Honey producer pooh-poohs rivals

By LIAM DANN

Following in the footsteps of such great thinkers as Winnie the Pooh, the Commerce Commission is pondering how it is that bees make honey.

The commission is considering whether to investigate a complaint from Peter Bray, managing director of Airborne Honey, about the labelling and marketing of premium honey flavours such as manuka and rata.

Bray claims that some honey varieties in supermarkets contain little of the honey type they claim to be.

Despite much discussion, the industry has yet to adopt its own labelling standards and debate rages about the science of identifying honey types.

Traditionally most New Zealand honeys were called clover honey.

"It was something consumers took with a grain of salt," Bray said.

But in the past 20 years both consumers and producers had become more sophisticated, he said.

Using colour matching and pollen testing, it was scientifically possible to identify exactly what flowers had been used to produce a certain style of honey, he said.

Bray said he was aware of producers who heat-treated honeys to give them a dark manuka look when the product was up to 85 per cent clover honey.

Certain kinds of honey are seasonal because of the flowering cycle of the plants in the area.

Beekeepers who produced pure honey varieties had to strip down their hives and start fresh at certain times of year, he said.

"That costs money," he said. "We're talking about people being rewarded for being diligent."

Bray would not name the brands he has identified to the commission.

Commission spokeswoman Jackie Maitland would say only that the complaint had been received and a decision on whether to proceed with a formal investigation would most likely be made within 10 days.

Bray said Airborne had been successfully marketing its honey to consumers as a pure product but a manuka honey shortage last year had forced him to take the issue to the commission.

As the shortage pushed prices up Airborne had its product removed from one supermarket. It was replaced with a cheaper rival honey that was labelled as manuka but which he believes did not contain 70 per cent manuka pollen.

New Zealand Bee Industry Group chairman Milton Jackson said the sector was still looking to put its own standards into place.