What happens before a jar goes on the site
- A signed wholesale account. The producer confirms in writing that online resale is allowed and at what recommended retail price, and gives written permission to use their product photos, names and label text.
- The label, read by us. Grade, MGO figure, UMF™ licence holder number, floral type, size and any advisory wording are copied from the jar, not from a supplier spreadsheet and not from us.
- The licence, checked. We match the licence number on the jar against UMFHA's certified-brands list and record the date we checked it. That date appears on the product page.
- Stock in hand, and a real photo.Either a photo we're allowed to publish or one we took of our own stock. No mock-ups and no generated images, ever.
- Sealed, never repacked.Every jar leaves here exactly as the producer sealed it. We don't decant, re-pot, relabel or add a sticker of our own. Repacking would make us a food processor, and putting a UMF™ grade on a label of our own would need a licence we don't hold.
Things we never claim
We don't, and we won't. A UMF™ licence belongs to a producer or packer who is tested per batch. We are a retailer of other people's sealed jars, so we quote their licensed grade and their licence number and never put a grade on anything ourselves.
We hold neither. Export certification applies to exporters of honey, which we are not. An earlier version of this site claimed eight apiaries were "MPI export certified". Those businesses did not exist and the claim has been deleted along with them.
We don't test honey. Everything we show about a grade is the producer's own printed figure, plus a check that their licence number is on UMFHA's published list, with the date we checked it recorded.
Honey is a food. In New Zealand, nutrition and health claims about food are regulated and the rules apply to advertising, not only to labels. We've gone further than the law requires: no health, wellness or "use" claims at all, at any grade, anywhere on this site, including in emails.
Not in our own voice. Those words appear on this site only inside a producer's own product name or label text, credited to them. We could find no New Zealand legal definition of "raw" honey at all.
There are none on this site, because none would be real. The one ordering we do publish — price per 100 g — has the number it's ordered by printed in the same table.
Which rules this sits under
Three, and they do different jobs. The Food Act 2014 is the food-safety and food-standards law MPI administers. Standard 1.2.7 of the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code governs nutrition content and health claims on food, and it applies to advertising as well as to labels. The Fair Trading Act 1986, enforced by the Commerce Commission, prohibits false, misleading or deceptive representations about goods, which is the law that makes an invented certification a legal problem and not just a bad look.
Our own rule is stricter than any of them: we make no health or wellness claims at all, general-level included. Grades are described as what UMFHA measures, never as what they do for you. If you want to know what mānuka honey is for, ask a health professional, not a shop.
The government's mānuka test
Separately from UMF™, MPI runs the test that decides whether honey can be sold as mānuka and whether it is monofloral or multifloral. We link their page rather than quoting its thresholds, because their site blocks the requests we can make and we won't reprint numbers we haven't read at the source. The longer explanation is here, and everything we dropped for lack of a source is here.
If we get something wrong
Tell us. Include the page and what's wrong, and we'll either source it or take it down, and change the date on the page so you can see we did.
UMF™ is a trade mark of the UMF Honey Association. We are a retailer of other producers' sealed jars and do not hold a UMF™ licence.
Standing sources
- UMF Honey Association — the UMF™ Four Factor Quality Testing (the grade table) — 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
- Ministry for Primary Industries — health and nutrition claims, Standard 1.2.7 — last checked 16 September 2026
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand — nutrition, health and related claims — last checked 16 September 2026
- Food Act 2014 (New Zealand Legislation) — last checked 16 September 2026
- Fair Trading Act 1986 (New Zealand Legislation) — last checked 16 September 2026