Most Supermarket Honey Isn't Really Honey

There's a good chance the honey in your cupboard right now isn't really honey. Not fully. Not the way you think.

I know how that sounds. But stay with me, because honey is one of the most faked foods on the planet, right up there with olive oil, and most of us have never once given it a second thought. We spoon it onto our porridge, stir it into a hot drink, feel a bit virtuous about it, and never turn the jar around to read the back.

So go and do that now. Turn yours over. If the label says something like "blend of EU and non-EU honeys", that jar has just told you it could have come from almost anywhere, all mixed together, with nobody able to say what's really inside. That vague little line is the first clue something's off.

How you fake a jar of honey

The trick is old and it's simple. You take cheap sugar syrup, the kind made from rice or wheat or sugar beet, and you water the honey down with it. A bit of real honey, a lot of syrup. It still pours golden, still tastes sweet, still looks the part. You'd never know from the jar.

Why bother? Money, of course. Real honey is expensive. Bees are slow, beekeepers graft, and a proper harvest takes what it takes. Syrup costs next to nothing. So if you're the sort who's happy to cut corners, you can turn a cheap sack of syrup into something you sell at honey prices. Do that across a whole shipping container and you can see how tempting it gets for the wrong kind of person.

So how much of it is fake?

For years this was a bit of a shrug. Everyone suspected it, nobody had the numbers. Then a few years ago the EU decided to check. They pulled 320 jars of imported honey, from twenty different countries, and sent the lot off to the lab.

Nearly half came back flagged as likely cut with sugar syrup. Almost one in two. Worth sitting with, the next time you reach for a cheap squeezy bottle because it was a pound less.

It's not about where it's from

When this hit the news, a few of the headlines went straight for "British honey is fake", because every UK sample got flagged. That's not what it means, and it's worth clearing up.

Most of that honey wasn't British at all. It was made somewhere else, shipped in, blended together and sent back out with the trail wiped clean. The problem was never the country on the label. It was the blending. Once you tip a dozen anonymous barrels into one, nobody on earth can tell you where any of it came from.

Your local beekeeper with a few hives down the lane isn't the villain here. Neither is a good single-origin honey from abroad. A honey you can trace back to one place, whether that's a field in Yorkshire or the mountains of Yemen, is a completely different thing to a faceless industrial blend with no home to it.

The enemy isn't imported. The enemy is anonymous.

The other trick: filtering the life out of it

There's a second sleight of hand worth knowing about. A lot of shop honey gets heated hard and filtered so heavily it comes out crystal clear and stays runny forever. Looks lovely and neat on the shelf. Very tidy.

Trouble is, all that filtering strips out the pollen. And pollen is basically the honey's fingerprint, the thing a lab uses to work out where it came from. Take it out and you've quietly rubbed out the evidence, along with a good chunk of what made raw honey worth eating in the first place. A honey that never sets, never changes and hasn't a speck of pollen left in it has been processed half to death.

How to spot the real thing

You don't need a lab for any of this. A few simple habits do most of the work.

Read the back, not the front. The front is marketing. Pretty bees, the word "pure" in a nice font. Ignore it. Flip the jar over and look for a clear country of origin, ideally one named source, not that "blend of EU and non-EU honeys" line. The ingredients should read: honey. That's it.

Look for raw and unheated. Raw honey hasn't been cooked or filtered to death, so it still holds its pollen, its enzymes and its character.

Don't panic when it sets. Real raw honey turns cloudy and thick over time, sometimes almost solid. People think it's gone off and chuck it. It's the opposite. Setting is one of the surest signs you've got the real thing. Stand the jar in a bowl of warm water and it loosens straight back up.

Be a little suspicious of cheap. If a jar is oddly cheap, something somewhere had to give. Honey from real bees, properly kept and harvested, costs what it costs.

Ask where it's from. The simplest test going. Can whoever sold it to you actually tell you where it came from? A good producer will know it off the top of their head, and they'll be glad you asked.

What you're actually paying for

Strip it all back and this is what it comes down to. The whole reason people have treasured honey for thousands of years, the enzymes, the pollen, the taste that shifts depending on where the bees were working, is exactly the part that gets destroyed when it's cheapened and processed into submission. Pay for the fake stuff and you're really just buying expensive syrup in a nicer jar.

Ours is raw and unheated, the ingredients run to one or two things, and I can tell you exactly where each of them came from. Not because it's some miracle in a jar. Just because that's what honey is meant to be.

So do yourself one small favour tonight. Turn your jar around and read the back. You deserve to know what you're actually eating.