Click this link for an overview of honey fraud in the Philippines.
Go into just about any of the large supermarket chains and you will find ‘honey’ for sale on the shelves. There will most usually be many containers of Philippine ‘honey’ from a company called Cem’s Food Products with an address in Manila – with large descriptive labeling including: ‘honey from the forests of Palawan’, ‘rare tropical honey’, ‘extra virgin honey’, ‘raw wild honey’, ‘unfiltered honey’, ‘naturally healthful’, ‘Ultra Heat Treatment’, together with pictures of bees and beehives.
Cem ‘honey’ is about a third of the price of the imported honey (from the USA or Australia). Research indicates that the major supplier of ‘honey’ products to the national supermarkets is the Cem brand. Consumers are being given the clear message that the Cem ‘honey’ is wonderful honey made by bees in plentiful supply from the Philippines at a very reasonable price.
I expect you will have an opinion if you have ever tasted this ‘honey’!
(Offer your opinion in the ‘Leave a Reply’ form below.)Lengthy and detailed enquiries have resulted in the conclusion that the content of the Cem ‘honey’ bottles is not from the Philippines, and that the actual origin and ‘purity’ of the contents are uncertain. The company premises are in an industrial area of Manila and the company has no ‘bee farms’. No Philippine beekeepers appear to supply the Cem’s Food Products company, yet they flood the supermarkets with dubious products clearly labelled and marketed as if it was Philippine honey from Philippine bees! Despite repeated requests the Cem company refuse to state where their ‘honey’ comes from.
The Cem Food Products company has no website and does not offer any customer information or enquiry service, despite it being the largest ‘honey’ supplier in the Philippines. If the Cem company truely respected its customers and retailers, it would be eager to provide open and clear information such as an example professional Indian honey company does (Bharat Honey) and as other professional genuine honey companies do, both in the Philippines and in other countries.
Genuine beekeepers in the Philippines are increasingly prepared to state publicly that this persistent fraudulent activity is wrong and that it needs to be corrected. Fuller information from these enquiries has been repeatedly sent by the author to the Food & Drugs Administration since this is the government body responsible for public food and health issues, but as yet no response from the FDA has been received. This situation would not be acceptable in many other countries – the Philippine people should be able to trust the food they buy in supermarkets.
(The post What is honey? explains the nature of genuine honey.)
This also matters because the existance of this honey fraud negatively impacts on the reputation and perception of Philippine honey, and also undermines any developing beekeeping industry. This situation also contributes to a reduced national population of pollinating bees and consequently lower crop yields for millions of farmers.
(This link provides actual email evidence of the CEM fraud: http://beephilippines.info/honey-fraud-supermarkets-evidence-2/)
Offer your opinion in the ‘Leave a Reply’ form below.