Thanks Peter! From the link:
“Consumers don’t tend to like crystallized honey,” says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. “It’s very funny. In Canada, there’s a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: ‘Something’s wrong with my honey!’”
There’s an exception to this filtration process. Dutch Gold also packs organic honey from Brazil, and organic honey doesn’t go through nearly as fine a filter. Clark says that this is because organic rules prohibit the use of diatomaceous earth in the filtering process.
Of course, the raw honey that Dutch Gold gets in 50-gallon drums does contain pollen. As part of a recent auditing process, the company sent samples of imported honey that it received from India and Vietnam to a laboratory in Germany. There, scientists analyzed the pollen in that raw honey, and came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, from flowers that grow in the countries that claimed to be producing that honey.
Bottom line: Supermarket honey doesn’t have pollen, but you can still call it honey. Call it filtered honey. And the lack of pollen says nothing about where it may have come from.
Now, could there still be fraud going on, involving ultrafiltration and Chinese honey? Yes, but not in the way described by the Food Safety News article.
Some people suspect that Chinese exporters are ultrafiltering some of their honey and sending it to, say, India. There, it could be mixed into raw Indian honey and exported to the US. Pollen analysis would show that this honey was from India, although at least one expert, Vaughn Bryant at Texas A&M University, says that he’s seeing imported honey with an unnaturally low concentration of pollen. This, he says, could be evidence of ultrafiltration. Or it could be the kind of filtration done in the U.S., which also removes pollen.
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So NPR does not rule out the possibility of Chinese honey shenanigans, but tries to downplay the issue.
As an aside of sorts, one which you may be familiar but most are not;
Interestingly enough, honey with pollens can be readily identified as to pollen source by electrical testing methods.
Can't remember the exact source I recently got that from, but I was in the UC Davis Library studying a range honeybee info. The info came from a good source, claimed the testing was accurate, effective, and cheap/easiest, too. Mixed flower sources of course, showed a range not readily identifiable. But one can tell clover from canola & alfalfa, cotton from soy, those from orange blossom, avocado, etc. Each flower source had it's own signature which would repeatedly produce "signature" results (though there was one pairing that were close to be near indistinguishable --- cannot recall which).
I think you've nailed the present methodology of "honey laundering" also.
Mexico is a big honey producer, too, let's not forget. I don't want to accuse without evidence, but if I was in the employ of the Dept. of Ag, that would be a direction to consider.
They wanted to build that big tollroad up through Texas didn't they? If that's allowed, it's to have the Chinese ships unload in Mexico (cheaper, less environmental rules) then drive China exports right into the middle of the U.S. using Mexican truckers (cheaper, less environmental and truck safety laws).
Since the Chinese know all of that, why not use Mexico for a honey laundering locale, too? Even without the tollroad. The Mexican honey biz is big enough to hide many a barrel of sin within...
We can be sure they've "thought of it" at the least.