Selling Honey: Labelling and Direct Sale Without Mistakes

A jar does not sell because the honey is good: it sells because it is compliant. Mandatory particulars, floral names, batch codes, durability dates and the change that rewrites labels from 14 June 2026, plus the rules for selling direct on the farm, at fairs and online.

Your honey is good. You know it, and so does anyone who has tasted it in your kitchen. But the jar you put on a shelf does not sell because it is good: it sells because it is compliant.

This is the part of the job nobody talks about. We spend hours on frames and varroa, then the moment comes to write four lines on a label and it turns out nobody ever explained them properly. Worse: in 2026 those lines changed. Italian legislative decree no. 207 of 30 December 2025 applies from 14 June 2026 and rewrites the rules on honey origin labelling.

This guide sets out the three things that really decide whether you can sell your honey: how you are registered, what is written on the jar, where and to whom you sell it. No shortcuts and no alarmism. Just what the rules say, with a pointer to whoever has the final word on your case.

Registration comes before the label

No label saves honey sold by someone who appears in no register. The first step is entry in the national beekeeping register, compulsory even for a single hive, and it applies even if you only produce for your own household. We covered this in detail in the guide on urban beekeeping, where the subject overlaps with distances and local rules.

The second step is hygiene. Regulation (EC) no. 852/2004 places honey production within primary production, and a beekeeper already on the register has effectively met the notification requirement. But as soon as you extract, filter, jar and label for sale, you move into processing: you need suitable premises, in plain language an extraction room, and whatever registration or approval your local health authority requires.

This is where everything changes from one region to the next. There is no magic number of kilos below which you are free: Article 1(2)(c) of Regulation 852/2004 excludes the direct supply of small quantities of primary products to the final consumer or to local retailers, but paragraph 3 of the same article states plainly that Member States lay down the rules governing those activities. In Italy that means regional rules. So the right question is not how many kilos you may sell, but what your local health authority asks of you.

The rule many people discover too late: honey must be pre-packed at origin

There is one line in Italian legislative decree no. 179 of 21 May 2004 that settles a lot of doubts on its own: honey intended for consumers must be pre-packed at origin in closed containers.

In practice: you cannot draw honey from the settling tank into the jar a customer brought from home. You cannot sell loose honey by weight the way olives are sold. The jar is closed where it is produced, and it reaches the buyer closed and labelled.

It sounds like a formality. It is not. It is the reason why direct sale of honey, at a fair or on the farm, always goes through an already packed product.

What has to be written on the jar

Regulation (EU) no. 1169/2011 on food information to consumers applies to honey, together with the specific provisions of decree 179/2004. Put the two together and the list of mandatory particulars looks like this:

• the sales name, that is "honey", possibly completed as we will see shortly;
• the net quantity, in grams or kilograms;
• the date of minimum durability;
• the name or business name and address of the operator responsible for the label;
• the address of the production or, if different, packaging plant, where it does not coincide with the address already given;
• the country of origin where the honey was harvested;
• the batch code, apart from the exemption discussed below;
• any special storage conditions, where the nature of the product requires them.

Honey carries no list of ingredients, because it is made of honey and nothing else: adding anything, additives included, is forbidden. And under the new wording of the decree, pollen is not an ingredient but a specific natural component of honey.

When you may write "acacia" and when you may not

The sales name may be completed by a reference to the floral or vegetable origin, but only if the product is wholly or mainly obtained from the plant indicated and has the organoleptic, physico-chemical and microscopic characteristics of that origin.

The three conditions travel together. The right taste is not enough if the pollen analysis tells a different story, and the other way round. Anyone selling a monofloral honey with no verification behind it is exposed, because that wording is exactly where an inspection looks. In our article on wildflower, monofloral and honeydew honeys we explained how a botanical origin is established.

Regional, territorial or topographical origin is a different matter. There the rule is stricter: the reference is allowed only if the product comes wholly from the origin indicated. No "mainly". If you put the name of your village on the label, that honey comes from there and nowhere else.

From 14 June 2026 origin is written differently

This is the change worth knowing well, because it rewrites labels many people considered settled.

