Executive Summary

Behind the image of a natural, simple product, the global honey market has become vulnerable to widespread adulteration and laundering. Modern supply chains now contain fraudulent products to be blended, relabelled, and redistributed at scale before reaching consumers.

Based on the available information, we assess honey adulteration and laundering has significantly grown over the past five years, and is likely to continue expanding globally. Despite increasingly sophisticated methods to detect honey fraud, dishonest actors constantly exploit analytical blind spots and poor regulation, enabling adulteration methods to outpace detection capabilities. Additionally, it is likely that such fraud is geographically concentrated – particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, like China, where markets have relatively weak oversight.