More Manuka Madness

I've been sorting out things I take to the talks I give and for display at the Farmer's markets and came across the stuff I have on Manuka honey. Apart from it's alleged magical powers I did a couple of blogs about the ridiculous prices being charged for it here and here.

The most expensive Manuka I found was on the Bodykind web site and out of curiosity I re-visited the site to find the price of the honey had gone down to under £80 a jar.

Old price

New price

I noticed a couple of things.
Firstly the current ad has a blurb that wasn't in the original ad about

Manuka Health MGO 550+ is 100% pure Manuka Honey straight from the breath taking landscapes of New Zealand.....................................

Exactly the same wording as in their email to me when I asked them why it was so expensive.

Also, although the price has gone down a bit, the new add says

'reduced from £99.99 - saving you 20%'.

So the price was £83 that went up to £100 and down to £80

Bodykind also stock another brand of Manuka

£113 for a jar of honey. Wow, but at least its less than the £162 it used to be.

The ad talks about being

 'tested for its Methylglyoxal [MGO] by a certified laboratory...................'.

As far as I knew there was no agreed test for Manuka honey which lead to a series of meaningless acronyms [UMF,NPA, MGO] used to rate the honey's 'goodness', so I did some Googling to find that by coincidence on the 12th December the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries announced a test for Manuka honey to take effect from the 5th February that was to apply to exported honey.
Only honey that meets the requirements can be called Manuka honey

Reading about the new requirements they seem to open a whole new overpriced can of over hyped. worms.
More of which later