Honey looks like a simple purchase and behaves like a complicated one. It is a natural product whose composition moves with the flower, the weather and the week of extraction; it is expensive relative to sugar syrup; and it is bought by weight in opaque steel drums. Those three facts together explain why honey carries more analytical testing than almost any other food a buyer will handle.
The four commercial monoflorals
Acacia, from Robinia pseudoacacia, is the premium article: near-colourless, mild, and slow to crystallise because of its high fructose to glucose ratio. The flow lasts roughly two weeks in late May and June, so annual supply is decided in a very short window.
Linden is the aromatic one, pale amber with a green cast and a strongly minty, camphorous character. It is bought for flavour, and it is the honey most likely to be rejected by a buyer who did not taste it first.
Sunflower is the volume honey: bright yellow, high in glucose and fast to crystallise, which makes it the natural raw material for creamed and set honey and a handling problem for anyone who wanted it liquid.
Buckwheat is dark, malty and high in conductivity and polyphenols, bought by bakery, confectionery and nutraceutical customers who want colour and a flavour that survives processing.
Full detail on all four, including the colour bands and the parameters that separate them, sits in the Ukrainian honey guide.
What the law actually sets
Council Directive 2001/110/EC, and specifically its Annex II, sets the composition criteria that make honey honey in the EU: moisture not more than 20 g per 100 g, fructose plus glucose not less than 60 g per 100 g for blossom honey, sucrose not more than 5 g per 100 g with a 10 g allowance for false acacia and a few other origins, water-insoluble solids not more than 0.1 g per 100 g, free acidity not more than 50 milliequivalents per kg, HMF not more than 40 mg per kg and diastase not less than 8 on the Schade scale, with a conditional allowance down to 3 for naturally low-enzyme honeys where HMF is not more than 15 mg per kg.
Two of those lines are worth reading as a pair rather than separately. HMF rises with heat and with age; diastase falls with heat. Together they distinguish an old honey from a cooked one, which is a distinction no single parameter can make.
Authenticity
Honey adulteration is a mature problem, and the regulatory attention rose sharply after the European Commission’s coordinated action on honey reported in 2023. The practical position now is that a bulk honey purchase is expected to come with an authenticity file rather than an assurance.
- Stable carbon isotope ratio analysis by AOAC 998.12, which detects C-4 plant sugars from cane and maize and is blind to C-3 syrups.
- NMR profiling against a commercial reference database, whose value depends on how well that database covers the declared origin.
- LC-IRMS and oligosaccharide markers for the syrups the other methods miss.
- Pollen analysis for botanical origin, read by someone who knows the crop.
The signal to look for is agreement between methods. How to verify honey authenticity sets out the sequence.
The import route
Honey is a product of animal origin, and that classification decides everything about how it enters the Union. The exporting establishment must be listed, the country must have an approved residue monitoring plan, the consignment travels under an official health certificate following the model in Regulation (EU) 2020/2235, and it enters through a designated border control post with a Common Health Entry Document in TRACES NT under Regulation (EU) 2017/625. Buyers whose experience is in cereals or fruit are regularly caught by this, because none of it applies to a container of wheat.
Where to go next
- Acacia honey – colour grading, the sucrose allowance and the pollen problem.
- Linden honey – the aromatic monofloral and its sensory specification.
- Sunflower honey – crystallisation, creaming and the volume trade.
- Buckwheat honey – the dark, high-conductivity industrial honey.
- Varieties, quality and export guide – the full technical treatment.