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?
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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)
I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs where there was an old candy plant or something that bees had gotten into, and they made blue honey from the syrup that was left over in the plant.
From my limited understanding almost all beekeepers give their bees sugar syrup to help them overwinter anyway so nothing stops them from supplementing their diets in the spring. It’s obviously not ideal since a lot of the other aromatics from pollen will be missing but it’s still a step up from mixing the end product with sugar syrup.
My Grandpa is a beekeeper, i help him take care of his hives.
The honey i get out of that crystallises quickly to a relatively rough texture, and has a deep taste. It is a completely different thing than what you get in the store.
I don’t know if that one is adulterated, or just processed so much that it is all flat and smooth.
I’m so confused by people not liking crystallized honey. It’s so much more convenient to use, it doesn’t drip anywhere it’s practically like thick peanut butter consistency. Great for yogurt, toast or tea. Why would anyone want it to be runny?
You can heat it in a microwave to reverse the crystallization.
Do not do this ifs the honey is in a squeezable bear container. The honey will boil, make a hole in the bear and spray honey all over the inside of your microwave (the turntable helps this). This will make a huge mess and will make opening the microwave more challenging.
I think the general recommendation is to put the bottle in warm/hot water. I don’t believe microwaving is a good idea, unless done at low power for longer.
Warm water is sufficient, though with recent cautions about heating plastics and leaching of chemicals, I'd prefer transferring the honey to a glass jar if it's not packaged in such already.
You can double-boil if you want, where the jar sits in a shallow water bath which you boil for 10--20 minutes or so to decrystalise the honey.
Crystallization isn’t an indicator of fake or low quality honey.
We have had wildflower honey crystallize in the honeycomb when we left it in the garage over winter.
It can be decrystallized easily with gentle heat. I put our jars in a water bath in a pot and leave it over a low setting for about an hour until it is good. The water never gets over 125 or so, which should be fine.
There are a number of things that can affect crystallization; Storage conditions, filtering, what the bees foraged, etc.
There are some genuine honeys which rarely crystalize.
Afaik (as an amateur beekeeper), it is not a good indicator of anything in particular, there are even reports of adulterated honey crystallizing. This make sense, since honey and fake honey are both a supersaturated solution of sugars that will gladly crystalize if given an opportunity.
> 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/hal...