A new report, commissioned by the Food Authenticity Programme, has found that, despite often being unpublished and opaque, proprietary honey authenticity databases are used to underpin significant commercial testing decisions.
Crucially, this lack of transparency has led to legal disputes and, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), undermines confidence in the analytical methods used for verifying honey authenticity.
As a result, the Government Chemist, Defra, the Food Standards Agency (FSA), and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) convened a seminar in 2019 with experts and industry, identifying the need for a mechanism to assess honey authenticity database fitness for purpose.
Now completed, the framework seeks to enable the assessment of the fitness for purpose of authenticity databases, in a bid to facilitate reliable enforcement decisions and reduce legal ambiguity.
Why a new framework is crucial
Why is the implementation of such a framework so important? Simply put, because honey fraud is rampant across the UK and the European Union (EU).
As recently as 2023, an investigation conducted by the European Commission found that 46% of sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent.
Even more striking, 100% of the ten samples taken from the UK failed the test.
The report concluded that the sample might have been blended or packaged in Britain, but that ultimately the honey was most likely shipped in from overseas.
Government officials said that no single test can be used to determine the authenticity of honey products, spotlighting the complexity at the heart of the issue.
The news prompted an outcry from UK‑based producers, who called for stricter country‑of‑origin labelling on honey products, which is currently not required for a blended product from more than one country.
In 2022 alone, British businesses imported 38,000 tonnes of honey from China, the UK’s biggest supplier. As such, there is a strong chance that most cheap pots of honey consumed by UK shoppers originate from there.
Speaking at the time, Arturo Carrillo, the co‑ordinator of the Honey Authenticity Network, said: “The UK is flooded with very cheap adulterated honey imported from China. What is disappointing is that the British authorities have been very, very much reluctant to accept and address this tremendous problem.
“If this study does not trigger a broad and serious investigation in the UK like the one in the EU, then either the UK are completely incompetent or they are complicit.”
But as Professor Michael Walker tells Food Manufacture, the picture is far from clear: “The extent of honey fraud is difficult to pin down. Estimates of global honey fraud in the scientific literature range from 10% to 70% depending on the jurisdiction.
“Honey imported into the EU from China registered the largest number of ‘suspicious’ results. UK honey importers have argued that honey originating in China may give misleading results in authenticity tests owing to the practice in China (and other high‑humidity countries) of harvesting from the hive early and using mechanical moisture reduction. It is said that this may give rise to artefacts that cause false positives for fraud markers.”
Estimates of global honey fraud in the scientific literature range from 10% to 70% depending on the jurisdiction.
Prof. Michael Walker
Why is analysing honey authenticity so complex?
Analysing the authenticity of honey, as opposed to other foods such as meat or dairy, is an incredibly complex process.
Not that detecting food fraud is ever simple, but the composition of honey poses its own particular set of challenges, quite apart from other commodities. This can also change depending on plant nectar (botanical origin) and the area where bees have foraged (geographical origin).
And to make matters worse, the tactics used by fraudsters have become ever more sophisticated and, as a result, harder to detect.
For example, honey can now be adulterated with bespoke syrups made from rice, wheat or sugar beet that have been tailored to mimic the sugar profile of honey.
And the picture is further complicated by a lack of an agreed consensus on testing methods. Techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is able to pick up some added sugars, for example, but they may still need to rely on databases that do not cover all types of natural variation.
Walker lays out these complexities in further detail: “Honey is mainly fructose, glucose and water with an additional highly complex minor and trace composition with much natural variation. Honey is produced by non‑domesticated but managed bees that retain their wild foraging nature.
“There are varying species, differing temporal, climatic and environmental factors, different beekeeping and harvesting practices and post‑hive processing. Taking all this into account is profoundly challenging for authentication by targeted and untargeted bioanalysis and for interpretation of the resulting data.”
He continues: “Interpretation of any food authenticity is often based on databases of markers of authenticity or its converse.”
“Such databases exist in the published scientific literature, with the advantage of being peer reviewed and available for other scientists to use.”
“However, these datasets often contain small numbers of authenticated samples and are focused on a single or a narrow subset of the facets of biochemical complexity exhibited by honey.”
How do we solve the problem?
Given these entrenched challenges and difficulties, the report has unsurprisingly concluded that the standardisation of approaches for database scrutiny is essential in improving the highly complex honey testing landscape that currently exists.
To facilitate this, the working group behind the report has created a clear framework to evaluate the fitness for purpose of proprietary honey authenticity databases.
This new framework is focused on determining database scope, composition, metadata, representativity and method validation.
To better assist investigators, the framework provides a set of detailed questions to guide the interrogation of these databases, in a bid to ensure both consistency and thoroughness in evaluations.
In particular, it spotlights evaluative reporting (ER) as offering a useful pathway forward when there are two possible explanations – for example, that the honey is genuine or that it is not – and the evidence needs to be weighed between them.
The framework also emphasises the need for secure and confidential data‑transfer mechanisms, balancing transparency with the protection of proprietary information, and suggests the development of a data trust framework.
Effective collaboration between database owners, regulatory authorities and laboratories will therefore be critical if the picture is to be improved.
What emerges, then, is an exceedingly complex issue, deeply shaped by the atypical nature of honey as an ingredient. However, the new framework and its recommendations offer a tangible route forward, helping to resolve the difficulties both in proving, and ultimately deterring, honey fraud and adulteration.
