Food Safety News Questions Ultra-Filtered Honey

A November 7, 2011, Food Safety News report has questioned the practice
of filtering honey to remove pollen, alleging that “more than three-fourths
of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce.”
According to investigative reporter Andrew Schneider, the ultrafiltering
process “is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese” that makes it
impossible to determine the honey’s source. As a result, the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration does not consider ultra-filtered products to be “honey,”
although it does not check domestic honey for pollen.

Food Safety News sent 60 honey samples bought in 10 states and Washington, D.C., to Texas A&M melissopalynologist Vaughn Bryant for pollen analysis. The results purportedly showed that 76 percent of samples bought at groceries stores had all the pollen removed, while 100 percent of samples from drugstores and 100 percent of individually packaged samples for restaurants contained no pollen. Bryant also reported “that every one of the samples . . . bought at farmers markets, co-ops and ‘natural stores’ like PCC and Trader Joe’s had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen.”

Some producers claiming to source their honey from U.S. and Canadian
suppliers evidently told Schneider that ultra-filtering gives consumers “crystal
clear” honey as desired, as well as increased shelf life. But American Honey
Producers Association President Mark Jensen refuted these arguments, saying
that removing pollen from honey “makes no sense” because it is costly and
detracts from overall quality. “I don’t know of any U.S. producer who would
want to do that,” he said. “In my judgment, it is pretty safe to assume that any
ultra-filtered honey on store shelves is Chinese honey and it’s even safer to
assume that it entered the country uninspected and in violation of federal
laws.” Food Safety News is produced by plaintiffs’ firm Marler Clark.