So the next time you find yourself in the Honey aisle of your grocery store, debating between a pricy premium, artisanal honey and the store-brand nectar contained in a plastic bear, you might want to think twice before choosing based on price.

That’s because a searing investigation of the honey market by Food Safety News found that 76% of all honey bought at grocery stores were treated with a process called “ultrafiltration,” which removes not only impurities like wax but also all traces of pollen. And of the types of brands at grocery stores, the ones that were far-and-away the most likely to be ultra-filtered were generic brands.

But according to FSN, the biggest reason to avoid ultra-filtered honey is that pollen is the only sure-fire way to trace the source of honey to a geographic location. As a result ultra-filtered honey is often used to mask the shady origins of certain kinds of honey.

Food Safety News honey samples were sent to premier melissopalynologist and professor at Texas A&M University, Vaughn Bryant. What he found was that roughly three fourths of the honey contained no pollen, making it unidentifiable and unsafe. Of that average, he found that:

• 100 percent of Winnie the Pooh sold in Walmart stores had all pollen removed.
• 100 percent of honey from individual packets from KFC and McDonald’s had all pollen removed.
• 77 percent of honey from big box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, and Target had no traced of pollen.
• 100 percent of honey from drugstores like Walgreen’s and CVS Pharmacy had all the pollen filtered out.

The honey purchased from co-ops, farmers markets and stores like Trader Joes contained the full amount of original pollen.

Many have called for the FDA to do more to prevent adulterated and smuggled honey from landing on grocery shelves, but the group has so far shrugged off the burden.

In the meantime, though, worried consumers do have a good option: buying honey from farmers’ markets and natural food stores. The FSN investigation found that few, if any, of the honey sold there had been subject to ultra-filtration.

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