Is My Honey Raw - What Is Raw Honey - Is Raw Honey Good For You - Do Bees Make Raw Honey #rawhoney

What is raw honey? Why do UK beekeepers hate the term? And why do I personally think it's a really valuable term when it comes to describing your honey? Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Some of the topics that we cover on this channel are very, very dull. Don't hit that unsubscribe button because they are pretty useful even though they're dull. Some of the videos, and I include this one in that category, are highly controversial. Like, this video is going to get people's pulses racing, and no doubt I'm going to get another call from Trading Standards. However, I'll put the caveat in there absolutely straight away. You cannot use the term raw honey to describe your honey in the UK. It's not a reserved description for honey. You cannot use it on your website, you cannot use it on any literature. Amazon, Etsy, eBay, your labels, anything. You're not allowed to call your honey raw honey in the UK. So why, when I go and search on Amazon for honey, does every single product that comes up on it say that it's raw honey? Every single one. You search honey on Amazon and 9 times out of 10 it's called raw honey. However, Trading Standards are not allowing me to call my honey raw honey because another beekeeper has said Black Mountain Honey is calling their honey raw honey, It says it on their website. It's not a reserved description. So can you please have a word with them and tell them to take all of that literature down? I'll hold my hands up always whenever Trading Standards come knocking and say absolutely no problem at all. I've gone along with all of their recommendations and I have removed the word raw from absolutely everything. So Black Mountain Honey is no longer a raw honey. I'm a little bit frustrated, as you can imagine, and I think there's so many other beekeepers in the country as well. Who are frustrated with not being able to use the term raw. Now, this stems from a really big legal battle, from what I'm told, between Hilltop and Rouse. Big argument going on about the use of the term raw honey. But I just wanted to give you my take on the word raw. So normally when it comes to selling a premium product, what you do is you come up with a term, then you need to come up with a way of informing the public as to why that term sets your product above other products that don't have that term. There are so many different examples of this, and the hardest part in all of that is informing the public, letting the public know why your product with a term is better than a product without a term. Now, it seems all of the other countries across the world have got this, and the UK public demand raw honey. It's the question I'm asked every single time, is your honey raw honey? And up until Trading Standards contacted me and said I can't do this anymore, I used to say to people, yeah, my honey is raw honey. So the hard part has already been done. The UK public want to buy raw honey, and they want to buy raw honey because they understand what raw honey means. And to them, raw honey means honey that's come straight out of the hive. It's not heated up to unnecessary temperatures. It's not tampered with, it's not been super filtered, it's not been mixed with sugar syrup, it's not come from another country where the stringent regulations are nowhere near as secure as they are in the UK. The hard bit has been done. The UK want raw honey. So if I was a UK consumer, let's forget I'm a bee farmer at the moment, and I want to buy raw honey, I go onto Amazon or eBay or any of these platforms and I type in raw honey, and there's hundreds of different versions that come up. And every single one that's legally saying it's raw honey comes from outside of the UK. There are tons of them. Every single one you see says raw honey and they get 1,000 stars because everyone likes raw honey. And then you get people like me who say, well, my honey's raw as well in the same way that yours was. Sorry, Trading Standards, it's not raw, it's unpasteurized. And I'll just clarify that once again, my honey is not raw. I'm talking about the use of raw honey here. I feel now that I'm at a distinct disadvantage because another beekeeper has said, Black Mountain Honey, you are using the word raw to promote your honey, to make it seem better than all of the competition. So where does that leave me? Because I see across the board everybody else outside the UK on Amazon, all of my competitors using the word raw, and I'm not allowed to use it now because Trading Standards have specifically singled me out and said, Black Mountain Honey, you can no longer use the word raw. Where does that leave me? A really, really awkward situation. So what I could do is I could go to Trading Standards and I could pick out every other single beekeeper within Wales, within England, within Scotland that uses the word raw on their labels, on their jars, on their website, on any of their literature, and just dob them in and just say, you know what, Trading Standards, they're using the word raw. I wasn't allowed to use it. I didn't think they should be allowed to use it either. It's not a reserved description in the honey regulations, therefore they shouldn't be allowed to use it. But I almost want to go in a completely different direction with this. I don't want to just pass that real annoyance on to other beekeepers because they've not necessarily done it to me. And no doubt the person who reported me to Trading Standards is, is whiter than white, cleaner than clean. Obviously he doesn't call his honey or her honey raw honey anyway. But I want to go a little bit further than that, and I want to encourage you to not use the word raw because it's not a reserved description. But just speak to your local beekeeping association and get them to petition the government to say we should be able to use the term raw honey, and we should be able to use that term, and it should be included as a reserved description within the honey regulations