Scottish honey first to use BSI Kitemark for food assurance

A honey producer in Scotland has become the first company to use BSI’s recently-launched Kitemark for Food Assurance, intended to help consumers verify food products.

The Scottish Bee Company’s heather honey says the mark will help “food sector organisations…to verify food label claims, deliver consumer trust and support transparency in the food chain.”

Honey is a perennial target for food fraudsters, generally involves either non-compliance with an origin name resulting from mixing of honeys from several varieties or the deliberate addition of an adulterating substance.

A European Commission report published in 2017 estimated that 14 per cent of honey samples tested were adulterated with added sugars such as high fructose syrups, while the US Pharmacopeia’s Food Fraud Database lists honey as the third-favourite target for adulteration, behind milk and olive oil.

The Kitemark is deigned to provide consumers with a degree of assurance that what is claimed on the label of a food product – such as composition, purity and origin.

It relies on site inspections that validate 30 data points, including legal status, geo-location, number of personnel to production capacity and export countries, and bundles the data into QR code-based authentication feature – known as VerifEye – that allows buyers to verify their purchases.

In a statement, the Scottish Bee Company said that to get the Kitemark, it had to “have each step of our supply chain audited and our honey samples tested for pesticides and genetically modified organisms in an independent laboratory environment.”

The company also had to send BSI information about where our hives are located and must be open to being audited at any time to ensure they are in Scotland.

Howard Kerr, BSI’s chief executive, said: “Today, people want to understand the important details about the food they eat.”

“By extending the power of the Kitemark into areas like food authenticity and provenance, including the Scottish Bee Company, BSI can serve that need. After all, customers deserve food that’s safe, sustainable and socially responsible.”