Legislative decree 207/2025, which transposes Directive (EU) 2024/1438, states that the label must indicate the country of origin where the honey was harvested. If the honey comes from more than one country, those countries must appear in the principal field of vision, in descending order of their share by weight, together with the percentage of each. A tolerance of 5 per cent is allowed on each individual share, calculated on the operator's traceability records.

There is one simplification only: where a blend has more than four countries of origin and the four largest shares account for over 60 per cent of the blend, the percentage may be shown for those four alone, with the other countries listed in descending order without percentages.

For genuinely small jars, under 30 grams net, the country names may be replaced by the two-letter code of ISO standard 3166-1 alpha-2.

The provisions apply from 14 June 2026. Products placed on the market or labelled before that date in line with the previous rules may be sold until stocks run out.

Why the new rule favours those who produce in Italy

Let us work out who gains.

Until yesterday a blend of different provenances could get by with generic wording. Today that wording is no longer enough: country names and percentages are required, in the principal field of vision, where the customer looks first.

Anyone producing their own honey in a single country writes one line, and writes it as a positive. That is a competitive advantage that costs nothing, because it follows from the way you work. It is worth using well: a clear provenance, the name of the territory if it genuinely is wholly that one, and the rest of the label kept clean.

The other side of the coin concerns those who buy honey from third parties and resell it packed. There the traceability paperwork becomes serious, because the percentages on the label must be demonstrable. If you buy in bulk, pick your supplier with this in mind too: we wrote about it in the guide on how to choose a reliable wholesale honey supplier.

The batch code: a line you can skip, but only on one condition

A batch identifies a set of units produced or packed in substantially identical circumstances. It is set by the producer or packer under their own responsibility, and it must be easily visible, clearly legible and indelible, preceded by the letter "L" unless it is already distinguishable from the other labelling particulars.

The batch code is not required where the date of minimum durability shows at least the day and the month. And this is where many home-made labels go wrong without noticing.

Honey keeps for a long time, so the temptation is to write the year only. But if you write only the year, the batch code becomes mandatory. If instead you print day and month, you may leave the batch out. Both routes are correct: what does not work is taking half of one and half of the other.

One last useful exemption: for packages and containers whose largest face has a surface area of less than 10 square centimetres, no batch code is required.

You decide the date of minimum durability

No rule imposes a two-year shelf life on honey. The date of minimum durability is the date until which the product retains its specific properties under proper storage conditions, and it is set by the operator on the basis of how they work and how the product behaves.

The wording, on the other hand, is fixed: "best before" where you give the day, "best before end" in other cases. For products keeping for more than eighteen months the year alone is enough; between three and eighteen months, month and year will do.

A practical point written in no statute: the shelf life you declare has to hold for your real honey, not the ideal one. Honey jarred too wet ferments early, and the printed date will not stop it. The real control happens upstream, as we saw when discussing honey harvesting and ripening, where the legal ceiling on water is 20 per cent but the working target sits lower.

Nutrition declaration: honey is exempt

The table of energy and nutrient values, compulsory on nearly every packaged food, is not needed on honey.

The reason lies in Annex V to Regulation 1169/2011, which exempts unprocessed products comprising a single ingredient, and the European Commission has said so expressly for honey: it is an unprocessed food, obtained from components rather than ingredients, and may therefore benefit from the exemption.

Watch the flip side, though: if a nutrition claim appears on the label, the exemption falls away and the declaration becomes compulsory. A claim thrown in to look good forces you into a table you need not have drawn up.

Type size, field of vision and small jars

Mandatory particulars must be printed in a type whose x-height is equal to or greater than 1.2 millimetres. On containers whose largest surface measures less than 80 square centimetres the threshold drops to 0.9 millimetres.

Sales name and net quantity must appear in the same field of vision, that is, readable together without turning the jar.

And for miniature formats, the wedding-favour or tasting sizes, the picture lightens considerably: under 30 grams the country may become a two-letter code, under 25 square centimetres of surface no nutrition declaration is needed, under 10 square centimetres on the largest face the batch code falls away too.

What you may not write, even if it is true

This is the part that costs improvisers the most.

