Hive & Wellness Australia Hijacks UMF

At the time Australia’s largest manuka honey producer, Hive & Wellness Australia Pty Ltd, launched an attack on New Zealand manuka honey – as detailed in Capilano Trash Talks New Zealand Manuka – the company was marketing three manuka honey products as “UMF certified”. It still does.

The three products are Barnes Naturals brand “New Zealand Manuka Active Honey MGO550+”, “Australian Manuka Active Honey MGO100+”, and “Australian Manuka Active Honey MGO300+” (see Illustration 1). These products were launched on Amazon Japan on 26 January 2025, 14 March 2025, and 2 January 2025, according to Amazon data.

A Barnes Natural listing on Amazon Japan claiming UMF certification (red text translations to English and highlights have been added).

Each product is recorded as “UMF certified” in a specification summary table in the listing. Headlines include MGO value equivalent UMF ratings of 6+, 11+, and 16+, each set by a value of 1 above standard UMF ratings of 5+, 10+, and 15+.

Barnes Naturals is not a UMF-certified brand, though its owner, Hive & Wellness, is a longstanding collaborator and joint-venture partner of Comvita Ltd, in medical-use honey production and supply and manuka honey production within Australia.

Small-scale sellers of dubious bearing frequently attach bogus UMF™ ratings or falsely claim “UMF certification” for manuka honey products in online store text. In this way, they hijack the brand in order to boost sales. The Barnes Naturals manuka products, however, are listed on the brand’s official Amazon Japan store.

Illustration 1: Three Barnes Naturals brand manuka honey products — one New Zealand and two Australian — are claimed on the brand’s official Amazon Japan store to be “UMF certified”. The Barnes Naturals brand is operated by Hive & Wellness Australia Pty Ltd, which is not a UMF Honey Association licensee.

Some – perhaps many – consumers view official stores as more trustworthy than listings by third-party sellers. Under the Amazon system, multiple third-party sellers can sell the same product but only a single seller can operate an official brand store. 

All three products are jarred in Australia by Hive & Wellness, according to the product description, which indicates that the manuka honey in the MGO550+ product has been imported in bulk from New Zealand. Comvita Ltd has not responded to the question of whether the company supplied the bulk manuka honey to its long-term Australian partner.

A label change is apparent on one jar in a gift set of the three products (see Illustration 2). For the MGO550+ product the country in the product name is switched from New Zealand to Australia, as though the presence of a New Zealand product would sully the gift.

“MGO” abbreviates methylglyoxal, the compound most responsible for manuka honey’s antibacterial properties. NPA values, which are reverse calculated from MGO content, are seen on the front of the Barnes Naturals products. NPA abbreviates non-peroxide activity. NPA and UMF values are identical, but only UMFHA licensees can use the UMF™ trademark.

Only the most brazen of unscrupulous unlicensed sellers will print UMF values on the front of product labels. Others will work in “UMF” pretty much everywhere else in the listing.

The Hive & Wellness marketing attack on New Zealand manuka honey was contained in a Capilano Honey leaflet distributed in Vancouver in April, titled “Try Australia’s #1 Manuka”.

Capilano Honey Ltd delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange in December 2018 when it was acquired by a China-aligned consortium led by Sydney-based private equity firms. Capilano Honey is operated as a brand of Hive & Wellness along with other brands formerly in the stable of Capilano Honey Ltd, such as Barnes Naturals.

Illustration 2: The label of one Barnes Naturals brand manuka honey product states “New Zealand” in the product name. But in a gift set of products, this label switches the country to Australia (see product at left).

Amazon Japan reportedly is Japan’s largest e-commerce platform. The Japanese business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun, calculating from Amazon.com, Inc. annual report data, estimated Amazon Japan’s calendar 2023 revenues (this is the value of commission that accrued from online merchandise sales and revenue derived from related Amazon businesses, not the value of the merchandise sold on the platform) at JPY3,200b (NZD36.4b or NZD100m per day).

*This report was compiled with research assistance from Bruce Roscoe.