Trader Joe’s relieved of sticky situation over honey labels

Honey, no reasonable consumer would expect Trader Joe’s Co. to make sure all of its honeybees get all of their nectar from the same kind of flower.

That’s the assessment issued by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday in affirming the dismissal of a class-action lawsuit against the Monrovia, California-based chain store that claimed the store’s “100% New Zealand Manuka Honey” label fooled consumers.

The court, in agreeing with an earlier district court opinion, wrote that Trader Joe’s did not violate the Food and Drug Administration’s rules on labeling, and that most people know all honey doesn’t come from the same kind of flower.

“After foraging for pollen from different flowering plants, bees do not segregate the nectar from different floral sources before producing honey. … It is all simply honey that a particular hive creates from all of the nectar its bees have foraged,” the opinion states.

“Here, Trader Joe’s Manuka Honey is chiefly derived from Manuka flower nectar, and Manuka is therefore the chief floral source for all of the product’s honey under the FDA’s definition, even if some of it is derived from nectar from other floral sources. … (t)here is no dispute that all of the honey involved is technically manuka honey, albeit with varying pollen counts.”