Health claims are governed by Regulation (EC) no. 1924/2006 and are allowed only where authorised and entered in the European register. For hive products there are no authorised claims: the applications relating to the botanicals sector have been left pending. That means your honey label may not say that it soothes the throat, strengthens defences or helps you sleep. We explained this in the piece on pollen and propolis, where the issue is identical.

Then there is the grey zone of evocative words. "Natural", "genuine", "pure", "artisanal" are not banned outright, but Regulation 1169/2011 requires information that does not mislead. Writing "pure Italian honey" on a product that is only partly Italian is an unfair information practice, with its own penalty attached.

A simple rule to keep in mind: every word on the label must be provable with a document or an analysis. If you cannot prove it, take it off.

Selling direct: on the farm, at fairs, online

Direct sale of agricultural products is governed by Article 4 of Italian legislative decree no. 228 of 18 May 2001. Agricultural entrepreneurs entered in the business register may sell at retail, throughout the country, products coming mainly from their own holdings.

The arrangements change the paperwork:

• sale on the holding, on open-air surfaces or surfaces used for primary production: no notice of commencement;
• village festivals, fairs and events promoting typical or local products: no notice;
• itinerant sale: notice to the municipality where the holding is based, effective from the date it is sent;
• non-itinerant sale in public areas or premises open to the public: notice to the mayor of the municipality where you sell;
• e-commerce: you may start at the same time as you send the notice to the municipality where the holding is based.

Two thresholds to keep an eye on: where revenue from the sale of products not coming from your own holdings exceeded, in the previous calendar year, 160,000 euro for sole traders or 4 million for companies, ordinary trade rules apply.

It is worth remembering that farming activity does not stop at honey. Pollination too is recognised as a connected agricultural activity, as we saw when discussing contract pollination.

Selling to others: shops, restaurants, wholesale

The moment the jar leaves your hand and lands on someone else's shelf, two things change.

The first is paperwork. You need traceability in and out, and the batch becomes the tool by which, if something goes wrong, you trace back to a limited set of jars instead of a whole year's production.

The second is responsibility for the label. The operator named on the pack is the one responsible for the information, and that role is not delegated to the shopkeeper.

If instead you sell in bulk to other operators, in drums, the honey travels as a product intended for further processing or packing: there the commercial documents and supply agreements matter more than the consumer label. One point stands firm, now more than ever: whoever does the jarring must be able to reconstruct where every kilo came from, because they will have to write countries and percentages on their own label.

What getting it wrong costs

Penalties for breaches of food information rules are set out in Italian legislative decree no. 231 of 15 December 2017. The amounts show how seriously the matter is taken:

• failure to apply one or more mandatory particulars: from 3,000 to 24,000 euro;
• omission of the batch code: from 3,000 to 24,000 euro; batch code shown in ways other than those prescribed: from 1,000 to 8,000 euro;
• breaches concerning the nutrition declaration: from 2,000 to 16,000 euro;
• naming the producer on the label instead of the responsible operator: the same 3,000 to 24,000 euro penalty.

These figures comfortably exceed the value of a batch of jars. Reprinting a label costs far less.

Three mistakes we see most often

The first is the copied label. Someone takes a colleague's, changes the name and prints. Except that the plant address, the batch and the durability date are your data, not theirs, and a copied monofloral name remains a claim that you have to be able to stand behind.

The second is honey "without a label because I know the buyer". Selling to relatives and acquaintances is still selling. And honey intended for consumers must be pre-packed at origin in closed containers: a jar filled on the spot is not an informal shortcut, it is a non-compliance.

The third is one claim too many. A health sentence added to make the label more appealing is the costliest mistake, because it cannot be patched with a correction: it has to come off.

In short

Registration first, label second, sales channel last. In between, one habit to acquire: keep the paperwork in order, because from 14 June 2026 a honey label has to state provenance in a way that can be checked.

For anyone producing in Italy that is good news. One clear line, a territory declared in full, no vague formulas. It is exactly the kind of transparency a beekeeper can afford.

If in doubt on a specific case, the right desk remains the veterinary service of the local health authority and, for the commercial side, the municipality: the implementing arrangements change from region to region, and one local answer is worth ten readings of a general rule.