To get a behind-the-scenes look at how international standards for honey and hive products are being developed, Karen Allan caught up with the New Zealanders who are putting in the hard work and late nights to ensure fair, quality standards are produced, and counterfeit products are kept out of the market.
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies. The work of preparing international standards is done by ISO technical committees made up of representatives from member nations.
In 2018 a shadow committee of honey industry representatives was formed to represent New Zealand’s interests to develop an international standard for bee products. Three of the New Zealand ISO representatives (Terry Braggins, Young Mee Yoon and Kat Holt) regularly meet with representatives from about 35 countries to make sure international standards for honey and hive products are reasonable and fair for all parties.
Four new standards are being developed covering honey, propolis, royal jelly and pollen. Kat Holt (Massey University) plays a major role in the pollen analysis while Terry Braggins (formerly of Analytica Labs) and Young Mee Yoon (Honey New Zealand) are involved in the honey and propolis work. The main focus has been the new honey standard, the most complex of the standards, receiving more than 300 comments from participating countries.
This work has involved many hours of meetings, consultations and analysis over the last six years and trips to Nanjing and Paris. Work that is largely invisible to the producers, exporters and consumers that benefit from it.
As most international meetings are timed to suit the working hours of the more populous northern hemisphere, this can mean being available for meetings that start at 10 pm or 11 pm and may not finish until after midnight.
When he signed up, Terry says he didn’t think it would take so long to complete the process. But the shadow committee is now consulting with New Zealanders on the final Draft International Standard (DIS) and went to ballot for final approval on 16 September this year.
The draft international honey standard
The new international honey standard is based on the Codex Alimentarius honey guidelines, which were written in Europe before the mānuka honey industry really took off. According to Terry, these guidelines were accepted by the committee as a minimum standard of quality. The group’s objective has been to enhance the overall quality of honey and implement strategies to reduce or eliminate honey fraud, such as incorrect provenance (e.g., mānuka honey being sold as New Zealand-origin when it is not) or sugar syrup fortification.
Honey regularly appears in the top three most adulterated foods in food fraud reports (up with milk and olive oil). Terry says most adulteration occurs in products where some producers fortify honey with sugar syrup, enzymes, colours, or flavouring. In some adulteration cases, hives may have been fed sugar syrup and the honey harvested too early, sometimes before the honey has even been capped by the bees. This gives the honey a high moisture content (e.g., 40% water). This may then be mechanically dried and sold as honey. But it is not honey, says Terry, and it is one of the factors driving down honey prices internationally. These standards are being put in place to try to prevent that happening.
The DIS covers good beekeeping practices such as harvesting and feeding practices, quality factors, post-harvest treatment and hygiene requirements as well as packaging, transportation and testing methods that can be used to identify the quality and provenance of honey.
The draft standard defines good beekeeping practice as “harvesting mature honey with less than 18% moisture content. Honey should be harvested from combs with at least an average of 80% capped-filled combs”.
The draft standard also includes provisions that stipulate honey should not undergo moisture reduction. “Any techniques that use a significant reduction in air pressure (vacuum air) to reduce the water content of the honey is not permitted.” The New Zealand committee is currently contending that a complete ban on moisture reduction is too restrictive and is proposing that moisture reduction should be allowable for honey with no more than 24% moisture content. This would allow the prevention of fermentation but prevent adulteration with high-moisture immature honey.
As someone who has been working in the apiculture industry since 1997, Young Mee has noticed on her travels that New Zealand’s honey processes are different from many countries, partly due to the sheer volume New Zealand producers are packing per day. Many local operators pack the same amount of honey in a day as international operators might be packing in a year, which requires different types of post-harvest intervention.
The draft standard does, however, allow for a higher moisture content of 21% for mānuka honey. Mānuka honey is also exempt from meeting electrical conductivity tests as it is one of some honey types that have fluctuating conductivity values.
Diastase activity requirement
On the positive side, the draft standard now classifies mānuka as a low-diastase activity honey.
Mānuka honey, one of the few types of honey that is aged before being sold, often fails the diastase enzyme test on the international stage. This enzyme diminishes in honey over time and many EU countries have a standard that diastase activity must be over 8 Schade units. New Zealand has a wide variation of diastase activity levels even before the mānuka honey is extracted from the hive. With this evidence, New Zealand representatives on the committee convinced the technical experts that New Zealand mānuka could be considered a low-diastase honey and that because it is not fresh, it doesn’t mean it is low quality.
MGO™ levels in mānuka honey increase over time, enhancing its bioactivity, which is a key factor in its appeal to consumers. According to Young Mee, experts are now more receptive to this idea due to the scientific evidence provided by Terry. “They don’t just accept it because we say so. Terry did a lot of work on that,” says Young Mee.
The draft standard now includes mānuka honey amongst the honey types that must show a minimum diastase activity of 3 Schade units as opposed to the 8 Schade unit minimum expected of most honey types.
“That’s really a major achievement. It took a bit of convincing,” says Terry.
The counterfeit honey problem
Producers around the world are struggling to compete with the price of fake honey and producers that are adulterating their honey are managing to keep up with changing testing methods almost as quickly as laboratories can create them.
The main sugar in honey is C3 sugar, so honey with levels of C4 sugars above 7% has often been treated as adulterated honey. This has caused headaches for some mānuka honey producers as mānuka honey can return a high C4 sugar test result, even though the honey has not been fortified with C4 sugar syrups.
Young Mee says, that while the C4 test was originally effective at identifying certain types of sugar adulteration, it is now being bypassed by fraudsters using C3-type sugars that the test cannot detect. The overseas laboratories are now using an array of new test methods including a type of honey fingerprinting—comparing honey samples to see if they match the gold standard for each variety.
The draft standard outlines the accepted tests for honey quality, and laboratories may use other tests to identify fraud that they are unwilling to reveal, says Young Mee, to keep the information from fraudsters looking for ways to beat the tests.
Getting your honey up to standard
Terry says exporters can opt to undertake minimal testing before exporting and hope that the honey doesn’t fail tests done by importers, or they can decide to make sure their product is of optimum quality before leaving the country, with more extensive testing. But he acknowledges that the latter option is going to be more costly.
Being careful with sugar feeding—leaving a suitable break after feeding and before harvesting honey—can help ensure appropriate sugar type in honey, and reduce the risk of a producers’ honey failing importer tests. The draft standard bans the harvesting of hives while being fed sugar syrups.
Young Mee points out “that sellers of mānuka honey within New Zealand only need to meet basic standards for moisture and sugar levels. However, in her opinion, mānuka honey sold domestically should also adhere to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) export standards, which define what qualifies as ‘mānuka honey’ to ensure consistency and quality.”
If the draft standard is approved, it will be published in early 2025. This will be the end of the process for the main honey standard but there is still more work to be done. Turkey has proposed a standard specific to their pine honey (Turkey produces 80% of the world’s pine honey in the export market). Terry estimates this will take another three years. The propolis and pollen standards are likely to take at least two more years of work to complete.
The other industry representatives on the New Zealand committee are Tony Wright (UMFHA), Jackie Evans (Comvita), Kannan Subramanian (Manuka Health) and Duncan Lash (MPI).
Terry Braggins
Young Mee Yoon.