US honey standards

Grades are not a standard of identity

The United States Standards for Grades of Extracted Honey are administered by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service. They are voluntary: a packer uses them if they want the grade on the label, and pays for the service. They score a honey on soluble solids, absence of defects, flavour and aroma, and clarity, and assign Grade A, B, C or Substandard.

The identity gap

For years there was no federal definition of what honey is. The industry petitioned the FDA for a standard of identity; the FDA declined to set one and instead issued guidance on the proper labelling of honey and honey products — for example that a product with added sweetener may not be called honey, and should be named to reflect what it contains.

• Guidance sets out the agency's thinking and is not a regulation with the force of a standard of identity.
• Misbranding and adulteration provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act still apply, and are the actual legal hook.
• Several states, including Florida and California, adopted their own honey standards, so the applicable definition can depend on where the honey is sold.
• There is no federal equivalent of the EU's filtered-honey designation, so ultrafiltered product is treated differently on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Where the enforcement actually happened

The most consequential US action on honey has been in trade rather than in food composition. Antidumping duties on Chinese honey created a strong incentive to disguise origin, and the resulting transhipment through third countries produced criminal prosecutions — the largest food fraud cases the country has seen. Origin fraud and adulteration are entangled in the US market for this reason, and the enforcement tools reflect it.