Know Your Honey

Do you know what's really in your honey?

Not everything sold as honey has the same story.

Our love of honey began with the bees.

In our travels, we fell in love with these extraordinary little creatures — and with the incredible honey and honey products we discovered along the way. We came home to New Mexico inspired by what we'd experienced and wanting to create something of our own: a small-batch business that celebrated both the bees themselves and the remarkable product of their work.

So we began establishing our own apiaries and developing the honey products we wanted to share here at home.

But bees work on their own schedule, not ours.

We Have Bees. So Why Aren't We Harvesting Their Honey Yet?

Because right now, they need it more than we do.

A honeybee colony doesn't make honey for us — it makes honey to feed itself and survive periods when forage is scarce, especially through winter.

As we establish and grow our apiaries, we've made a deliberate choice to prioritize strong, healthy colonies and adequate food stores over getting a honey harvest as quickly as possible.

We could push for a harvest and replace what we take with supplemental sugar syrup. But that's not the kind of beekeeping we want to practice. When possible, we'd rather leave our bees with the honey they worked all season to make.

So for now, we're patient.

When our colonies have enough honey to comfortably meet their own needs and provide a responsible surplus, we'll be incredibly proud to put honey from our own apiaries into our jars.

Until then, we source honey from New Mexico producers to create our products.

And interestingly, needing that additional honey taught us something we hadn't expected.

We started reading labels more carefully.

Products that were presented in ways that implied they were local weren't necessarily produced here at all. We began discovering just how much honey sold in the United States is imported, sometimes from multiple countries, and how difficult it can be for an ordinary shopper to know exactly where the honey in a bottle originated or how it was handled along the way.

And the deeper we looked, the more we learned about "fake" honey, added sugar syrups, extensive processing, and the very real problem of honey fraud.

Honestly, we were disappointed.

But it also made something very clear:

If we're going to put our name on a jar, we want to know the story of the honey inside it.

Did You Know? Most Honey Eaten in America Is Imported

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, more than 70% of the honey consumed in the United States is imported. (Source: U.S. Food & Drug Administration — Imported Honey Adulteration Testing)

Imported doesn't automatically mean bad honey. There are excellent beekeepers producing authentic honey all over the world.

But a long and complicated supply chain can make something very important harder to answer:

Where, exactly, did my honey come from?

For us, that question matters.

Honey Fraud Is Real

Unfortunately, honey is vulnerable to food fraud.

Honey is relatively expensive to produce. Inexpensive sugar syrups aren't.

The FDA specifically monitors honey for what it calls economically motivated adulteration — essentially, substituting or adding a cheaper ingredient for financial gain.

In honey, that can mean adding undeclared sweeteners made from cane, corn, rice, or sugar beets and still selling the product as honey. (Source: U.S. Food & Drug Administration — Economically Motivated Adulteration of Honey)

And this isn't just theoretical.

In an FDA sampling program conducted in 2021–2022, 14 of 144 imported honey samples — about 10% — were found to be violative.

A subsequent 2022–2023 investigation found 3 of 107 imported samples — about 3% — violative.

In FY2025, the FDA expanded its testing to include both domestic and imported honey. Of 102 samples tested, four — approximately 4% — were found to be violative, including two domestic and two imported samples.

Sources: FDA FY2021–22 testing · FDA FY2022–23 testing · FDA FY2025 testing

These were targeted surveillance programs, not random surveys of every jar of honey in America, so those percentages shouldn't be interpreted as the percentage of all honey that's adulterated.

But they demonstrate something important:

Honey fraud exists — and regulators are actively looking for it.

The Problem Isn't Just American

One of the largest recent honey investigations happened in Europe.

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre analyzed 320 samples of honey imported into the European Union during a coordinated investigation in 2021–2022.

Of those samples, 147 — 46% — were considered suspicious of noncompliance because testing detected at least one marker of an extraneous sugar source. (Source: European Commission — Coordinated Action on Honey Fraud)

That's an extraordinary number — but it deserves context.

The European Commission specifically cautions that the investigation was not designed to estimate the percentage of all honey on the European market that is adulterated, and the results shouldn't be generalized to all imported honey.

Still, it's one more reason we're passionate about knowing the source of our honey.

What About Heated or “Pasteurized” Honey?

This is another subject surrounded by a lot of misinformation.

Heating honey doesn't make it fake.

Honey may be warmed during commercial processing because warmth lowers its viscosity, making it easier to pump, filter, blend and bottle. Heating can also dissolve existing crystals and help honey remain clear and liquid longer.

There's also an important distinction between gently warming honey and subjecting it to substantial heat for extended periods.

Research shows that heat exposure can alter characteristics used to evaluate honey quality. Two commonly studied measures are diastase activity, an enzyme naturally present in honey, and hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), which tends to increase with heating and prolonged storage. The effects depend heavily on both temperature and time.

Source: Scientific Review — Effects of Processing and Heating on Honey Quality

So we're not going to tell you that warming honey somehow turns it into corn syrup.

It doesn't.

But we do believe that when bees have already created something this remarkable, there's good reason to handle it thoughtfully.

Crystals Aren't the Enemy

That cloudy or crystallized jar in your pantry?

It isn't necessarily old, spoiled, or defective.

Crystallization is a natural property of real honey. Some varieties crystallize rapidly; others can remain liquid considerably longer because the rate depends partly on the honey's natural glucose-to-fructose composition, floral source, temperature, and storage conditions.

Commercial processing may deliberately delay crystallization because shoppers have traditionally expected honey to remain perfectly clear and liquid.

We look at it differently.

In fact, our Whipped Honey deliberately harnesses crystallization. We encourage honey to form incredibly small, uniform crystals until it develops that silky, buttery texture our customers love.

Sometimes nature doesn't need to be “fixed.”

It just needs to be understood.

Why New Mexico Honey?

Because we want to know where our honey comes from.

Until our own bees can provide a responsible surplus, we use locally sourced New Mexico honey while we establish and grow our own apiaries.

That distinction matters to us.

We're not going to pretend every jar came from our own bees when it didn't. We're building toward that goal honestly — hive by hive, and on the bees' timetable rather than ours.

Along the way, we're supporting honey produced here in New Mexico and building a business that connects the finished jar back to something much bigger:

the bees, the beekeeper, and the land that produced it.

Our goal isn't to convince you that every imported or commercially processed honey is bad.