Fake Honey in Australia: What 2025 Testing Really Found

In December 2025, Australian beekeepers had around 30 imported honey samples from supermarket shelves independently tested by labs in Germany, using techniques that can pick up dilution our own border checks currently can’t.

Several of those samples came back adulterated, honey cut with cheap sugar syrups like rice syrup, but still labelled as pure.

Australia imported about 9,000 tonnes of honey in 2024, mostly from China, Malaysia and Thailand, so this isn’t a small side issue. The ACCC is now investigating possible mislabelling of honey sold here.

Is this actually new?

Not exactly, but it keeps happening. Back in 2018, an international honey fraud-testing lab made headlines, claiming that close to half of the honey on Australian supermarket shelves was adulterated. That figure went everywhere.

What gets left out is that the testing method behind it, called NMR testing, was later found by regulators not yet to be reliable enough to stand up as legal proof. So I want to be fair here: that specific “half of it’s fake” number is contested, not settled fact.

What isn’t contested is that Australia has a real, ongoing honey mislabelling problem. The ACCC has previously taken real enforcement action against honey suppliers over misleading labelling, and the chair of the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council has openly called our border testing “extremely outdated,” saying it can’t reliably detect adulterants like rice syrup.

So somewhere between “half of it’s fake” and “nothing to see here” is the honest, current answer. But it’s still not good enough.

Can you test honey at home?

I get asked this question sometimes, and the answer to this is no, not really. You’ve probably seen the water test, the flame test, or “real honey crystallises, and fake honey doesn’t.”

I want to bust these properly, because repeating them does more harm than good.

• Water test: doesn’t tell you anything about added sugar syrup, only about moisture and thickness, which vary naturally anyway.
• Flame test: dangerous, unreliable, and destroys the honey’s natural enzymes in the process. Skip it entirely.
• Crystallising: this comes down to the ratio of glucose to fructose in that particular honey, not whether it’s pure. Some genuine honeys barely crystallise at all, others do it fast. Neither tells you anything about fraud.

Honey adulteration is now sophisticated enough to pass amateur tests and sometimes even lab tests. A jar can tick every box on a viral “how to spot fake honey” list and still not be real honey.

So how do you actually know your honey is real?

Since you can’t test it in your kitchen, the answer comes down to trust and traceability, not tricks. A few things actually do help:

• Look for a clear “100% Australian honey” claim, not a vague “packaged from local and imported ingredients”.
• Ask if the brand can tell you which hives or region it came from. If they can’t answer, that’s the answer.
• Be a little sceptical of honey that’s suspiciously cheap. Real honey costs what it costs because bees and beekeepers do the work.

None of that is a lab test, but it’s more reliable than any kitchen trick circulating online.

How we do things differently at Ben’s Bees

I’ve never wanted to be a middleman for honey that I can’t personally vouch for. Every jar of Ben’s Bees honey comes straight from our own hives around Melbourne. We spin it from the frame, sieve it, and bottle it; nothing else happens to it in between. No blending, no importing, no mystery ingredients standing in for the real thing.

If a honey brand can’t tell you where it’s from or how it’s made, it’s worth asking about; otherwise, give it a wide berth. I’d genuinely love it if more people started asking brands those questions.

If you want to try honey where you know exactly the story behind it, our Pure Raw Honey 500g is spun straight from our Melbourne hives, nothing added, nothing taken away.

Real honey doesn’t need a mystery ingredient list. It just needs bees and someone willing to tell you exactly where it came from… and be honest with you about what’s in it.