A Blend of EU and Non-EU Honeys: What That Label Actually Means

Pick up a jar of supermarket honey and turn it round. Somewhere near the barcode, in small print, there's a good chance you'll find the words "blend of EU and non-EU honeys".

It sounds official. It isn't telling you very much.

What the phrase tells you, and what it doesn't

Honey labels have to state where the honey came from. When a jar holds honey from a single country, that country is named. When it holds honey from several countries, the label can use a general phrase instead, and "blend of EU and non-EU honeys" is the one you'll see most often.

Read literally, it covers honey from almost anywhere in the world. It doesn't say which countries are in the jar, how many, or in what proportions. It doesn't name the beekeeper or the season. A packer could change the mix from one batch to the next and the wording on the label wouldn't need to change at all.

None of this means blended honey is bad honey. It does mean the label gives you nothing to judge it by.

Why honey is worth faking

Honey is slow and costly to produce. Bees gather nectar from a huge number of flowers, carry it back to the hive, and then fan it until most of the water has evaporated. Only then is it honey. Sugar syrups made from rice, maize, beet or cane can be produced in bulk for a fraction of the cost.

That price gap is the whole problem. A well-made mixture of honey and syrup looks like honey, pours like honey and tastes close enough to honey that nobody standing at a supermarket shelf could tell the difference.

What the European Commission found

Between November 2021 and February 2022, the European Commission ran a coordinated check on honey being imported into the EU. National authorities took 320 samples from incoming consignments and sent them for laboratory analysis.

147 of those 320 samples, or 46%, were flagged as suspicious of being bulked out with sugar syrup.

"Suspicious" is a careful word. It means the laboratory results didn't match the profile of genuine honey closely enough to be passed, rather than that every one of those consignments was proven fake. Even so, it's a remarkable figure. The Commission published its findings under the title "From the Hives", and the full report is available on the European Commission's food safety pages.

How syrup gets past a basic check

For a long time, honey fraud was relatively easy to catch. Cheap syrups were mostly made from cane or maize. Both are what botanists call C4 plants, which process carbon slightly differently from most flowering plants. That difference leaves a measurable trace in the ratio of carbon isotopes in their sugars. Nectar comes mainly from C3 plants, so a laboratory could compare the two and spot syrup that didn't belong.

Fraud adapted. Syrups made from rice or sugar beet come from C3 plants, so their carbon signature sits much closer to honey's own. Some syrups are now produced specifically to slip past the standard tests.

The result is that no single test can be relied on any more. Serious producers use several, each looking at the honey in a different way, so that a sample has to pass all of them.

The four tests behind every batch of our honey

Every batch of RAWGORILLA honey is checked four ways before it goes into a jar.

NMR profiling. Nuclear magnetic resonance reads the chemical fingerprint of a sample as a whole, measuring many compounds at once, and compares it against a large database of authenticated honeys. Added syrup changes that fingerprint even when the main sugars look normal on their own.

Stable isotope analysis (IRMS). Isotope ratio mass spectrometry is the carbon test described above, used to look for sugars from both C4 and C3 sources that shouldn't be there.

Pollen analysis. Honey carries pollen from the plants the bees visited. Identifying and counting it confirms the botanical source. This matters most for single-variety honeys such as acacia or linden, where the name on the jar is a promise about which flowers the bees worked.

HPLC sugar profiling. High-performance liquid chromatography separates the individual sugars in a sample and measures each one. Genuine honey has a characteristic balance of fructose, glucose and smaller sugars. Syrups tend to disturb that balance or leave traces of sugars that have no business being in honey.

The same batches are also tested for residues. Glyphosate, pesticides, heavy metals and a full panel of antibiotics all come back as not detected.

What "organic" means for honey

Bees fly wherever they please, so organic certification for honey works differently from organic certification for carrots. Under the EU's organic regulation, Regulation (EU) 2018/848, the rules reach out beyond the hive:

• Within 3 km of the hives, the bees' forage has to consist essentially of organic crops or wild vegetation.
• The hives themselves have to be built mainly from natural materials.
• Synthetic chemical repellents can't be used while the honey is being extracted.
• Colonies must be left with enough of their own honey and pollen to get through the winter. Feeding is only allowed if a colony's survival is at risk, and then only with organic honey, organic sugar or organic sugar syrup.

Our honey is certified organic under that regulation by certification body BG-BIO-02.

How to shop for honey you can trust

You can't run an NMR scan in your kitchen. You can read a label properly, though, and a few habits go a long way.

Look for a stated origin. A named country tells you more than a blend statement ever will.

Look for a single producer. Honey from one producer can be traced back to its source. Honey pooled from many suppliers is much harder to vouch for.

Look for an organic certification code. Certified organic honey carries the code of the body that inspected it. It's small, but it's there.

Don't rely on kitchen tests. You may have come across advice about dropping honey into a glass of water, dabbing it on your thumb or trying to set it alight. None of these reliably detects added syrup. A thick, well-made adulterated honey can pass every one of them, and some genuine honeys fail. Crystallisation isn't a purity test either: it's perfectly normal for real honey, but it proves nothing on its own. We explain why in our guide to why honey goes solid.

Be wary of a price that seems too good. Honey costs real money to make. A very cheap jar of it had to come from somewhere.

Why our honey is sourced this way

Everything above explains how the RAWGORILLA honey range is put together: a single European producer, certified organic beekeeping, and four separate authenticity tests on every batch.

There are five honeys in the range, and they're very different from one another:

• Organic Acacia Honey, pale, mild and slow to set
• Organic Linden Honey, intensely aromatic with a herbal finish
• Organic Wildflower Honey, the everyday jar, varying gently with the seasons
• Organic Forest Honey, dark, malty and made from honeydew rather than nectar
• Organic Blossom Honey with Honeycomb, liquid honey with a hand-cut piece of comb in the jar

If you're not sure where to start, our guide to choosing a honey takes you through all five, from the palest jar to the darkest.