The rules
- A figure needs a source and a date. Every guide ends with the pages it draws on and when we last opened each one. Honey prices move and UMFHA has changed its table before; the date tells you how much to trust ours.
- Every UMF figure comes from one file.There is a single copy of UMFHA's grade table in this site's code, and every grade, every tile and every lookup reads from it. Nothing is retyped, which is how the old site ended up with three different tables.
- A producer's claims stay theirs.Flavour, floral type, “raw”, origin and grade come from the producer, in their words, credited. We never paraphrase a grade into a rounder number.
- No ratings, rankings or badges.We haven't tasted these honeys side by side, so we won't rank them. Where we do order something — price per 100 g — the number it's ordered by is in the table.
- No invented businesses, people or reviews. Every business named on this site is real and linked to its own website. Nothing here is written by a persona and there is no personal byline: pages are written and maintained by NZ Mānuka Honey as an organisation.
- Listings are public facts, and removable.The brands and producers on this site haven't endorsed us and didn't ask to be listed. Each entry carries the page we read, the date, and a link to ask us to correct or remove it. We do that on request, without argument.
- No health claims, at all. Stricter than the law requires, and it applies to every page, every product description and every email. The full rule.
Claims we dropped, and claims we deleted
The first group we'd have liked to tell you and couldn't source. The second group was published on an earlier version of this site, or of nz-honey.co.nz, and was wrong. Both are listed, because a site that quietly fixes its own errors is asking you to take its word for the rest.
This is the single biggest gap on the site, and it is not for want of trying. mpi.govt.nz sits behind a bot wall that returns a challenge page to every request we can make, including from a browser under our own control. So we have never read those thresholds at the source, and we do not print them. Other sites' copies of them disagree with one another, which is exactly why we won't pick one. Read them from MPI: mpi.govt.nz.
This was on the old version of this site, twice, and it is false. On UMFHA's table the minimum MGO for UMF™ 20+ is 826 mg/kg against 83 mg/kg for UMF™ 5+, which is a bit under ten times. The claim is deleted and the correction is on the grade page.
The previous versions of this site and of nz-honey.co.nz listed twenty businesses that did not exist, complete with invented "MPI export certified" and "Apiculture NZ" badges, invented years trading, invented hive numbers and, in two cases, invented relationships with named iwi and hapū. Every one of those pages now returns 410 Gone rather than redirecting, so the names stop circulating. Any real business that happens to share one of those names had nothing to do with them.
All unsourced, all deleted. We could not find current, citable figures for New Zealand mānuka production by region, national production, or hive numbers per region, so there are none on this site.
Repeated everywhere, including by the old version of this site. We could not source either half of the ratio in a form we could link, so it's gone rather than hedged.
Not a sourcing failure — a deliberate rule. Honey is a food, health claims about food are regulated in New Zealand, and the rules cover advertising as well as labels. We make no health, wellness or "use" claims at all, and we deleted an entire guide ("mānuka honey uses by grade") rather than rewrite it. That URL returns 410.
We looked and found none. The word appears on this site only inside a producer's own product name, credited to them, and never as our own description.
Not published anywhere we could find. So our use of UMF™ is deliberately conservative: only as a reference to a producer's own licensed grade, always with the ™, always with a credit line saying the mark is UMFHA's and that we hold no licence.
Advice about honey and infants exists, but we have not sourced it from a New Zealand health authority page we could read and link. Rather than write a health line ourselves — which we have ruled out anyway — we will show a producer's own label advisory as label text when we stock a jar carrying one.
Unresolved. MPI's "My Food Rules" tool answers this, and the answer will be published here with its date before the first sale. We won't take an order until it is.
We don't have a courier account yet. Publishing a plausible rate would be inventing a promise, so delivery and returns says "not set" until it is.
None of the wholesale pages we read publishes terms; each asks for an enquiry. We have built on the basis that we hold stock and pack every order ourselves.
We have New Zealand volumes for a handful of head terms only. We don't quote invented demand figures, on this site or to producers.
We have applied to no programme yet and have been approved by none, so every outbound link on this site is plain and earns us nothing. If that changes, the brand's row will say so above the link, the link will carry rel="sponsored", and it will not change the order of any table.
What we don't do with AI
No product photograph on this site is generated, and none will be. No flavour description is written by us or by a model; flavour is the producer's own copy or it's absent. Where a page has a drawing instead of a photo, it's plainly a line drawing, so nobody mistakes it for a jar we hold.
Found something wrong?
Tell us. Include the page and what's wrong, and we'll either source it or take it down.
Standing sources
- UMF Honey Association — the UMF™ Four Factor Quality Testing (the grade table) — last checked 16 September 2026
- UMF Honey Association — what UMF™ means — last checked 16 September 2026
- UMF Honey Association — certified brands — last checked 16 September 2026
- Ministry for Primary Industries — mānuka honey testing (blocked automated access; read it yourself) — last checked 16 September 2026
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand — nutrition, health and related claims — last checked 16 September 2026
- Fair Trading Act 1986 (New Zealand Legislation) — last checked 16 September 2026
- Consumer Protection (MBIE) — the Consumer Guarantees Act — last checked 16 September 2026
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner — the Privacy Act 2020 — last checked 16 September 2026