A lot of honey found on the UK market is not raw honey but has been heated and processed without declaring it on the label. Some of our competitors have pasteurised honey by heating up to 70 degrees Celsius or more, followed by rapid cooling for easy filtering and bottling so that it looks cleaner and smoother, more appealing on the shelf, and easier to handle and pack. Pasteurisation kills any yeast cells in the honey and prevents fermentation, which is a concern for storing honey with high moisture content over a long periods of time especially in warm weather.

Seggiano mono varietal honey on the other hand is a completely different product not only in terms of the way it is extracted from the hive but also how it is treated, packed and but also what it looks like and how it tastes. When we say that our honey is raw what we really mean is that the honey is very close to the condition it was when it left the beehive. In other words: unheated, unpasteurised, nothing added and nothing removed.

Our Seggiano honeys are indeed raw, which by definition means, that it has not been heated to above 40 degrees centigrade. Our Italian bee keepers extract their honey from the comb through centrifugal forces as opposed to heat: this is a much slower process which takes time and hence adds costs to the final product. We are proud to sell this type of honey which customers can usually only purchase directly from the bee-keeper.

In summary:

• Our raw honey is not heated and pasteurised like standard mass production honey.
• Our raw honey is not filtered while regular honey is filtered many times to get clear, golden honey.
• Our raw honey is almost solid at room temperature while regular honey is a thick or runny liquid at room temperature

There are no strict legal guidelines for claiming and labelling honey as 'raw'. However we can prove that our Seggiano honeys are a fundamentally different product to the mass produced commercial clear, filtered and pasteurised honey available on the high street.

Click here to play the podcast interview with David Harrison, co-founder of Seggiano, and learn about the farmers and artisanal producers he works with in Italy, to create their outstanding range of organic pestos, artichokes, honeys, olives and more.