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THE BRITISH HONEY SCANDAL

Gavin Wren

169,153 views

Britons love honey, yet the industry has been rocked by continuous accusations of adulteration, with numerous reports claiming that honey is substituted with cheap sugar syrups.

Is honey being faked?
Are we being ripped off?
And how can you tell if your honey is real or not?

I tried to answer these questions.

Featuring:
Helen from Highgate Honey
Oussama from Malik's Honey
And 'An Industry Expert' from somewhere

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00:00 Introduction
01:07 Sticky Business
02:58 To The Hives
08:30 What Is Honey?
10:17 Who Has Their Hand In The Jar?
11:24 The Global Honey Trade
13:30 Follow The Money, Honey
17:04 Making Fake Honey
19:01 People Aren't Talking
24:18 The Industry Position
27:44 Are We Being Conned?

20 Comments

@ricochetpig 3 months ago

Someone should do a sting operation. 🐝

@Toast4375 3 months ago

As a beekeeper, thanks for putting this together. Much appreciated!

@ba28272827 3 months ago

Do chocolate next! The amount of produced chocolate hasn't changed. But cocoa imports have dropped 66%!

@robertsmith4830 3 months ago

I think it's best to assume that any mass-market honey is adulterated in some way. If you want pure honey, don't buy it from a supermarket.

@Devonhoneyandcandles 3 months ago

I'm a small scale Devon beekeeper, loved the video, all honey buyers should watch this.

@BigDave41UK 3 months ago

A 30 minute video about the honey scam? Don't mind if I do! I go out of my way to buy local honey from farm shops.

@TheBeeRookie 3 months ago

I am a beekeeper with a business that needs this exposed it has been brilliant to watch you expose the supermarkets and why my PURE HONEY costs more!

@DementedDuckup 3 months ago

There’s a company here in mid-wales that imports honey. They sell multiple different honeys to supermarkets. One of them being their ‘premium’ sold at a higher price and in a fancier bottle. I know for a fact (as my partner use to work there) that the premium honey is just a mix of the honeys from different vats.

@robertpayne1838 3 months ago

For twisting, I would always say reach out to a university. They always need new research projects. For example, I did my undergraduate dissertation at the university of Hertfordshire in collaboration with a CBD oil company called Bud and Tender. We established that we could test CBD Oils using the Ramen Spectroscopy technique and establish whether the high street oils even included CBD and whether they were adulterated with any other Cannabinoids.

@QueenStreetHomestead 3 months ago

After becoming suspicious of a bulk store selling 5lbs of honey for less than $20 CAD, we switched to only buying Ontario No.1 raw honey from an apiary we can (& do) actually visit. Local honey tastes so different from the big store stuff & I am glad we made the switch.

@Hill_Walker 3 months ago

Quite simply, if the label says it's a blend of EU and non EU honey, there's zero possibility it's 100% honey in the UK.

@neeskeskneesk4004 3 months ago

I've not bought supermarket honey in a long time, and was shocked at how cheap it is. I pay (and expect to pay) around £7 for 250g of my local honey (in Scotland).

@lenkapenka6976 3 months ago

nobody gives a shit anymore - about anything - any regulatory agencies we had sold out decades ago

@brickwars9073 3 months ago

Anyone with tastebuds and a brain knows the £1 honey in shops isn’t real honey

@radiocaf 3 months ago

I will always pay extra for local honey over buying anything on a supermarket shelf. That way I can be more certain that it's legitimate honey and not blended with anything else.

@christopherchen2224 3 months ago (edited)

Never a good thing when one single company has control over 60% of the market supply! Particularly suspicious when over 75% of the product is imported from China!

@BlessedByAlMighty 3 months ago

That's why we only sell organic raw honey directly from the bee keepers, with no bee feeding, no pesticides and no antibiotics

@HarrisonTBr0wn 3 months ago

Hi gavin. I'm a beekeeper in Surrey with a very small operation. I'd love to send you some of my honey from spring :)

@juliehayden2019 3 months ago (edited)

I recently lived in Eastern Europe for a couple of years where local honey is big business, every other village house had bees, but they were buying in huge cans of sugar syrup and diluting the honey with it but selling as 100% natural. Huge lorries stacked with sugar syrup we’re coming into the country