What’s the difference between raw honey and honey?

It’s hard to choose the best ingredients for you and your family when you’re running through the grocery store. With a list full of items and the kids running in different directions, it’s hard to have time to examine each ingredient. You want to get real, natural food but sometimes don’t know what they are or have the time to choose! If you want real, natural honey where do you turn? Do you pick up raw honey or just anything that says honey? What’s the difference?

We’ve got answers for you.

How It’s Handled

The biggest difference between raw honey and the other kind of honeys is how it’s processed. Once the bees have made their delicious honey, it has to be extracted from the hive and bottled for you to enjoy! And this is where raw honey and other honey diverge.

Honey that doesn’t say raw on the label can often mean it has been processed or pasteurised. Pasteurized honey has been heated at very high temperatures in order to make the honey smoother and bottling process easier. Pasteurized honey can also be highly filtered, taking out the natural components of honey. Pasteurization and filtration are done to make the bottling process easier and to increase the honey’s attractive shelf life. While honey doesn’t expire, real honey begins to crystallize, which is a normal and natural process. It may not look like you would expect, but crystallised honey is actually real, raw and unfiltered honey!

What’s Inside?

With raw honey, the natural benefits of honey are maintained. There are numerous vitamins, enzymes and antioxidants found in natural honey. Raw honey also contains pollen, which is a good thing! At Nature Nate’s, we test our honey. Pollen allows us to trace the honey back to its original source, confirming that your honey is in fact real honey and came from within North America.

Other honeys use pasteurization and lots of filtering remove the nutritional aspects of honey and take out the pollen. In removing the wonderful vitamins and enzymes, honey becomes just another processed sugar! And without pollen present, you have no idea where your honey comes from, or if it’s even honey at all!

Choosing Real

At Nature Nate’s we always keep our honey raw and unfiltered. We gently warm our honey, so that it can slide into our orange-labelled bottles. We lightly strain—but never filter—our honey just to remove large lumps of wax and leftover bee parts from the hive. Our honey goes through extensive testing to ensure a clean read free of common pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics. We also work closely with our beekeeping partners and always know where our honey comes from.

In order to enjoy all the benefits that are naturally found in honey, choose raw and unfiltered honey. So next time you’re mowing through the grocery store, make your honey selection easier by grabbing a bottle of raw honey!