Experts Expose ‘Fake’ Honey Sold in Grocery Stores And Reveal How to Find the Real One: ‘They Add...'

In February 2013, the Justice Department of the US charged two major honey importers in the “Operation Honeygate.” The charge stated that the honey they sold was smeared and laced with harmful antibiotics that could be harmful to the consumers, per Insider. By selling this fake honey, the companies saved over $180 million on shipping charges. In 2011, Food Safety News purchased more than 60 jars, jugs, and plastic tubs of honey from ten different states. Experts who analysed this revealed that most of the honey was filtered out of the bee pollen. The syrupy ingredient was not even close to the original nectar bees sip from the flowers.

Fast forward to today, most of the honey sold in the market is still fake. This, probably, is the reason why honeybuns, the delicious cousins of cinnamon rolls, “don’t taste the same as they did when we were kids. They taste like chemicals,” as @MilaanItaly wrote on X. In an interview with Gloucestershire Live, Fabián Torres, director of business development at SICPA and honey expert, claimed that up to 80% of honey sold in Spain is blended. Only a small quantity stands up to the reputation of real honey that bees created; most of it is adulterated with sugar.

“These 'fake' and poor quality honeys, with additives, are more like syrups than honey as such. In the best case, they add sugar, which makes them very harmful caloric bombs for children or elderly people,” he warned. This puts the consumers in a precarious dilemma. While they’re mixing honey drops in hot water or let’s say, in a cup of metabolism-boosting lemon-and-honey tea, they’re unknowingly adding only more sugar to their body, which, in the long term, could be dangerous. Plus, Torres revealed that it is difficult to distinguish whether the honey is real or fake. 

A study published in Food Control affirmed this reality. “The large variation of honey composition makes it particularly difficult to authenticate. So, having this consistent technique in the testing armoury could take the sting out of honey fraud,” said the lead researcher, Doctor Maria Anastasiadi, who used the DNA barcoding method to differentiate between real and fake honey samples in an experiment, according to a Cranfield University press release. A beekeeper added that heat is “the greatest enemy” of honey. “Once it reaches a temperature of 50 degrees Celsius, the sweet, viscous substance starts losing its nutritional properties,” Ferhat Ozturk, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and project director of HONEY Pathway, told Newsweek. 

Most of the honey sold in grocery stores is actually “diluted by high fructose corn syrup or rice syrup,” as Beth Czerwony, an outpatient dietician for the Center for Human Nutrition, told Newsweek. Manufacturers dilute it to add the illusion of water content, and when people taste the sweetness, they get fooled. In fact, Ozturk said, that honey from local beekeepers is “four times more biologically active than grocery store honeys.” He urged people to avoid purchasing honey from these retail stores and instead source it from a local beekeeper. Maybe, we all need a lesson from Pooh on how to dig up honeypots from beehives and Rabbit’s hole!