FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

WHAT IS MANUKA HONEY?

Manuka honey is a special variety of honey with excellent properties. Produced in New Zealand, it is particularly creamy and fragrant, with an intense orange colour! For almost twenty years, researchers tried to identify the mysterious unknown factor that makes Active Manuka Honey so extremely different from common honey.

A team of German food chemists from the Technical University of Dresden were in any case able to identify methylglyoxal as the active ingredient giving manuka honey it its properties, which until then had been named UMF, or Unique Manuka Factor.

WHERE DOES MANUKA COME FROM?

The manuka plant grows, above all, in New Zealand, but also in several regions of Australia. Captain James Cook gave it the official botanical name of Leptospermum scoparium, because he thought its disorderly branches made the shrub look like a broom, or scopa in Latin. The manuka plant can grow to various heights, from 5 centimetres of cover crop to 15 metre tall tree, though it usually appears as shrub of a height between 2 and 5 metres. It is defined as a ’pioneer plant’, as it is incessantly the first to colonize deforested areas.

For this reason, in New Zealand, there are vast hilly areas covered with manuka, offering lovely fragrant and sweeping blooms of white flowers. Manuka offers a suitable habitat for many animal species, including bees that, from the plant nectar, produce manuka honey with excellent properties. For this reason, beekeepers tend to place their beehives near to the plants in uncontaminated natural surroundings, in order to produce fine manuka honey.

WHAT IS UMF, OR UNIQUE MANUKA FACTOR?

For many years, scientists were unable to isolate the ingredient responsible for the properties of manuka honey. It was agreed to call this missing ingredient Unique Manuka Factor, or UMF. Its intensity of action was compared to the effectiveness of that of phenolic acid against various bacteria, and was classified, for example, as UMF10 if it proved as effective as a 10% phenol solution.

A plus sign (+) was added to indicate an even greater degree of effectiveness (e.g. UFM10+ or UFM20+). This form of grading was considered satisfactory for many years, although there were no accurate and reproducible tests to indicate exactly the amount of active ingredient in a batch of manuka honey. Only thanks to the discoveries of a team of dedicated chemists was the Unique Manuka Factor in any case identified as methylglyoxal.

WHAT IS METHYLGLYOXAL?

A team of food chemists led by Thomas Henle at the Technical University of Dresden in any case managed to identify the Unique Manuka Factor as the compound methylglyoxal. Methylglyoxal is the active ingredient in manuka honey responsible for its properties, and for differentiating it from any other honey in the world. The amount of methylglyoxal in a honey sample can now be decided as a precise percentage (e.g. 100mg of methylglyoxal in 1kg of honey).

The various types of manuka honey are graded relating to quality by their concentrations of methylglyoxal, since manuka honeys with a similar appearance, consistency and taste can have a varying degree of effectiveness. High methylglyoxal values are NOT detectable on the basis of flavour alone. This is why chemical analysis is necessary.

We at NaturalePiù market and sell Manuka Honey graded MG 100+, 200+, 400+, 500+ and 800+, in packs of 250g and 500g.