Nature’s wonder, a natural sweetener, HONEY is derived from the nectar of flowers collected by the ever-busy honeybees. Besides acting as an excellent ingredient for cooking and baking, the healing properties of honey undoubtedly make its best use in medicines also.
Used in Allopathy, Unani and Ayurvedic medicine, honey has ‘n’ number of uses in human consumption. Honey in India is found in different forms and different colours. Common forms of honey are comb honey, cream honey, liquid honey, etc.
It is believed that Kashmir Honey from the valleys of Kashmir is the tastiest form of honey.
Researchers from international food regulations say, “honey stipulates a pure product that does not allow for the addition of any other substances …this includes, but is not limited to, water or other sweeteners”.
Though available in abundance in natural form, traders, suppliers, and manufacturers tend to temper with the sweet honey of the ever-bearing hardworking bees. Speaking of the recent uproar in the manufacture of honey in the food & beverage industry has brought the biggest question mark imprinted on the minds of the consumers. Today, one will definitely not extend his hand to purchase a jar of honey, as he is uncertain whether he is buying sugar syrup at the price of pure honey!!!
In lieu of the honey adulteration, Mithai & Namkeen Times gained an opportunity to have some rewarding time with Dr. Shahzada Singh Kapoor, Founder & CEO of Little Bee Impex giving an insight into the honey world.
A little about ‘Little Bee’
Little Bee is a 100% export-oriented unit, the largest producer and exporter of natural honey and honey-based produce from India.
Company-owned Infrastructure, Plant and Equipment, Warehouse, Processing Machinery, Storage, and State-of-Art laboratory are more than enough to fulfill food safety and quality requirements for today’s emergent food market. Little Bee Impex manufactures and exports its honey products to 42 countries across every continent and around the globe and also has the credibility of exclusive export Beeswax, Beehives from India.
Honey is collected from different parts of India and from the hilly areas of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and many more.
The famous Kashmir Honey is the bestselling brand of Little Bee Impex, exclusively collected from the beautiful and mesmerizing landscapes of Kashmir.
Little Bee Impex, has its own beehives (to mention more than 50,000) for the honey produces.
The success of the Little Bee Impex has also resulted in improvements in the workplace, health, and safety at all levels in the company.
State of the laboratory includes HPLC, SPECTROPHOTOMETER, COLORIMETER, HIGH PRECISION, REFRACTOMETER, and other biological equipment to test any impurities in honey including pesticides and antibiotics.
At Little Bee Impex, quality control lab, extensive tests are carried out to determine the quality of honey during purchasing, processing, and packaging.
From Dr. Shahzada Singh Kapoor the excerpts follows:
What are the signs to identify pure
honey?
Firstly, we cultivate our honey from the blissful land of Kashmir, where honey is in its purest form and with heavenly taste.
Due to the weather and freshest flowers of the valley, the nectar has a unique taste and texture enhancing the tastebuds leaving a lingering smoothness of the slurptious liquid. This pure organic honey from our own-planted beehives is exported to the Middle-East, the US, and European countries.
Talking about the signs to identify the purity of honey after it is bottled and sold, as a consumer, there is no method however to identify the pureness of honey. You need a complete laboratory with the latest testing gadgets to check the contamination of honey.
The reason is simple, there is a scientific type of adulteration where finding contamination with your naked eyes is not just possible. There are many traditional styles to identify the purity of honey which actually no longer exists in current times.
In the days bygone, the honey business often involved sugar or jaggery syrup as major adulteration to increase the volume. The level of adulteration these days is at a different level that is practically hard to detect. There is a test called NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) that gives reliable results about the type of foreign mixture in the honey.
What does it mean when we refer to the term ‘Adulterated Honey’?
Adulteration in honey means adding anything (basically other sweeteners) intentionally to increase the volume and mass of the honey for the benefit of sales and profit earned by it.
Adding sugar, jaggery, rice syrup, corn syrup, golden syrup in honey is definitely a form of adulteration. Any kind of syrups added to pure honey falls under the crime of adulteration.
Honey cultivated and extracted from bee-hives is pure honey. Such pure honey often varies in tastes and shades depending upon the nectar collected from the sourced flowers.
Of late there was an uproar whereby many top brands were tarnished for making adulterated honey. What is your opinion about the brand names involved?
The problem is genuine and does exists in the country. There is a solution to it. The entire industry needs an overhauling and cleaning of adulterants.
Indian government should strictly provide one standard benchmark to be adopted by all the honey producers and traders to check the quality parameter and only then can we think of giving a better quality of honey and do away with discrepancies of adulteration in honey. Thus, we cannot raise objections to any single entity of honey producer.
The ones who are backing away from the Indian standard of honey production are actually the lowest in quality and honey quality can never be detected.
The new testing instruments and parameters reckoned from Germany are here to check the pollution within the packs of honey. The latest testing method NMR shows adulteration level in the honey samples successfully, but the availability of these test-lab instruments are fewer in numbers in India.
Honey-making is a slow process. Still, the demand for honey is more than the production. How do then the manufacturers keep up the pace with the supply/demand market? How best can you support this query with reliable data?
The production of honey in the Indian market is big enough, and to prove this the exports of honey to the other countries testifies with affirmative fact. The best quality goes out of the country and the sub-standard level is what flourishes in the Indian market.
To justify the pure quality of exported honey, these exports undergo a severe test parameter according to the importing countries who have set the testing matrix very high than of India.
Here in our country, we still have a weak parameter. Hence our honey for exports stands true to its established standards laid down according to the USFDA or EU standards of imports.
America is a vast country and has its own honey production industry.
Do they need to import from India?
Yes, America is a gigantic nation and it ranks fourth in the honey making, but the home consumption of the honey is so high that the American Honey industry cannot fulfill the domestic demand and hence they have to rely on imports from other countries, esp from India. They use honey in everything as the main ingredient in their daily food consumption.
In India, honey consumption is deficient, and the demand mostly rises only in the winter seasons as cough and cold remedy.
The general assumption of Indian people is that honey by nature is hot and so are its properties. Hence it’s a seasonal and winter product.
According to you, what corrective measures can be adopted by FSSAI to check and stop adulteration in Honey?
It is an appeal to FSSAI that it should make it point to follow the latest standards set by the developed countries. It is dreary to see that FSSAI is still following the age-old scales and testing equipment that are outdated in today’s world.
Not only for honey but in totality, the testing standards for the food industry have to be revived for the betterment of the consumers and the Food Safety department on the whole. FSSAI should follow the European standards as it the best in the world.