5 ms·

How 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 som

How 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 ago
From 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 ago
  Some 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 ago
  Also: > 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.
- secondcoming 2y ago
  It's extremely common for honey sold in the UK to be labelled as a 'blend of EU and non-EU honey', or similar. There's no doubt in my mind that what this really means is that they've no real idea where the honey comes from. On the rare occasion I do buy honey it's usually Scottish Heather Honey, which is as delicious as it is expensive.
  - Marazan 2y ago
    Yeah as soon as I see 'blend of EU and non-EU honey' then I'm noping out of there as it just means disguised sugar syrup. Actual location authenticated honey costs actual real money.
skylurk 2y ago
Honey supply chains are opaque and global, plus the incentives to cheat are clearly there and it's hard to definitively prove a batch was not adulterated. I'd say it's fair to be suspicious. That said, this old article seems to think its not as common a problem as you would expect: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/relax-folks-it-really-is-honey-after-all https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/re...
- throwup238 2y ago
  > "Consumers don't tend to like crystallized honey," says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. "It's very funny. In Canada, there's a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: 'Something's wrong with my honey!'" Anecdotal but everything in that NPR article rings true to me. American consumers are used to the bear shaped bottles with purified honey that’s barely distinguishable from sugar syrup and could easily be adulterated but the raw honey I usually buy is so obviously honey from the taste and texture that I have a hard time believing any of it is adulterated. If honey producers were really that good at artificially replicating flavor profiles, they’d be far ahead of the rest of the food science industry.
  - highcountess 2y ago
    Are you sure what you believe is unadulterated honey because you are familiar with the taste, is not just adulterated and you are just so accustomed to fake honey that you confuse the two? I say that because basically all the honey I’ve ever bought in a store has always tasted flat and lacked flavor depth that has long made me wonder about its authority compared to known hive honey.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      I’ve had raw honey straight from both domesticated and wild hives as it was collected so unless the bees themselves are adulterating it, I think I’ve got an accurate baseline for how honey is supposed to taste. Go out and buy a good manuka or wild Himalayan honey and you’ll quickly learn how to spot the real stuff. The honey I buy isn’t meant to look like filtered golden sugar syrup so adulterating it is practically impossible. That said I buy it from ethnic grocery stores so unless you’re getting the good stuff at Trader Joes YMMV (I like their manuka)
Etheryte 2y ago
There are many studies into this, but this Forbes article [0] is a good example: > Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products, and out of 95 European importers checked, two-thirds are affected by at least one suspect batch. This is only one example, similar stings elsewhere have likewise found bleak results. As the son of a beekeeper I can attest to this, the honey you find at a grocery store and what actually comes out of a hive are very different things. Even if you boil natural honey you still don't get the texture and consistency they have at the store. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/half-of-the-honey-in-european-markets-is-fake-alerts-eu-investigation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/hal...
- RHSeeger 2y ago
  > Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products That sounds better than the rates I saw of good/bad extra virgin olive oil, and you can most certainly find good EVOO at a grocery store; you just need to know what brands to look for. Is there any reason to believe it isn't the same with honey? If not, then that's a pretty far cry from "If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup".
  - WhiteDawn 2y ago
    And similar to olive oil. Once you taste the real deal, it's very easy to identify the fake/watered down stuff by taste alone.
- mft_ 2y ago
  > similar stings :)
- sholladay 2y ago
  Agreed that fresh honey and store honey are very different. You would think that, given how different they are, it would be easy to detect the fake honey. But apparent lyrics not.
tharkun__ 2y ago
And he is definitely globally wrong anyway. Our local supermarket sells honey from a local beekeeper that we've also bought honey from directly before. Only that one local supermarket has their honey and it's closer to us than driving to the beekeeper. And yes it has a nice looking but plain label on the jar. He is probably mostly right about large quantity, imported honey tho.
- vinnymac 2y ago
  I think as a guide for buying honey his advice is valuable, although a bit dramatic, and it won’t apply to every country or region. As someone who is a beekeeper and owns a farm, you can be much more certain what you’re getting is honey where I am from when it’s being purchased from the back of a van from some random person with some glass jars, than you can at any supermarket. Hi it’s me I am the random person with the glass jars :)

