A food lab analyzed 110 commonly available honey products and found more than 70 percent were ‘adulterated’ with sugar from beets or corn
- A food lab analyzed 110 different kinds of commercially available honey
- Around 70 percent of the honeys were adulterated with other compounds
- Many honeys are mixed with sugar from beets, rice, or corn to save money
As the world’s population of bees rapidly declines, many honey manufacturers have turned to producing counterfeit blends of honey to profit.
According to food laboratories that have analyzed a wide selection of honey brand, more than half have shown signs of adulteration.
Adulteration involves adding cheaper types of sugar to honey, diluting it with water, or heating it to particular temperatures to eliminate chemical markers that would indicate the country of origin.
A food lab analyzed 110 commercial honey products and found over 70 percent of them had been blended with other kinds of sugars or were fraudulently labeled
‘We tested about 60 to 70 different companies, and we found that about 50 to 60 percent of those honeys tested are bad honey,’ Kent Heitzinger a lawyer involved in a class action lawsuit over fraudulent honey, told Vice.
‘Out of 110 products, around 70 percent were adulterated. There’s been something done to them.’
‘It is just pure fraud in our opinion. They’re selling products to the American public that isn’t what it says it is.’
Demand for honey has been steadily rising–in 2018, 575 million pounds of honey were consumed, a 40 percent increase from 1998.
At the same time bee populations are collapsing, with 40 percent of hives tended by beekeepers were lost between 2018 and 2019 alone.
To exploit the rising demand, many honey manufacturers have begun adulterating their products with other kinds of sugars, most commonly taken from rice, beets or corn.
The most common way of ‘adulterating’ honey involves blending it with cheaper sources of sugar, such as beet sugar, corn sugar, or rice sugar, while still labeling the end product as pure all natural honey
Aother common practice for producing fraudulent honey involves a straining process that removes chemical markers of the honey’s country of origin.
The process involves dissolving the honey in water and filtering the mixture through aliphatic resin, a compound that strips it of chemical markers, including antibiotics, pesticides, or unwanted flavors.
In the past this process was used to help make less palatable kinds of honey, like Indian gum honey—which tastes and smells like ‘like old gym socks,’ according to biochemist Jim Gawenis.
Aliphatic resin removes the odor from Indian gum honey and turns it a pleasant amber color, though it also strains out all the pollens and enzymes that give honey its added nutritive benefits.
Beekeepers are already struggling after mass bee death, with 40 percent of US bee hives lost between 2018 and 2019 alone. The rise of fraudulent and counterfeit honey has only made it harder on beekeepers to compete
‘What they do is they would take, say, a Chinese honey, put it through that filtration, and then dust it with Argentine pollen, mix it up,’ Gawenis told Vice.
‘All of a sudden, you have Argentinian honey.’
At present, there’s no reason to believe the practice of selling fraudulent honey is a public health threat.
However, it’s helped keep the honey market flooded with surplus product that’s kept prices down and made it harder for honest beekeepers to earn a living.
‘In my opinion, they’ve all been doing this for years,’ Heitzinger, one of the lawyers said. ‘That’s my gut feeling. And it’s all about profits.’