Honey Laundering and Authenticity

Jan 19, 2011
By Bradley Kreit in: The Future Now Blog
| Research Manager, Health Horizons Program
Bradley Kreit was born in San Francisco and grew up in Oakland, California. Taken by an urge to explore other parts of the country, he moved to Connecticut for college and moved and traveled ...
food futures, transparency

Honey Laundering and Authenticity

It's hard to find just one or two things to excerpt from Jessica Leeder's great investigation into the large amount of global crime that has grown up around something as simple as honey. It turns out that, in response to U.S. and E.U. trade rules designed to keep antibiotics out of the honey supply, a variety of middlemen have turned up in parts of Asia to conceal the origins of honey--a practice that has been met with equal amount of money spent on tracking down the honey launderers.

Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.
None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry.

Much later in her article, Leeder notes that since the honey laundering started in earnest about a decade ago, several countries that produce very little amounts of honey enjoy very large honey exports.

Despite the arrests, the honey industry has been watching suspect import numbers climb.
They are particularly incensed by three countries that, ten years ago, exported zero honey to the U.S., according to Department of Commerce data. India, Malaysia and Indonesia are mysteriously on pace to ship 43 million kilograms of honey into the U.S. by year’s end.
“It is widely known those countries have no productive capacity to justify those quantities,” said Mr. Phipps, the honey markets expert.

The rest of the article, which is well worth reading in full, points out different methods for concealing honey's origins, strategies for combating the fraud, and a sort of legal back and forth that seems out of place for what feels like a pretty ordinary food item.
In reading this, though, I was reminded of signals suggesting that honey may not be the only food subject to similar sorts of fraud attempts. For example, in late 2009, a group of students decided to use DNA analysis to try to verify the origins of their foods--and found that 11 of the 66 foods they tested were mislabeled. Not surprisingly, the mislabeled stuff was expensive--sheep's milk was actually regular old milk, sturgeon caviar was really Mississippi Paddlefish.
And DNA testing--the cost of which keeps dropping--isn't the only tool at a consumer's disposal for testing food origins and chemicals. A group of Canadian chemists have developed a little strip--sort of like a piece of paper for testing p.h. levels--to see if a food item contains pesticides, for example.
As of now, most of these stories about food fraud have received relatively little public attention. But it's interesting to imagine what would happen if stories about honey laundering and the like started gaining traction--and what sorts of reactions it could spur. Certainly, we'd see consumers examining their Florida orange juice, California cheese and so on a lot more closely. And, of course, we'd also see food companies responding by engaging in a lot of desperate marketing to demonstrate the authenticity of their foods. And many more middle men trying to conceal their supply chains.
At some level, I think that scenario is only a matter of when, given that, over time, we really won't need large governments to invest millions of dollars to track down the origins of our foods. With pesticide test strips, cheap DNA sequencing and the like, the scenario above--of increasing fears of food fraud--may only be a matter of when.