Cheap honey and olive oil? Think! Food fraud

Honey and Extra Olive oil have a few "good" things in common:

• single ingredient products, easy to consume as they are, no further cooking is required
  
• unique and complex flavour profiles, and
  
• a lot of health benefits.
  

 
Extra Virgin Olive oil flavours are so complex to the point where one might say their complexity resembles the ones from wine.
To understand the depth of complexity of such flavours, one can read the flavour description as it comes out from an international olive oil competition panel. Panelists experts on identifying the flavours descibe the flavour profile of an extra virgin olive oil. We quote one example from a competition in New York for Pamako organic extra virgin olive oil
''It has a fresh and fruity aroma, with strong spicy elements, and a soft, bitter taste''

This can be testified through the plethora of olive oil competitions in the world happening in various cities to name a few Athens, New York, Madrid and Tokyo. 

Both Honey and Extra Olive oil have been used in food frauds many times in the past. Companies such as Lidl, Filippo Berio and Bertolli had been fined for misinformation about the origin or the tasting quality of the extra virgin olive oil.
EU and UK authorities still allow honey and olive oil to have label which mentions in a very vague way the country of origin of the product. In many cases, one can see a label on a bottle or a jar reading: ''This is made of EU and non EU blends''.
In most of the cases, it is impossible to find the exact country of origin of these honeys due to a broken food traceability system. And that can be proved from the fact that European Food Safety Authority publishes data from most of the food fraud cases across the world where honey and olive oil products appear on the list more or less on every other month.

Why the supermarkets still sell products of honey with the label to read non EU blends of honey at only £3.20 per Kilo when the cost of producing honey for a beekeeper is at least £5.00
What is our action then you might wonder?

Do not buy any of these products: blends of various products, and to make sure this does not ahppen check the label.
When you see blends of EU and non EU blends, then immediately it is understood that this products is jarred or bottled using mixtures of various olive oil. Instead buy them from local delicatessen stores across the country where both olive oil and honey products come from one grower or beekeeper. Especially with honey, we recommend any purchase of honey products to be done from a beekeeper who packs their honey into jars by themselves. And remember all products must have a label on with all the legal information on: address, weight/volume, name of the product, best before date, country of origin (which in our case it should be one) and nutritional information (Honey is excepted)

Fake blossom honey sold in Lidl stores in Greece