Why is honey so expensive? The sweet (and bitter) truth.

Cheap honey vs expensive honey

Ever gone to the supermarket and thought to yourself why honey on the shelf is so cheap (£2 or lower) and then gone to a local marketplace to then see honey being sold sometimes for over £10! Sounds ridiculous right?

Maybe you’re thinking it’s based on the scale of economics - well that’s true to a point especially with the large producers but also fails to truly encapsulate the real problem - honey fraud.

Honey fraud

Sadly, probably around a third of all jars on the shelves may not be truly honey, instead being replaced with cheaper syrups or being altered at later stages by humans to drive down the price. Honey is now the third most defrauded food after milk and olive oil.

Honey - not that easy to make

Honey is a luxury product made by bees but still requires specialist skills from humans to obtain, time consuming effort on the part of skilled labourers and additional costs from keeping the bees healthy to buying the equipment to extract the honey, jarring, etc.

Small-scale, local beekeepers

Now turn to local honey made within the UK, most beekeepers only operate on a small-scale basis (usually only 1-2 hives) and only accounts for 14% of domestic consumption - meaning less than 2 out of 10 jars of honey sold are made here in the UK. Most big products of UK honey come from bigger countries, especially China. Whilst most local keepers share more expensive equipment to keep costs down, many get into the hobby for the love of the bees and for paying respect of the product that the bees work so hard to make, not cutting corners for profit.