Is honey produced in accordance with Chinese standards “fake honey”?

A comparative analysis of Chinese and EU regulatory frameworks on honey

 

In recent years, debates over the authenticity of honey have repeatedly surfaced in European public discourse. Chinese honey has frequently been labelled as “fake honey” or “adulterated honey”. Following the introduction of the new isotopic method EN 17958:2024 for honey testing in the European Union, some commentators have even gone so far as to equate the continued sale of Chinese honey with “knowingly placing counterfeit goods on the market”. If left unclarified, such claims may mislead end-consumers and, more importantly, substantially damage the commercial reputation and market opportunities of beekeeping enterprises and traders that organize production and export strictly in accordance with Chinese law and the laws of importing countries.  

To address the question of whether “Chinese honey is, at the level of regulatory design, allowed to be ‘fake honey’”, one must return to the applicable legal norms and technical standards. This article reviews the Chinese standards for honey, production-process requirements and export control mechanisms, and compares them with the existing and newly developed standard systems in the European Union. It does so from four perspectives—(1) the definition of honey, (2) the prohibition of added substances, (3) compositional criteria, and (4) authenticity-testing methods—to clarify, in regulatory terms, what is regarded as “genuine” and “fake” honey.  

 

1. Definition of honey: A shared framework centered on ripening in the comb

Across Chinese, EU and Codex rules, “honey” is not any sugary liquid but a tightly defined natural product that must be collected, transformed, dehydrated and fully ripened in the comb by bees.

Within the Chinese regulatory system, the legal and standard-based definitions of honey show a high degree of consistency across different normative levels. The National Food Safety Standard Honey (GB 14963-2011) defines honey (in the author’s paraphrase of the Chinese text) as a natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the plants, which honeybees collect, blend with their own specific substances and transform through full ripening. This definition contains three core elements: (1) the raw material must originate from nectar, plant secretions or honeydew collected by bees; (2) it must be mixed with specific bee secretions and undergo biological transformation; and (3) the process must involve full ripening, implying specific temporal and process-related requirements.

The industry standard Honey (GH/T 18796-2012) further specifies “ripening” as the process whereby bees transform, dehydrate and store the collected material in the comb until it becomes mature honey. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ standard Green Food – Bee Products (NY/T 752-2020) adopts a definition that is fully aligned with GB 14963 and GH/T 18796, likewise emphasizing that honey must be transformed, dehydrated, stored and ripened within the comb before it can be marketed as “honey”. In short, Chinese standards take the complete biological process of “collection – transformation &ndas