Raw Honey

We often get asked if Black Bee Honey is raw honey, and the answer is not straightforward so we thought we would address it in a bit more detail here.

A ‘raw’ food in its strictest terms is a food which has not been heated to a temperature of 42 degrees C / 115 degrees F or more, so when talking about the ‘Raw Food’ diet, for example, this means a diet consisting of mainly or wholly fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts as well as sprouted and fermented foods. The idea behind this diet is that by heating or processing food, some of the nutrition is taken out of it.

Based on this our honey could be described as raw honey, as it is only gently warmed when jarred to ensure it goes into the jars easily. However, raw honey is not a legally recognised term in the UK and it became an issue for us a few years ago. We were contacted by Trading Standards to say that we are not allowed to use the term raw to describe our honey on our jars or website. We then moved to describe our honey as ‘unpasteurised’ but that too was deemed unlawful and we were forced to drop that in 2022.

And yes, the fact that other honeys out there on the market are still using the term raw has not gone unnoticed by us, but we are not ones to snitch!