What’s the truth behind honey fraud claims?

Honey is a superfood. As well as trace vitamins and minerals, it can offer antioxidants and antibacterial properties. The fact this amber nectar is natural and tastes delicious has meant that – amid growing fears over ultra-processed foods – honey value and volumes have risen for three consecutive years, with sales up a further 5.6% to £205.5m last year, on volumes up 7.3% [NIQ 52 w/e 6 September 2025].

But beyond its wholesome image and soaring sales, the honey business is riven with infighting. Amid intense lobbying to alter the very definition of honey, accusations of fraud and legal threats are rife. “If you suggest we’re purposely or inadvertently bending the rules, next time you’ll be speaking to the f***ing lawyers,” warned a PR executive of one honey company during a phone call with The Grocer last month.

Tensions are running high for good reason. Importers face mounting claims they’re making a killing out of cheap Chinese honey that’s (at best) non-compliant with UK law or (at worst) bulked up with sugar syrup. Suspicion runs so deep that in 2025, the World Beekeeping Awards (WBA) axed its best honey award through fear of rampant adulteration.

Importers deny the claims, pointing out that no single analytical test can determine honey authenticity – a fact also cited by the WBA as a reason for scrapping last year’s awards. So, what’s the truth? And what’s being done to reassure shoppers the honey they’re buying is the pure, natural product they think it is?

Let’s begin by defining our terms. There are in fact many types of honey, but UK law defines it as: “The natural sweet substance produced by apis mellifera bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants… which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature.”

This necessarily dry legalese doesn’t do justice to the magic that happens inside beehives. Foragers pass nectar to their hive sisters. It’s passed from mouth to mouth through the colony as enzymes in bees’ saliva break complex sugars down into simpler forms. The solution is stored in combs, which bees fan with their wings to accelerate evaporation. After several weeks (depending on climate, season, etc), the bees seal the comb with wax. Only then do you have honey.

Chemically speaking, most honey is similar: a concentrated, viscous solution chiefly comprising fructose, glucose (75% to 80%) and water (about 20%). The rest (typically less than 2%) is a soup of organic acids, enzymes, minerals and other plant-derived compounds. This gives different honeys their own chemical fingerprints, reflecting everything from the plants foraged to seasonal and climatic conditions.

“The problems arise around the complexity of honey and the fact there is no single test that can determine its authenticity,” says Michael Walker, an FSA founding board member and honorary professor of practice at the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast. “Therefore, batteries of investigation need to be applied, but currently there’s [no] agreement on how the outcome of tests should be interpreted.”

The lack of conclusive tests has led to claims that the UK and Europe are being flooded with cheap honey adulterated with sugar syrup or drawn from the hives of bees fed purely with sugar syrup.

In 2023, the European Commission’s From the Hives report concluded that 46% of 320 samples of honey imported into the EU were “suspicious”. Honey from China accounted for 74% of samples suspected of being adulterated or derived from syrup-fed bees. All 10 UK samples – imported to the UK, blended and re-exported to the EU – were suspicious.

Online videos also allege fraud on an industrial scale, with one purporting to show Chinese companies touting adulterated ‘UK-grade’ honey at the 2024 SIAL trade fair in Paris. Also in 2024, the Honey Authenticity Network UK [HAN UK] said 24 out of 25 non-EU blended honeys from UK supermarkets failed DNA tests.

“A lot of the stuff that’s coming in could just be honey-flavoured syrup,” says Lynne Ingram, a Somerset-based beekeeper and UK chairwoman of HAN. “That’s fine if you just want to sweeten your tea with it. But it needs to be correctly labelled and consumers need to be able to make informed choices.”

UK producers are also angered by the UK’s reliance on imported honey. Just 14% of the honey consumed in the UK – and just 5% of what’s sold in supermarkets – comes from British hives. The rest, about 62k tonnes a year, is imported. Most (77%) of that comes from China, the world’s biggest honey producer.

Cheap, cheerful and Chinese

The EU is far less reliant on imports, producing about 60% of the honey it consumes. This is due, largely, to huge domestic honey industries in Romania, Hungary, France, Spain and Portugal. China and Ukraine are the EU’s largest honey importers, jointly accounting for about two-thirds of imports in 2024 (see box, below).

