Honey Testing, Grading, and Adulteration

There's a man at Texas A&M University named Vaughn Bryant whose job title includes the word "melissopalynologist." That's someone who identifies honey by examining its pollen under a microscope - because every jar of real honey contains pollen grains that function like a botanical fingerprint, telling you exactly which flowers the bees visited and, by extension, which part of the world the honey came from.

In 2011, Food Safety News asked Bryant to examine more than 60 jars of honey purchased from stores across 10 states and the District of Columbia. The results were, to use a technical term, bonkers.

76% of honey bought at grocery stores - Safeway, Kroger, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop - contained zero pollen. Not reduced pollen. Not trace amounts. Zero. As in, the defining biological fingerprint of honey had been completely removed, making it impossible to determine where the honey came from, what flowers produced it, or whether it was actually honey at all.

It got worse. 77% of big box store samples had no pollen. And 100% - every single sample - from drug store brands was pollen-free.

The FDA's own position is clear: any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey. Which raised an uncomfortable question: if 76% of grocery store "honey" doesn't meet the FDA's own definition of honey, what exactly is in those bear-shaped squeeze bottles?

How You Remove the Fingerprint

The process is called ultrafiltration, and it works like this: you add water to honey, then force it through filters under high pressure at the molecular level, then remove the water. What comes out looks like honey. Tastes like honey. Pours like honey. But the pollen - those tiny grains that a melissopalynologist (try saying that five times fast) could use to trace the honey's origin to a specific region, a specific season, even specific flower species - is gone.

The American honey packing industry had a ready explanation: consumers prefer clear honey that doesn't crystallize quickly, and filtration achieves both. Which is technically true. Fine filtration does slow crystallization and removes visible particles.

But ultrafiltration goes far beyond removing visible particles. It operates at the molecular level, removing components that are invisible to the naked eye. The pollen grains that Bryant was looking for are 10-100 micrometers in diameter. You don't need molecular filtration to remove visible cloudiness. You need molecular filtration to remove evidence.

And that's where this story pivots from food science into crime drama.

Honeygate

In December 2001, the US Commerce Department imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese honey after determining it was being sold in America at below fair market value - dumping, in trade terminology. The initial duties were staggering: up to 221% of declared value, later converted to $2.63 per net kilogram.

Chinese honey became effectively too expensive to import legally. So it stopped showing up in import records.

It did not stop showing up in American honey.

What happened instead became Operation Honeygate - the largest food fraud case in US history. Chinese honey was shipped to intermediary countries - India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan - repackaged, relabeled as originating from those countries, and then imported into the US at prices that didn't include the anti-dumping tariff. The pollen was ultrafiltered out so that nobody could trace its origin back to Chinese apiaries.

In 2013, the Department of Justice charged two major American honey packers: Groeb Farms in Michigan and Honey Solutions in Texas. Five individuals and two companies faced federal charges. A Texas honey broker named Jun Yang was sentenced to three years in federal prison for facilitating 778 container loads of fraudulently declared Chinese honey, evading $37.9 million in anti-dumping duties.

The broader scheme avoided an estimated $180 million in tariffs. HSI Chicago seized nearly 60 tons of illegally imported Chinese honey. Fourteen individuals were charged across the investigation.

And here's the part that should probably bother you: the laundered honey tested positive for harmful antibiotics, lead, and various agricultural chemicals. This wasn't just a tariff evasion scheme. It was contaminated product entering the food supply through the front door of major American grocery stores, disguised as honey from countries that had nothing to do with producing it.

Groeb Farms paid a $2 million penalty. Honey Solutions paid $1 million. To put those fines in perspective, $180 million in evaded tariffs was the estimated scope. Three million dollars in penalties. The math on that particular cost-benefit analysis is not subtle.

The Grading System Nobody Uses

The USDA maintains an official honey grading system. It's voluntary. Most honey on store shelves has never been graded. But the system exists, and it reveals what quality assessment actually looks like when someone bothers to do it.

Graders score extracted honey on a 100-point scale across three factors. Flavor and aroma carry the heaviest weight at 50 points maximum - because ultimately, honey's value is its taste. Absence of defects - particles, foam, visible issues - accounts for 40 points. Clarity gets the remaining 10.

Grade A (Fancy) requires 90 or more points and maximum moisture of 18.6%. Grade B (Choice) needs 80-89 points at the same moisture level. Grade C (Standard) accepts 70-79 points with moisture up to 20%. Below 70 points is Substandard.

That 18.6% moisture threshold matters because honey above 20% moisture ferments. Not "might ferment" or "could eventually ferment" - honey with excess moisture will ferment, producing alcohol and off-flavors and turning your jar of premium wildflower into something that smells like a college dorm room on Sunday morning.

Beekeepers measure moisture with a refractometer - a handheld optical instrument that reads the water content of a small honey sample in seconds. It's one of the few quality checks that's both simple and genuinely important. Everything else about honey grading gets complicated fast.

Color Is Not What You Think

The Pfund scale, introduced in the 1950s, classifies honey color using a wedge-shaped amber glass comparator. The scale runs from Water White (0-8 mm on the Pfund scale) through Extra White, White, Extra Light Amber, Light Amber, Amber, and Dark Amber (114+ mm).

Here's where it gets interesting: color has nothing to do with quality grade. A Water White honey and a Dark Amber honey can both be Grade A. Color is purely descriptive - a consequence of which flowers the bees visited, the mineral content of the nectar, and how long the honey has been stored.

But color affects price. Lighter honeys generally bring higher wholesale prices because American consumers associate light color with mild flavor and premium quality. Dark honeys - buckwheat, avocado, chestnut - are stronger-flavored and often cheaper per pound despite sometimes being more nutritionally complex.

