'We're hiding some very dirty secrets'. The scandal of fake foreign honey

An investigation by Jon Ungoed-Thomas reveals the worldwide honey fraud that begins in China and ends with allegations of adulterated jars on UK supermarkets shelves

- Jon Ungoed-Thomas

It's like a fine wine, says Sarah Wyndham Lewis, sitting at a table at her home in Essex, describing the complexity and depth of taste of real honey.

A good honey has its own terroir, she adds. "We're looking at about 200 substances in honey, and they are responsive to the soil, the weather and the prevailing conditions... You've got this extraordinary potential for limitless variety."

Wyndham Lewis is a honey sommelier and founder of Bermondsey Street Bees, supplying restaurants with raw honey and training food professionals to use it. She believes, too, in educating everyone about the watery, blended "anonymised sugary concoction" found on the shelves of some British supermarkets.

It is not just a question of taste; many beekeepers believe that honey is at the heart of one of the world's biggest food frauds, and that some, including jars sold in the UK, is blended with cheap sugar syrup from China. "We're hiding some very dirty secrets here," says Wyndham Lewis. "Nobody wants to tackle it."

Britain is the world's biggest importer of Chinese honey. In the coastal provinces of eastern China, factories heat, blend and pack jars of one of the world's most traded commodities. The region is also a hub for the manufacture of fructose syrup, which can mimic the taste of honey and pass some authenticity checks.

UK regulators have been accused of being "supine" in the face of a huge and largely undetected global fraud. Under current rules, a blend of honeys from different countries does not require those countries to be listed on the label. Last year, beekeepers attending a food fair in Paris secretly recorded sales teams from east Asia claiming the UK was targeted with the cheapest honey because of a lack of robust and effective testing.