Image credit and thanks: Kai Hawes

World Bee Mark©

 

Honey Fraud and The European Commission Combat Against Food Fraud

 

The European honey market, worth about 2.3 billion Euros annually, is rife with honey fraud.

Honey fraud undermines small beekeeping 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.

The World Bee Project CIC is a partner in the European consortium ALLIANCE. Our research partner is  CIHEAM-IAMM – Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Montpellier, UMR CEE-M – Center for Environmental Economics – Montpellier, France. ALLIANCE introduces a novel concept based on emerging technologies towards detecting and preventing food fraud. Its 25 partners come from 12 countries and bring expertise across and along food supply chains in addition to leading universities, think tanks, innovation managers, and technology developers. ALLIANCE represents a paradigm shift in the European Commission HORIZON Food Supply Chain Systems’ management for the combat against Food Fraud and has won a 3-year European Commission HORIZON-CL6-2022-FARM2FORK Grant Award.

 

The World Bee Project’s BeeMark©pilot project is fundamentally about ensuring that beekeeping remains a viable livelihood option for ‘organic’ beekeepers and can support bee welfare and improve food security and the environment in the long term. The World Bee Project seeks to demonstrate how technology can help beekeepers establish the provenance and purity of their honey to better differentiate it from blended and adulterated honey of unknown origin sold at lower prices in supermarkets.

 

The overarching goal of ALLIANCE is entirely in line with the new EU standard agricultural policy, Common Agricultural Policy 2023-2027, for social, environmental, and economic sustainability in agriculture and rural areas to support competitiveness and offer strategic plans to cope with food crisis management.

Our food, our health, our planet, and our future all depend on healthy pollinators.