There are many reasons for the UK’s reliance on Chinese honey. These include our climate and that British beekeepers lack the clout of their peers elsewhere. US beekeepers, for example, produce about 40% of the honey consumed in the States. In 2001, they successfully lobbied for the imposition of anti-dumping tariffs of up to 180% on Chinese imports that still stand today. With the US effectively closed to them, Europe became more important for Chinese honey producers.

China’s low prices have also hit the sweet spot in the UK. In 2024, the average cost of honey imported to the UK by China was just 84p per kilo, compared with £2.10 per kilo of Mexican honey and £14.70 per kilo or New Zealand honey [World Bank]. The high price of the latter is largely down to the fact most honey from New Zealand is (or claims to be) manuka honey.

Such rock-bottom prices have stoked suspicions of fraud. Although large importers insist the claims are overstated, they all take the risk seriously enough to invest heavily in testing and traceability to ensure honey is genuine, wherever it’s from. For example, the UK’s largest honey importer, Valeo Foods, says it’s ceased sourcing honey from Ukraine because it’s been unable to carry out authenticity tests there since the start of the war.

“We are 100% pure and natural and have been since 1938,” says Tim Read, supply chain & procurement leader at Valeo, which owns the UK’s top honey brand, Rowse [NIQ]. “Authenticity is something we take extremely seriously, and we invest a lot of time, energy and money in making sure the honey we buy meets that standard.”

Honey is sourced globally, explains Read, but every jar is fully traceable to the beekeeper and carefully handled from hive to home, and every batch undergoes extensive testing before export and again on arrival, he says. This includes sugar profiling using liquid chromatography–isotope ratio mass spectrometry (LC-IRMS), along with the AOAC C4 sugar test, widely used to detect adulteration with corn or cane syrups, as well as screening for pesticides, antibiotics and other contaminants. Moisture levels, enzyme activity and other physicochemical properties are also checked, while pollen analysis helps verify botanical origin.

“Lab testing is only part of the story,” adds Read, as Valeo regularly audits its suppliers. “Traceability, relationships with suppliers and organoleptic testing – experienced tasters who can identify the floral source and sometimes the country of origin – all form part of a weight-of-evidence approach. If we can’t test it or we can’t be confident in the supply chain, we simply won’t source from there.”

Other honey packers say they’re taking similar steps. Hilltop Honey, now one of the UK’s largest honey brands and a major supplier of supermarket own label, says it has invested heavily in authenticity testing. Founder Scott Davies says Hilltop now uses a suite of analytical techniques and traceability checks. That includes advanced screening methods capable of detecting unusual sugar profiles as well as traditional pollen analysis to confirm floral and geographical origin.

“You can’t rely on one test and say that’s the answer,” says Davies. “You need a combination of different techniques and strong relationships with beekeepers and suppliers so you can understand exactly where the honey is coming from.”

The European Commission’s From the Hives report findings have added fuel to the debate – but scientists say its results need careful interpretation. The survey identified analytical signals that might indicate adulteration, but several of the markers used have not yet been fully validated and can occur naturally. The UK’s response to the report emphasised that the findings should act as flags for further investigation rather than definitive proof of fraud.

“Honey is an incredibly complex natural product,” says Dr Adrian Charlton, an expert on honey authenticity and principal scientist at Fera Science – a 25% government-owned public sector research enterprise that provides services to Defra, the FSA and other government bodies – who contributed to the UK’s response to the From the Hives report.

“Different honeys vary enormously depending on the plants, geography and climate involved. Unusual results in a test don’t necessarily mean fraud.”

For that reason, says Davies, authenticity assessments should rely on multiple techniques interpreted together. That philosophy is now shaping the government’s response to fraud allegations. Last year, a working group set up under Defra’s Food Authenticity Programme concluded its work in developing a framework to allow regulators and laboratories to interpret honey authenticity Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) databases.

That’s because accurate NMR analysis relies heavily on access to databases detailing honey profiles from around the world that are often unpublished and opaque, yet underpin significant commercial testing decisions. So the working group’s aim was to create a secure system for consistently comparing results from different analytical databases and methods, reducing the risk of false positives and improving the ability to detect genuine fraud.

“We achieved agreement on a framework for interrogating these databases in a more consistent way,” says Walker, who chaired the working group. “There are lots of laboratories generating large volumes of authenticity data, but until now there hasn’t been a clear system for how those results should be interpreted together. The objective wasn’t to prove that fraud is everywhere. It was to ensure that when we do identify suspicious honey, the evidence is robust and defensible.”

