Walgreens Nice! Honey: Fake Honey Robbed of its Entire Nutritional Profile by Heat and Processing
Written by Ajay Chohan, Founder @ Small Batch Goodness
Why the Walgreens Nice! Honey branding is misleading: Nice! Honey contains no pollen. This implies the honey has likely been ultra-filtered & subjected to high heat and pressure. Nice! Honey has thus lost all healthful and nutritional properties of actual pure, raw honey
Potentially harmful process used by Walgreens Nice! Honey: Ultra-filtration - subjecting honey to extremely high heat & pressure
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, the steps involved in getting honey from the flower to your table are largely handled by nature. Honey bees suck the nectar and pollen from flowers and deposit it in their honeycombs. Pollen is a fine powder like substance generated by plants to help it pollinate and replicate. It just happens to be incredibly nutritious and healthy as well. Beekeepers collect this heavenly nectar and pack it in little jars that we consume.
Sadly, that’s not how most of honey production works. A lot of honey sitting on store shelves, like this “Nice! Honey,” has first been adulterated with and then heated & filtered to hide this adulteration! Honey is also often heated and processed to make it last longer on store shelves.
Pollen is one of the substances removed during this filtration process. A 2011 study by Food Safety News found that over 75% of honey sampled in grocery stores had their pollen removed. You cannot call honey “pure” if it has lost this key integral component that is pollen (1)!
Nice! Honey – Walgreens
The anti-inflammatory, immune boosting and nutritional profile of bee pollen is incredible.
Why care about bee pollen in your honey? Well, most of the health benefits of honey come from bee pollen. Bee pollen is full of free amino acids, flavonoids, vitamins and minerals. The flavonoids in bee pollen have anti-allergic, anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. The antioxidants also protect your body’s cells against harmful free radicals, which can cause cancer.
The Journal of Functional Foods in 2018 stated, “due to its active natural metabolites with extensive nutritional and therapeutic properties, bee pollen is recommended as a treasure trove of human nutrition… previous studies demonstrated that bee pollen exhibit antioxidant, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, and antiallergic properties (2).” Thus, the benefits associated with consuming honey come from pollen to a great extent.
So why in the world would you heat and filter honey to the point of destroying all pollen?
As mentioned, a lot of honey you buy at grocery stores has been tempered with. Large retailers prefer processed honey without pollen as it increases shelf life. The traditional filtering methods used by beekeepers filter out bee parts and debris, but not the pollen. To filter out the microscopic pollen particles requires ultra-filtration, “a special process by which honey is heated and then forced through tiny filters that don’t let pollen through (1).” As Mark Jensen, the president at the time of American Honey Producers Association told Food Safety News, “Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but…diminish the quality of the honey (1).”
In addition to removing pollen to help increase honey’s shelf life, this filtration and processing is also useful in hiding the honey’s origin or any other unappetizing additives that can leave a trail. Unfortunately, ultra-filtration destroys all the health benefits of honey and what we are left with is a mere sweetener.
* 100% * of the honey sampled from Walgreens had no pollen!
Food Safety News teamed up with Vaughn Bryant, a professor at Texas A&M University and a melissopalynologist (those who study pollen in honey), to carry out a study of over 60 honey products sold in the U.S. Their study found that 100% of the honey sampled from Walgreens had no pollen (1)! Walgreens is misleading consumers who think they are buying honey with all its beneficial health properties. Not knowing that they are actually just getting a processed and heated sweetener.
Please Note: Here is my article on the best completely raw + unfiltered honey from small producers with integrity.
The resulting class action lawsuit against Walgreens’ fake honey:
In 2012, Terri Perea brought a class action lawsuit against Walgreens. She had purchased their “Nice 100% Pure Honey” believing it to be actual pure honey, only to find out by Vaughn Bryant’s testing that all naturally occurring pollen had been removed from his honey (3). She thus argued that this product couldn’t be labeled as honey given it lacks pollen, an essential component of pure raw honey.
As mentioned above, heating and removal of pollen is also concerning as it is often used to hide the source of origin of the honey or to hide any unwanted additives. Honey has often been found contaminated with heavy metals, harmful chemicals and even antibiotics. Regulators around the world thus require honey to have pollen so it can be used to help determine the origin and quality of the honey. You can read more about Terri Perea's complaint and lawsuit here.
Walgreens’ Nice! honey is neither healthy nor pure.
Honey should never be subjected to this high heat & pressure process. Walgreens’ ultra processed and heated Nice! honey lacks the healthy enzymes and antioxidants that actual pure raw honey with pollen would have. This is fake honey that is nothing more than a sweetener. If consumers are looking to buy actual pure honey with health properties, they are better off avoiding this processed ‘honey’ from Walgreens. There is nothing “simple” or “honest” about this product, as the misleading label states.
Sources - Research for Yourself!
1. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1756464618304845