Honey Fraud and The European Commission Combat Against Food Fraud
The World Bee Project CIC is a partner in the European consortium ALLIANCE.
The European honey market, worth about 2.3 billion Euros annually is rife with honey fraud. Honey fraud undermines smallholder beekeeping livelihoods and honey businesses and misleads honey consumers. Beekeepers selling natural, authentic honey locally cannot compete with supermarkets selling low-priced fake honey labelled as natural honey but blended with honey from non-EU sources and bulked out with rice or corn syrup.
ALLIANCE is a three-year long project funded by the European Union flagship research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe. The project consortium consists of 25 organisations, leaders in food supply chains, public policy, industry-specific technological development, innovation management, academia and public administration.
ALLIANCE will leverage the capabilities of The World Bee Project’s Bee Mark©that not only allows tracking of digital data but also enables a holistic supply chain traceability, practises and processes that ensure sustainable harvesting and effective labelling to remove fraud.
The Bee Mark©certification standard is based on practices and processes that ensure bee health, sustainable honey harvesting, product integrity and accurate labelling. It is based on decentralised blockchain technologies to validate sustainable & ethical production of honey at source, trace honey from origin to point of sale and share the product’s stories across a range of immutable real time digital channels.
The Bee Mark©uses AI-enabled sensors to continuously monitor bee health and the wellbeing of honey producing bee colonies. The development of the Bee Mark©solution will significantly improve the means to ensure the integrity of honey supply chains and protect the interests of beekeepers and consumers. Consequently, the use of blockchain not only eliminates data manipulation and inadvertent errors, but also clarifies results and logistics by enabling increased trust, transparency, and accountability between disparate entities in the complex honey supply chains. The fully integrated solution will display the following advantages: process automation; real-time tracking and monitoring of production processes; immutable audit trails, full transaction history; proof of certification, identity, provenance and compliance; and improved honey product safety. The overall system is environmentally friendly, producing trusted and immutable results, enhancing transparency and confidence throughout the honey supply chain.
The World Bee Project CIC role in the project is Leader of Task T4.4 in WP4 (Pilot Demonstration and Validation Campaigns) undertaking the organisation of the corresponding use case related with honey.
ALLIANCE will extend The World Bee Project’s BeeMark©eco-label to create a trusted digital honey eco-label, which helps validate honey origin and purity, whilst also promoting bee welfare and biodiversity. The eco-label will help protect consumers, producers, and pollinators as well as help to encourage more sustainable farming practices. Bee welfare will be monitored using intelligent in-hive sensors provided by The World Bee Project’s partners, which are already in use in other projects.
