Signature Select Honey: Heated, Not Raw & Diluted Honey Lacking Pollen & Any Health Benefits

Written by Ajay Chohan, Founder @ Small Batch Goodness

Why Signature Select Honey’s labeling is misleading: Safeway Signature Select clover honey contains no pollen. This implies the honey went through ultra-filtration, a process which forces honey through high heat and pressure, which effectively kills all beneficial qualities of actual pure and raw honey.

Potentially Harmful Process used by Signature Select Honey: Ultra-filtration - subjecting honey to extremely high heat & pressure

WE WOULD LIKE TO THINK the process involved in getting honey from flowers, to the honeycomb, and to our tables is largely handled by nature. Honey bees freely buzz around, going from flower to flower, and collect the godly nectar with pollen. Beekeepers then carefully bottle this from the honeycomb into the containers in our kitchen. And we get to enjoy raw, pure honey with all its health benefits.

Signature Select Clover Honey – Safeway Albertsons

Raw honey is anti-inflammatory and full of cancer fighting antioxidants.

There is a reason raw honey has been prized for thousands of years. Raw honey and the pollen in it is full of essential vitamins and minerals, live enzymes and free amino acids. It naturally has anti-microbial, anti-bacterial and anti-inflammation properties, to name a few. All this has led some to even call honey a complete food in itself. So, when a consumer picks up a container of honey from grocery store shelves or buys it online, these are the nourishing health properties they have in mind! And a lot of these health benefits come from the pollen in raw honey.

Heat and filtration destroys these health benefits.

Unfortunately, most honey we find today is not raw and pure. A ton of it has been adulterated, heated, filtered and processed to the point of turning it into an unhealthy sweetener. A 2011 study by Food Safety News actually found that over 75% of honey sampled in grocery stores had their pollen removed (1). You cannot call honey “pure” if it has lost this key integral component that is pollen!  As mentioned, pollen is where most of the health benefits in real, raw honey come from.

Testing showed Safeway’s clover honey has no pollen in it!

Food Safety News, in the same highly comprehensive study of 60 honey brands sold in the U.S., found that Safeway Clover Honey has no traces of pollen in it (1). This indicates that Safeway clover honey has been highly heated, processed and filtered. Now, why would someone want to remove the highly healing and nutritious pollen from honey? Remember, bee pollen contains 22 amino acids, 27 minerals and tons of vitamins (just kidding on the remember part). It helps with allergies, is anti-inflammatory and is healing for the entire body.

Sadly, retailers prefer processed honey without pollen as it increases shelf life. There are traditional filtering methods used by beekeepers that filter out bee parts and debris, & keep the pollen intact. Many retailers though prefer ultra-filtration, “a special process by which honey is heated and then forced through tiny filters that don’t let pollen through (1).” This filtration does tremendous harm to the actual pure, raw honey. As Richard Adee, a honey producer, told Food Safety News,

“honey has been valued by millions for centuries for its flavor and nutritional value and that is precisely what is completely removed by the ultra-filtration process…there is only one reason to ultra-filter honey and there’s nothing good about it (1).”

Richard suspects that ultra-filtration process is used to hide the origin country of honey. Thus, outside of increasing shelf life, retailers know that ultra-filtration can filter out any traces of unwanted additives and any other adulteration done to pure honey in a country with lesser oversight. So much so for Safeway Albertsons’ “pure and Grade-A clover honey.”

Please Note: Here is my article on the best completely raw + unfiltered honey from small producers with integrity.

Signature Select clover honey is neither real nor pure.

Honey having zero pollen, as is the case with this Signature Select honey, indicates significant processing and filtration. This honey has been turned into a mere sweetener with no healthful properties and thus cannot be called pure honey (not a legal claim, but a common sense one). As described, the heating & processing robs honey of nearly all beneficial qualities found in raw honey. The Signature Select honey lacks the live enzymes, amino acids and the antioxidants that an actually pure honey with pollen would have. Safeway needs to stop misleading customers by selling this processed product as “pure honey.” We advice consumers to stay away from all Signature Select honey until Safeway comes clean on its heating, filtration and adulteration practices.

Sources - Research for Yourself!

1. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/