matter, I'm saying evidence based or gtfo. I'm not saying don't look at it, I'm saying be reasonable and don't draw conclusions without conclusive evidence. One piece of conclusive evidence we have is that it is extremely difficult for scientists to tell the difference between authentic and adulterated honey, and it requires extreme measures not generally taken for foodstuffs, measures never said to be indicative of nutritional value. >(as the antibiotic properties demonstrate) no, any antibiotic properties would not demonstrate "a lot of additional chemical compounds". A chemical antibiotic component might be found to be a single compound. I'm not saying people are not allowed to establish a religious cult of honey and have kosher-honey rules; I'm saying that for people not in the cult, the difficulty of telling the differences makes you wonder what you're hoping to find out, or why you should pay high prices, and as a practical matter makes it very difficult to police the marketplace. the honey market in terms of fraud is much much worse off than the olive oil market. Some people could take advantage of this in their personal lives by switching to fake honey.
- johnea 2y agoI kept bees for about 15 years. Personally, I see 0 reasosn to have any kind of "award" anyway. This is a purely subjective process. Different people like different things. Honey is as varied as the forage that it's produced from. This whole process of determining a "We're #1" is just a symptom of the autistic ape.
- pentamassiv 2y agoI agree, especially when you consider that apparently they have a hard time detecting mixed in sugar syrup. What are they basing the ratings on, if they can't ensure the baseline "it's honey"?
- 29athrowaway 2y agoWhen you cheat, you are no longer playing the game. And if everyone wants to cheat then it doesn't make sense to play at all.
- domofutu 2y agoBlockchain could track honey from hive to jar, busting fraud with transparent supply chains & smart contracts.
- bluGill 2y agoWhy do you need a blockchain? A regular database can do that as well, and they use a lot less energy.
- DennisP 2y agoFwiw, the second-largest blockchain barely uses any energy. The real problem is that it's still not scalable enough for something like this, but it's improving pretty rapidly. As for why blockchain: if you did this on a regular database, you'd be trusting a third party to run that database. Businesses tend not to like that, because sooner or later it gets hard to switch away and the third party starts charging a lot more money.
- Isamu 2y agoI never thought about it but I guess I am a honey snob. It’s strictly local buckwheat honey for me, accept no substitute.