How 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 ago

From 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 ago
Some 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 ago
Also: > 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.
secondcoming 2y ago
It's extremely common for honey sold in the UK to be labelled as a 'blend of EU and non-EU honey', or similar. There's no doubt in my mind that what this really means is that they've no real idea where the honey comes from. On the rare occasion I do buy honey it's usually Scottish Heather Honey, which is as delicious as it is expensive.
- Marazan 2y ago
  Yeah as soon as I see 'blend of EU and non-EU honey' then I'm noping out of there as it just means disguised sugar syrup. Actual location authenticated honey costs actual real money.

skylurk 2y ago

Honey supply chains are opaque and global, plus the incentives to cheat are clearly there and it's hard to definitively prove a batch was not adulterated. I'd say it's fair to be suspicious. That said, this old article seems to think its not as common a problem as you would expect: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/relax-folks-it-really-is-honey-after-all https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/re...

throwup238 2y ago
> "Consumers don't tend to like crystallized honey," says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. "It's very funny. In Canada, there's a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: 'Something's wrong with my honey!'" Anecdotal but everything in that NPR article rings true to me. American consumers are used to the bear shaped bottles with purified honey that’s barely distinguishable from sugar syrup and could easily be adulterated but the raw honey I usually buy is so obviously honey from the taste and texture that I have a hard time believing any of it is adulterated. If honey producers were really that good at artificially replicating flavor profiles, they’d be far ahead of the rest of the food science industry.
- highcountess 2y ago
  Are you sure what you believe is unadulterated honey because you are familiar with the taste, is not just adulterated and you are just so accustomed to fake honey that you confuse the two? I say that because basically all the honey I’ve ever bought in a store has always tasted flat and lacked flavor depth that has long made me wonder about its authority compared to known hive honey.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I’ve had raw honey straight from both domesticated and wild hives as it was collected so unless the bees themselves are adulterating it, I think I’ve got an accurate baseline for how honey is supposed to taste. Go out and buy a good manuka or wild Himalayan honey and you’ll quickly learn how to spot the real stuff. The honey I buy isn’t meant to look like filtered golden sugar syrup so adulterating it is practically impossible. That said I buy it from ethnic grocery stores so unless you’re getting the good stuff at Trader Joes YMMV (I like their manuka)

Etheryte 2y ago

There are many studies into this, but this Forbes article [0] is a good example: > Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products, and out of 95 European importers checked, two-thirds are affected by at least one suspect batch. This is only one example, similar stings elsewhere have likewise found bleak results. As the son of a beekeeper I can attest to this, the honey you find at a grocery store and what actually comes out of a hive are very different things. Even if you boil natural honey you still don't get the texture and consistency they have at the store. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/half-of-the-honey-in-european-markets-is-fake-alerts-eu-investigation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/hal...

RHSeeger 2y ago
> Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products That sounds better than the rates I saw of good/bad extra virgin olive oil, and you can most certainly find good EVOO at a grocery store; you just need to know what brands to look for. Is there any reason to believe it isn't the same with honey? If not, then that's a pretty far cry from "If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup".
- WhiteDawn 2y ago
  And similar to olive oil. Once you taste the real deal, it's very easy to identify the fake/watered down stuff by taste alone.
mft_ 2y ago
> similar stings :)
sholladay 2y ago
Agreed that fresh honey and store honey are very different. You would think that, given how different they are, it would be easy to detect the fake honey. But apparent lyrics not.

tharkun__ 2y ago

And he is definitely globally wrong anyway. Our local supermarket sells honey from a local beekeeper that we've also bought honey from directly before. Only that one local supermarket has their honey and it's closer to us than driving to the beekeeper. And yes it has a nice looking but plain label on the jar. He is probably mostly right about large quantity, imported honey tho.

vinnymac 2y ago
I think as a guide for buying honey his advice is valuable, although a bit dramatic, and it won’t apply to every country or region. As someone who is a beekeeper and owns a farm, you can be much more certain what you’re getting is honey where I am from when it’s being purchased from the back of a van from some random person with some glass jars, than you can at any supermarket. Hi it’s me I am the random person with the glass jars :)