A Partnership for Quality

If there’s one thing Nate’s and Texas A&M University have in common, it’s that we believe that quality is of utmost importance when selling honey. For eight years, Nate’s partnered with Texas A&M to test origin of our honey to match our quality statement to customers.

Dr. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropology professor at Texas A&M, did a study for Food Safety News that included testing honey samples from all over the country and found that more than 75% of honey being sold has had all of the pollens filtered out. This makes the honey untraceable.

Even though the FDA doesn’t require pollen to remain in the honey, Nate’s chose to utilize Dr. Bryant’s expertise to keep our standards high and our authenticity true. By staying unfiltered—a straining process that only removes bee parts and wax but allows pollens to pass through—we believe we are giving people honey that is as close to what nature intended as possible, and leaving the pollens intact allows us to perform origin testing as well.

While there are many international testing facilities that perform the same types of origin test, we believe that universities are the key to the future of bee health, and we were proud to put our money toward a university that has one of the best agriculture programs in the world instead. Bryant has over 20,000 types of pollen from all over the world, and this invaluable collection allows him to identify what crops the bees who made the honey traveled to and where they were.

Not only do high testing standards keep our product true, we believe testing greatly impacts bee health. Our rigorous in-house and third-party testing confirms a clean read of pesticides and antibiotics. Our testing also ensures that the honey has not been adulterated with corn or rice syrup. Every time you purchase a bottle of Nate’s honey, you’re getting an authentic product that makes our give-back programs like Long Live the Bees and Honey Gives Hope possible.