with a really stringent schedule of what is required to be called raw honey. So it can't be heated above, say, 40 degrees centigrade. Hive temperature is around 37 or 38 degrees. So even if you wanted to go down to there, it can't be heated above 37 to 38 degrees centigrade, which is the temperature that the bees keep the honey at in the hive. As far as I'm concerned, that's still raw honey. Can't be pressure filtered, and all of the other benefits that you would get if your product was legally allowed to be called raw. What we would do then is we would be able to sell our honey at a premium versus all of the other companies and all of the other countries that are flooding Amazon that are flooding Aldi, Lidl, Tesco with raw honey, or cheap, cheap honey that doesn't necessarily call itself raw, but it attracts people in because it's 60p a pound versus £10 a pound from a local beekeeper. So this video is not about coming and buying my honey. Obviously I get that. I'm talking to all of the beekeepers here who supply their own honey, but I just think there needs to be a real movement against this, and I see it across beekeeping forums I see it across Facebook groups, I see it across everything on the internet, and people turn their nose up at that word, and they look at it and say, you shouldn't be calling your honey raw because that's not a reserved description within the honey regulations. But really, all you're doing there is you're just giving the competitive advantage away from the UK. You're giving the competitive advantage to people who are importing at pennies big barrels of cheap honey, and I will put that honey in inverted commas, I won't say why, but you're selling for 60p a pound on the shelf. The people who are advertising on eBay, on Amazon, on Etsy from all across the EU, all across the world, who call their honey raw— and I don't have anything against those people, and I'm not about to report them because in their country they can probably call their honey raw. Companies like Just Bee as well, they call their honey raw vitamin honey. They're very clever in the way that they call it that because it's vitamin honey. It's not normal honey, so it comes under different regulations. I really appreciate that, and I like the slant that they've put on it. They recognize that raw is a strong selling word, and they recognize that they're going to sell more jars of honey by using the word raw, because that is what the consumer wants, versus what we're trying to do at the moment is eradicate the word, even though all of the hard work has gone into convincing the consumer that raw is best. So this is my plea to everyone here. And I don't care, we sell a lot of honey on our website, and taking the word raw off really hasn't had a massive impact on our sales. But I just think, why are we going to the effort to downgrade that word, to make it something that you don't want to say, to have a go at people that use that word, as opposed to petitioning the government, petitioning the people who can make these decisions, to actually use that word, give it a defined reserved description in the honey regulations, and allow people to use it to set their honey against what's available in the supermarkets. Because I know every single jar of honey that's produced in the UK by local beekeepers is a million times better than what you're going to get when you're buying it for 60 or 70p a pound in Lidl or Aldi. So I guess you can probably tell that's a little bit of a rant. I hope it hasn't come across like that. It is a genuine frustration of mine. I really like the word raw honey. I chuck the caveat in there again because I don't want anyone sending this video off to Trading Standards and saying he's having a go at Trading Standards. Trading Standards are just doing their job. They were completely right to pull me up on it, completely right to say you're using a word that isn't a reserved description in the honey regulations, can you please take it down? And my response to Trading Standards was yes, of course, I'm very sorry, I won't do it again. So there we go. I will not be calling Black Mountain Honey raw honey anymore. My honey is unpasteurized, It isn't heated above a certain level, and it's very, very tasty indeed, but it's definitely not raw honey. But I just wanted to do this video just to talk about the confusion and the anger that UK beekeepers had of using that word raw honey, and I just wanted to give you my take on it. So what do you think? Do you think raw honey is a good term? Do you think it's a bad term? Do you think it's a misleading term? Do you think it's something that should be included, something that should be regulated in the honey regulations? Or do you think nobody should use it and we should just let everybody who sells their honey on Amazon get away with calling it raw? Stick it in the comments. I'm really interested to hear what people think about this one, because all I ever hear about the word raw honey from everyone is negative. And all I ever hear from consumers wanting to buy honey is, is your honey raw? We want raw honey. So there's this real mismatch. Really interested to see what you think. But bring it up at your local beekeeping associations. Bring it up when you talk to people. What they think, because I think the use of a designated reserve description for raw honey with really stringent controls over what is allowed to be called raw honey would help boost the number of sales of UK honey jars in the UK, which currently sits around 15 to 20%. Really, really small amount. That word raw honey will help boost it up higher, will get people paying a higher price for decent quality honey And will hopefully reduce the importation of cheaper, inferior honey. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Something a little bit different, something highly controversial. So I'm going to get my tin hat on as soon as I upload this one because I know it's going to cause a real stir. I hope you enjoyed it though. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.