Interactive Check

Is your honey real?

You cannot test honey in your kitchen. Every home test you have seen fails on real honey and passes on syrup. What you can check is how much the seller is willing to prove, and that turns out to be the useful question.

Ten questions about the jar you already own   |   Works for any brand, including ours
Your result

    Send this to whoever sold it to you

    1. Which laboratory tested this honey, and is it NABL accredited?
    2. What was the test date, and which harvest or batch does it cover?
    3. Was C3 tested, or only C4?
    4. Can you send the report itself rather than a summary?

    Why these ten questions

    None of this tells you whether there is syrup in your jar. Only a laboratory can do that. What it tells you is whether anyone could find out, which in practice is the thing that separates brands worth trusting from brands that are simply confident.

    Adulteration survives because it is invisible to the buyer and expensive to check. A seller who publishes real test results has given up that cover voluntarily. A seller who has not may still be honest, but you are taking their word for it, and in a category where FSSAI sampling keeps finding syrup, that word is worth less than it should be.

    1. Does the label name a specific flower and place?

    "Acacia honey from Jammu and Kashmir" is a claim someone can check with pollen analysis. "Natural honey" is not a claim at all.

    2. Does the label say lab tested?

    On its own this means little, because it does not say which test. But its absence is informative.

    3. Does it name the actual test?

    C4 by SCIRA, NMR, C3 by LC-IRMS. A brand that names the method has almost certainly run it. A brand that says only tested may be describing anything.

    4. Can you open a report without asking?

    This is the question that matters most. If the test happened, the document exists, and publishing it costs nothing.

    5. Does the report name the laboratory and its accreditation?

    NABL accreditation is what makes a result defensible. An unnamed lab on a certificate is decoration.

    6. Is there a batch or harvest reference?

    Purity is per batch. A report with no sample reference cannot be tied to the jar in your hand.

    7. How old is the report?

    A test from four years ago says nothing about this year's honey.

    8. Does the label say blended, or name more than one country?

    Blending is legal and disclosed blends are honest. It does mean single origin claims elsewhere on the pack are not true of what is inside.

    9. Does the ingredients list contain only honey?

    Anything else listed is disclosed adulteration, which is at least honest. Undisclosed is the problem this whole page is about.

    10. What does it cost per kilo?

    Real single origin honey has a floor price set by a short bloom and low yields. Far below that floor, something is subsidising it. Price proves nothing on its own, which is why it is last.

    Applied to us: Kashmir Reserve names the flower and the place, names the tests, uses a NABL accredited laboratory and tests each harvest. We do not yet publish the report openly, which costs us points on question four. We are fixing that with the 2026 harvest report. See how every brand we checked scores.

    Single origin acacia honey from Jammu and Kashmir, tested each harvest.

    See the honey →