Squeeze a bottle of "honey" off a supermarket shelf and there's a decent chance it isn't entirely honey at all. Investigations across the UK, Europe, and Australasia have repeatedly found jars cut with cheap sugar syrups — sold at honey prices, under honey labels, with none of the disclosure. For a small NZ honey producer like us, that's more than a headline. It's the reason we test.
What "fake honey" actually means
Nobody is selling jars of plain corn syrup and calling it honey outright — the fraud is subtler than that. The most common trick is blending: taking real honey and stretching it with a cheap sugar syrup (often derived from cane sugar, corn, or rice) to bulk up the volume while keeping the price of pure honey. Because these syrups can be refined to mimic honey's colour, sweetness, and even some of its chemistry, the result can look and taste convincing enough to pass a casual glance — or a shopper's spoon test.
For mānuka honey specifically, there's a second kind of fraud on top of that: honey that's genuinely unadulterated but isn't actually mānuka, or falls well short of the mānuka potency implied on the label.
This matters for reasons beyond fairness at the checkout. Genuine honey carries the trace enzymes, pollen, and antibacterial compounds that come from bees actually visiting flowers. Diluted honey doesn't just short-change your wallet; it also short-changes the very properties — flavour, provenance, and the natural goodness people buy honey for in the first place.
Why you can't always tell by looking (or tasting)
A lot of the "home tests" that circulate online — dropping honey in water to see if it dissolves, checking if it burns on a matchstick, watching how it crystallises in the jar — sound satisfying but don't actually hold up scientifically. Well-adulterated honey can pass every one of them. Genuine mānuka and other NZ honeys can also behave in ways that look "suspicious" to these folk tests simply because of their natural composition. The only reliable way to tell real honey from cut honey is laboratory analysis — and purity is only one part of what a proper panel of tests actually checks.
The science: how a lab actually catches fake honey
One of the most widely used methods internationally is C4 sugar testing, and the science behind it is genuinely elegant. Plants use different photosynthetic pathways to build sugar, and those pathways leave a distinct fingerprint in the ratio of carbon isotopes (carbon-12 to carbon-13) in the sugars they produce.
- Nectar-producing plants that bees forage from use the C3 pathway.
- Common adulterants like cane sugar and corn syrup come from C4 pathway plants (sugarcane, corn).
By measuring the isotope ratio in a honey sample — using techniques like Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry and Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy — an accredited lab can calculate the "apparent C4 sugar" content. Internationally, a result under 7% is accepted as consistent with pure honey; anything meaningfully above that threshold is a red flag for added sugar. It's precise enough that testing bodies use it as an export standard (the AOAC 998.12 method) for honey leaving the country. (note: if the first result is slightly high, we will blend with similar honey to lower within a respectable range) this is the reality of hive location)
Worth noting: the science isn't a blunt instrument. Mānuka honey in particular can occasionally show naturally elevated C4-type results without a drop of added sugar, which is exactly why interpreting results properly — not just running the numbers — matters, and why we work with accredited testing labs rather than relying on a single number in isolation.
Purity is only one question — "is it good honey" is another
C4 sugar testing answers "has sugar been added?" But a full quality picture asks more than that. Alongside C4 testing, we also check moisture content (whether the honey was properly matured and ripened before harvest), HMF (a marker that rises when honey has been overheated or has aged, used internationally as a freshness indicator), and pollen analysis (to help confirm floral and geographic origin). Purity, freshness, and origin are three different questions, and a jar that's "technically not adulterated" can still be over-processed or poorly handled. We think all of it matters.
For mānuka, there's a further layer again: since 2018, MPI (New Zealand's Ministry for Primary Industries) has set an official scientific definition for what can be labelled mānuka honey, based on four chemical markers plus a DNA test for mānuka pollen. Every mānuka batch we sell is tested against that definition, on top of the C4 sugar screen — so "mānuka" on our label isn't just a variety name, it's a government-recognised result.
Where Kai Ora Honey stands on this
We test our honey — not because we're required to, but because "real honey" should be a fact, not a marketing line. Every batch we sell goes to an accredited lab, not just a sample of our production, and we publish what that testing actually looks like — including results that need a bit of explaining — on our Quality Standards page, which walks through our process from the apiary through to final verification before bottling.
We think that's what "real honey" should mean for every jar on the shelf, not just the ones going overseas.
What to look for when you're buying honey
- Ask if it's been tested — a producer who tests will usually say so, and should be able to point to what kind of testing.
- Check the origin — single-origin, traceable honey is harder to quietly dilute at scale than a blended, multi-country jar.
- Be sceptical of "too cheap" — genuine honey has a real cost of production; a price that undercuts the market significantly is worth questioning.
- Don't rely on kitchen tests — water, flame, and crystallisation tests are folklore, not proof.
Honey should be exactly what it says on the label. That's the standard we hold ourselves to, and it's why we're happy to talk openly about how our honey is tested, not just how it tastes.
