Supermarkets and online stores everywhere love to sell hundreds of honey brands, sticking labels on the packages like ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ and ‘raw.’ To a health-conscious consumer, these terms are important! To a marketing team, they’re just commercial buzzwords. At Heavenly Organics, we put far too much effort into our safe, organic, and community-centered practices to not speak up, and to help anybody who cares about what goes into their body to choose the right products.

Raw honey has health benefits. Organic honey avoids the health risks of pesticides and herbicides. These are two immutable facts. But with so many honey types, it can feel overwhelming to police your grocery list while you shop it, so here are some quick ways to alleviate some of that worry.

Visual Cues

Holding a jar in your hands, watching the honey slide from one end to another, is one of the best ways to figure out if its packaging is telling the truth. Supermarkets filter and heat their honey to prevent crystallization, which decreases the antioxidant and vitamin content within. Heated honeys are less viscous, closer in consistency to maple syrup. They’re often lighter colors, too.

Check for cues like crystallization, which is a mark of natural purity. Turn the jar or bottle in your hands, and see how fast the honey moves around; do any air bubbles rise too quickly? If they do, you probably have heated honey—or a honey sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Honey that has not been filtered and heated will be slightly cloudy, rather than completely translucent; hold it up to a light.

Certifications

It’s impossible to see if honey is organic at a glance, but it’s not impossible to see a company’s practices. We brag about our certifications because we’re proud to have them! To be certified as USDA Organic requires a long process that we’re happy to go through so that you can be sure about what’s going into your body.

It’s even easier to check certifications when you’re shopping online, because you’re naturally on a company’s website. Take a peek through their mission statement, through their policies, and make sure that their values align with yours. A Glyphosate-Residue-Free certification, for instance, demonstrates an attention to detail, to make sure that one of the most common herbicides goes nowhere near your food.

The Label

Besides certifications, take a look at what the label is really saying. Do they throw some words around that sound good? Or do they try to tell you a story? If they tell you which flowers the honey comes from, when or where they’re harvested, or any metric data like the processes and temperature—that’s a great sign. It means that there’s more care for their work, and it’s more likely that the honey producer is telling the truth.

If they don’t even call their honey ‘pure,’ it might have additives. If there’s no specification of which flower it comes from—even wildflower—then that’s suspicious. ‘Natural’ doesn’t mean much of anything, and it’s important to note that there’s very little policy for labelling honey. Use your intuition, and shop from a company that is willing to let you in. For those that care, honesty is much more appetizing than money.