Honey — Nature’s Sweet Gift
Honey! This miraculous, pure, natural sweetener offers immense benefits. People have always valued it as a famous delicacy across the globe. In India, Ayurvedic medicine widely uses honey for its health‑promoting properties. While it mainly contains sugars, it additionally provides proteins, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. With a growing world population and increasing awareness of natural foods, global honey consumption has steadily increased over the past decades. Among exporters are eastern countries, including India, which have shown a significant increase in honey export. At the same time, India has seen a surge in domestic demand.
Rising Fraud in the Honey Market
However, the story isn’t wholly sweet. According to studies, honey stands among the most adulterated food items globally.
The high prices of honey have only increased the temptation for adulteration. As a result, numerous doubts have arisen over the purity of natural honey brands in the Indian market. Widespread speculation suggests that honey rejected by the EU, USA, and other foreign markets for quality reasons is sold in the domestic market.
How Honey Gets Adulterated
- Manufacturers may adulterate honey through various means:
- Intentionally diluting it with rice or corn syrups to increase volume.
- Introducing residual chemicals, antibiotics or pesticides that were used to boost yield in the hives.
- Harvesting uncapped or immature honey, which retains more moisture or is less stable.
- Using chemical processes to remove residues and lighten the honey’s colour or appearance.
- Feeding hives with industrial sugar to boost honey output artificially.
Why It’s Hard to Detect & Why It Matters
Despite numerous analytical methods, detecting adulterated honey remains challenging. Research indicates that when analysts added sugar syrups such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or beet sugar, they could still bypass standard tests.
Furthermore, a review notes that “official (legislative) determination … is unable to detect most methods of honey adulteration.”
Adulterated honey not only reduces nutritional value; it also risks introducing harmful substances and compromises trust in the supply chain.
MDPI
The Role of Regulation & Compliance
In light of these risks, manufacturers, packagers and resellers must remain compliant with relevant regulations. They must adopt rigorous sourcing, traceability and testing protocols to ensure product integrity. As global scrutiny intensifies, adherence to higher standards will become not just best practice—but essential for credibility and safety.
Food Safety & Standards Authority of India in a gazette notification dated 31st July 2018 defined the 18 parameters that have to met by the product. According to the specifications, SMR (Specific Marker for Rice Syrup) and TMR (Trace Marker for Rice Syrup) were expected to test negative, and the maximum allowed percentage of oligosaccharides was 0.1%. However, after the industry representation to FSSAI, the notification dated 29th October 2019 removed all three requirements. Additionally, the pollen count requirement was reduced from 25,000/g to 5,000/g, significantly diluting the regulation.
However, the 5th June notification has brought back the SMR requirement. FSSAI has also specified LC/MS (Liquid Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry) as the testing methodology for this. Details of the same can be found here. This should help reduce the adulteration from syrups from the C3 plants, mainly rice. Hopefully, the other parameters will be reinstated in the future.
As a manufacturer, packager, or reseller of honey, you must comply with this regulation, which came into effect in October 2019. Meanwhile for the consumers, here are a few quick tests that can detect adulteration in honey.
Test 1:
- Take a transparent glass of water
- Add a drop of honey to the water
- Pure honey will not disperse, however, if it disperses in water, it tells the presence of added sugar
Test 2:
- · Dip cotton in honey and light it up with a matchstick
- · If the honey is pure, it will burn.
- Adulterated honey will produce a cracking sound due to the presence of water in it
For a complete list of tests that you can do at home to detect common adulterants, you can watch the video on our YouTube channel.