Honey Fraud - Why it Matters

The Honey Fraud Scandal is gathering momentum in the UK, the US and worldwide. Its a huge deal for honey companies like The Scottish Bee Company. Its also a huge deal for bees and anyone who depends on them for pollination (i.e. anyone who eats food, drinks coffee, wears cotton etc. etc.).

At its most basic, honey fraud means cutting a pure product with inexpensive filler to increase volume. This increases margin for the fraudster, and forces down the price of genuine honey to a point where it becomes uneconomical to produce ACTUAL honey.

China 

In the late 1990's, the Chinese honey industry created a huge surplus of honey - supported by a huge hive count and adulteration by some producers with cheap syrup. This overflow was then sold to the world's hungriest honey importer, the United States.  The Chinese were prusposefully undercutting the market, selling at such a low price that American producers couldn't compete.

The US Government recognised the importance of Americans continuing to raise bees and sell the honey profitably and, in 2001, it declared that Chinese producers were unfairly 'dumping' honey on the US market.  They put a huge tarriff on Chinese honey.

According to Professor Norberto Garcia, now Chair of the Apimondia Working Group on Adulteration of Bee Products, "As soon as those Anti-Dumping Duties were established, new ways to cheat the rules were developed, for example trans-shipment of honey through third countries."  

Imports from other countries suddenly surged. Malaysia exported 37m pounds of honey in a single year.  Not a bad haul for a country where all the bees combined can only produce about one-tenth of one percent of that amount....         

Historically, syrups that came from corn or from sugar cane were mostly?used to adulterate honey. Around 25 years ago in the United?States a method?was developed to detect?that type of adulteration.?And then the Chinese discovered some years ago?that other filler syrup is not detected by this method. (h/t Professor Norberto Garcia). Detecting some of the 'filler' syrups, such as rice or beet sugars is challenging for the traditional tests based on isotopic differences, so the fraud has been allowed to persist.

This is where sophisticated new analytical chemistry tools such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) can provide a helpful a detailed chemical profile of a food. The British Standards Institute independently audit The Scottish Bee Company's honey using NMR and other tests as part of our ground-breaking BSI Kitemark for Food Assurance).

Selling fake honey is not just a consumer rights atrocity, its an environmental atrocity. According to beekeeper Riath Hamed, "The challenges of producing quality honey depends on many factors that relate to climate change, maintaining bee-health, pollution-free environment that’s free of pesticides and adopting best beekeeping practices. However, one of the biggest threats beekeepers have is competing with cheap adulterated, super filtered and pasteurised honey that’s being sold as genuine health-promoting honey."

Artificially low margins for honey can mean sustainable beekeeping is no longer commercially viable. Beekeepers in the US warn that if they go out of business there will be a shortage, not just of genuine honey, but of honeybees required to pollinate the 75% of crops that depend to some extent on pollination to increase yield and quality.

The Netflix documentary "Lawyers, Guns and Honey"explores the situation in the US in a little more depth.

Also, do please check out The Scottish Bee Company's blog and the excellent work done by the Honey Authenticity Network in the UK and overseas.

Until next time....

Iain