Ensuring Honey's Authenticity

Honey comes quickly to experts’ lips as one of the most highly victimized food commodities. Maintaining authenticity of supply is a continuing challenge to apiarists and honey processors around the world, at the same time that the industry is battling the pervasive problem of beehive collapse and the disappearance of ecosystems that support bees and other pollinators.

“It’s the most adulterated product in the world,” says Deleo de Leonardis, founder of food analysis startup Purity-IQ. “It’s expensive and in high demand, but you can’t mass produce it; it’s the bees making honey. You can enslave them all you want.”

The problem was dramatized in a Netflix documentary five years ago titled Lawyers, Guns & Honey

The show argued that only adulteration could be responsible for the continuing worldwide rise in honey consumption at a time of declining bee populations. It illustrated the broad use of corn syrup, rice syrup, and other liquids to dilute honey exports, mostly from Asia and involving middlemen in places like Germany.

Because of such problems, Netflix concluded, “Beekeepers can be forgiven for worrying that their business may be too challenging to survive.”

Among recent efforts by the industry to fight back are a True Source Certified Honey certification program to combat the problem of illegally shipped honey. As of a few years ago, companies that were True Source Certified represented about 30% of all honey sold in America, according to True Source, which couldn’t be reached for more current statistics.

The company updated its standards a couple of years ago, specifying exact testing methodologies that utilize “longstanding approved methods along with cutting-edge technologies to detect sugar [and] syrups,” True Source Honey said.