The irony is that many of the world's most sought-after honeys are dark. Buckwheat honey has more antioxidants than most light honeys. Manuka honey from New Zealand, which sells for absurd prices based on antibacterial properties, is distinctly dark amber. The market premium for light honey is a consumer preference, not a quality indicator. The Pfund scale describes what the honey looks like. It says absolutely nothing about what the honey is worth.

What the Tests Actually Catch

Modern honey authentication uses a battery of tests that reads like a chemistry final you'd rather not take.

C4 Sugar Test (SIRA): The workhorse of adulteration detection. It compares carbon isotope ratios between honey's protein fraction and its sugars. Real honey comes from C3 plants (most flowering species). Corn syrup and cane sugar come from C4 plants, which process carbon differently through photosynthesis. If the isotope ratios don't match, someone added cheap sweetener.

The problem? The detection threshold sits at approximately 20%. Meaning honey that's been stretched with up to one-fifth cheap syrup can pass the standard test. That's a lot of room for fraud in a $2.69-per-pound commodity where imported bulk honey sometimes arrives at 84 cents a pound.

NMR Profiling: Nuclear magnetic resonance creates a molecular fingerprint of the honey. Combined with machine learning, it identifies the type of adulteration. Better than SIRA for detecting C3 sugars - rice syrup, beet sugar - that the carbon isotope test misses. Worse than SIRA for detecting C4 sugars. No single test catches everything. Fraudsters know this.

Pollen Analysis: Vaughn Bryant's specialty. A trained melissopalynologist identifies and counts pollen grains under a microscope, determining botanical source and geographic origin. It's the most definitive origin test available - assuming the pollen hasn't been ultrafiltered out, which, as we've established, it frequently has.

Heavy Metal and Contaminant Screening: Labs test for arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, antibiotics (chloramphenicol, tetracycline, sulfonamides), and pesticide residues. The laundered Chinese honey that Honeygate uncovered contained detectable levels of antibiotics banned in US food production.

The FDA tested 107 samples of imported honey between April 2022 and July 2023. Three samples - 3% - were found to be adulterated with undeclared sweeteners. Those samples came from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Yemen. The previous testing cycle found 10% of 144 samples were adulterated.

Three percent sounds reassuring until you remember that the tests can't detect adulteration below 20%. And that only 107 samples were tested across a 15-month period during which the US imported hundreds of millions of pounds of honey. The sample size is a rounding error against the volume of product entering the country.

The Definition Problem

Here's a truly bizarre regulatory gap: the United States does not have a federal standard of identity for honey.

The FDA defines honey as "a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of flowers." In 2011, the agency denied a petition to establish a formal standard of identity, concluding that one wasn't necessary. Instead, in February 2018, the FDA published "guidance" on proper labeling of honey - which carries less legal weight than a binding regulation.

Individual states got tired of waiting. Florida passed its own honey standard of identity in 2009 - the first state to do so. California, Wisconsin, and North Carolina followed. At least twelve other states have proposed similar legislation.

The state standards matter because they give state attorneys general legal tools to pursue sellers of adulterated honey. Without a federal standard of identity, federal enforcement relies on more general food fraud and misbranding statutes - which are harder to prosecute and carry less specific definitions of what "honey" must contain.

The result is a patchwork. Honey that meets Florida's definition of honey might not be tested against California's standards. Honey that clears FDA import screening might fail a state-level authenticity test. And honey that isn't legally honey under the FDA's own ultrafiltration guidance sits on shelves nationwide with the word "honey" printed on the label because nobody's checking.

True Source and the Trust Problem

The True Source Honey certification program emerged as the industry's attempt to self-police. The voluntary, non-profit program uses NSF International for third-party auditing, requiring origin traceability from hive to table and dual authenticity testing - either carbon isotope analysis plus NMR profiling, or carbon isotope analysis plus high-resolution mass spectrometry.

Approximately 30% of honey sold in North America carries True Source certification. Which means 70% doesn't.

The certification doesn't guarantee the honey is high quality, artisanal, or even particularly good. It guarantees that the honey came from where it says it came from and that nobody added corn syrup to it along the way. The fact that "this is actually honey, and it's from the country listed on the label" requires a third-party certification program tells you everything about the state of the honey supply chain.

What the Bear Bottle Really Contains

So here's the picture. You're standing in a grocery store aisle looking at a plastic bear full of golden liquid labeled "honey." What do you actually know about it?

If it's not True Source certified: almost nothing. You know it passed whatever screening customs applied at the border - if it was imported. You know it hasn't been pulled from shelves - which only happens if someone tests it and finds something wrong, and testing is rare. You know it's labeled "honey," but the federal government doesn't have a binding standard for what that word means.

If it's True Source certified: you know the origin hasn't been laundered through intermediary countries and that basic adulteration tests came back clean. Within the limitations of those tests.

If it's local honey from your farmer's market: you know who produced it, where the bees foraged, when it was harvested, and whether the beekeeper treated their hives. You might even know the beekeeper's name, their dog's name, and their opinions on queen excluders.

The price difference between these products - $5 for the bear, $12 for the local jar - no longer seems quite as outrageous once you understand what you're actually paying for. One is a verified product from a known source. The other is a regulatory trust exercise in a market where trust has been repeatedly, spectacularly violated.

Vaughn Bryant is still at Texas A&M, still examining honey under microscopes, still counting pollen grains with the patience of a man who knows exactly how many bears on grocery shelves contain something that technically isn't honey.

Nobody has tested them all. Nobody has the resources to test them all. The bears just keep sitting there, golden and smiling, technically undefined.