What to avoid:

Any honey marketer bearing a manuka quality mark or rating system must have a standard relating to the mark that explains to a consumer what the mark means. The parameters associated with product grading should be meaningful and able to be verified.

Avoid one dimensional rating systems, i.e. suppliers that only use one parameter to grade their manuka honey.
Any grading system using MGO or pollen in isolation is not robust and should be avoided as:
Methylglyoxal, MGO can be artificially added by unscrupulous companies,
Manuka pollen grains can look identical to Kanuka pollen, so the honey may actually be a high proportion of kanuka which won’t exhibit the unique manuka properties.

Additionally, we recommend you avoid buying honey labeled as manuka based on a Total Activity or “Peroxided” activity rating as this is a property any honey will have and therefore not a good indicator of its manuka properties.