"Honey Laundering" Under the Spotlight

(MoneyWatch)  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is out this week with a special report on the global honey industry that will leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

It reads, in part, like an industrial espionage novel, complete with faked bills of lading, high-level political infighting and overburdened inspectors trying to enforce the law. The baddest actors in this drama would seem to be the Chinese -- industry experts told the newspaper that a lot of subterfuge goes into efforts by Chinese honey producers to get around U.S import restrictions. (The U.S. levies a $1.20 a pound tariff on Chinese honey, after determining that producers there were illegally dumping honey here at prices below their cost of production; the FDA also watches Chinese honey for traces of antibiotics banned here.)

In the past decade, the paper notes, U.S. honey imports from places like Singapore, Vietnam and Russia have skyrocketed, even though actual honey production in these places hasn't gone up. Singapore, in particular, barely produces any honey at all; honey produced in Vietnam historically has been a darker, heavier version than the type preferred here.

But corporate America -- including big retail and manufacturing names like Kroger, Wal-Mart, Target, General Mills and Kellogg's -- also comes under fire for what the P-I describes as misleading label claims. To site one specific, the paper says that one brand of honey sold nationwide by Kroger carries a label claim that it's been certified organic by the Washington State Department of Agriculture, even though the state doesn't have an organic honey certification program. (It does conduct routine food-safety inspections on honey producers.) In other cases, the paper notes that many processed foods that have the word "honey" in their names have little actual honey in them -- and some have no honey at all.

The Kroger case points out part of the problem, according to the P-I. There's no U.S. government standard for what constitutes organic honey -- or even a standard definition for what honey is. That means unscrupulous honey packers can slip water or cheaper sweateners into raw honey to stretch profits. The Florida Department of Agriculture is working on an organic honey standard, and industry people say they're hopeful it can become a national code.

The report was written by P-I correspondent Andrew Schneider. He also keeps a food industry blog for the P-I, which you can find here.

One more note: when you read the stories online, scroll down to the bottom of the page to check out the ads that Google AdSense is helpfully providing to the P-I. I about choked on my coffee when I got to the end of the story about how easy it is to falsely claim one's honey is certified organic, and found an ad for -- you guessed it -- organic honey. Sometimes the algorithms just don't work.