Researchers are also exploring new scientific techniques to strengthen detection methods. One of the most ambitious projects is funded by the FSA and led by Dr Maria Anastasiadi at Cranfield University, whose team is using a combination of non-invasive spatial offset raman spectroscopy (SORS) and DNA barcoding to detect adulteration, with the aim of developing a comprehensive database of the chemical and DNA fingerprints of honeys from China.

“SORS allows us to take the chemical fingerprint of honey we’ve spiked with rice or beet syrup in the lab, so if this becomes standard methodology it’ll allow us to identify it,” says Dr Anastasiadi. “The nice thing is this method is portable – a small instrument you can take anywhere. You can analyse samples at all stages of the supply chain and detect changes in between.”

Winging it

Claims of adulteration aren’t the only sticky issue in the row about imported honey, however. “If the product hasn’t been dehydrated and left in the comb to ripen and mature then it’s not commensurate with the UK legal definition of honey,” says Walker. “I stand by that definition.

The problem for Walker, and many others, is that much of the honey sold in the UK and across Europe hasn’t only been dried by the fanning of thousands of tiny wings in a hive, but inside industrial vacuum driers in Chinese warehouses. Vacuum dehydration is common practice in China, with estimates that 75% of its honey is made this way.

Long-standing talks around the development of an ISO international standard for honey have stalled, with the UK, China and others understood to have voted against a draft that did not allow for industrially dehydrated honey.

“We would be throwing an awful lot of honey away that had fermented if we didn’t reduce the moisture content to usually less than 20%,” says Charlton, who was involved in the ISO discussions. “People assume mechanical drying fundamentally changes the honey, but chemically that’s largely not the case. You might see small changes in some characteristics, but the core profile of the honey remains very similar.”

Charlton disagrees that UK law forbids mechanically dried honey. “The law is open to interpretation,” he says. “You have people who benefit from interpreting that honey can only be moisture-reduced in the hive. These are mainly beekeepers who want to drive up the price of honey. That’s a good thing for beekeepers but not for consumers. The other group says it’s feasible and good, because they benefit from ensuring supply from tropical countries remains in place.”

Read – who is also chairman of the British Honey Importers and Packers Association (BHIPA) and VP of the Global Honey Institute – was also involved in the ISO discussions, although he stresses this was not as a representative of Valeo Foods. “[The absence of moisture reduction in the standard]…goes against ISO principles and introduces a barrier to trade,” he says. “[Disallowing moisture reduction in the ISO]…is predominantly driven by western European beekeepers that arguably have a protectionist vested interest. Funnily enough, there are western European beekeepers that also moisture reduce. You could argue factions in that camp are turkeys voting for Christmas.”

European beekeepers scored what they see as a victory in 2024 when the EU agreed stricter rules on origin labelling. From June this year, non-EU blended honey labels must declare the origin and percentage share of each, although member sta. From June this year, non-EU blended honey labels must declare the origin and percentage share of eachtes have the flexibility to require percentages only for the four largest shares when they account for more than 50% of the blend. This is expected to be applied to UK law in due course.

While many support this, Read at Valeo is ambivalent. “It gives more visibility, which is positive,” he says. “If you had a blend of two origins for a given honey type and there was a crop failure in one of those countries of origin you would have to change it [and the label]… there’s potentially a significant cost impact. There’s also the environmental impact of label wastage.”

Some suggest alternative views are stifled through the dominance of Valeo. “It accounts for 72% of the market and packs about 85% of supermarket own-brand honey,” says one source (Valeo wouldn’t comment on market share). Another describes BHIPA as “an old boys’ club”, claiming the balance of power has long favoured importers over domestic producers.

Whether shoppers care about all this is another question. “Most consumers aren’t worrying about whether honey has been mechanically dried or not,” says Davies at Hilltop. “They care about taste, price and trust in the brand. There’s room in the market for different types of honey and I think we should be celebrating them all as an industry.”

Charlton seems to agree. “Purists might say the only honey for them is something that’s set, has been matured in a hive for weeks and comes in a lovely jar,” says Charlton. “Well, my kids wouldn’t go near that. They want runny honey they can squeeze on their cornflakes in the morning. We’re not all connoisseurs.”