Since 14 June an Italian honey jar has to name every country it came from, and say how much

For twenty years a jar of blended honey could get by with a single line. The 2001 European directive, in the text that applied until this year, allowed the list of countries of origin to be replaced by one of three formulas: «blend of EU honeys», «blend of non-EU honeys», «blend of EU and non-EU honeys».

The third was the most common and also the least informative statement available: it says the honey comes from somewhere inside or outside the Union, which is to say from anywhere.

Directive (EU) 2024/1438 of 14 May 2024 rewrote that point. The country of harvest now goes on the label, and where there is more than one they all have to appear «in the principal field of vision, in descending order of their share by weight, together with the percentage represented by each».

Italy brought the rule in with legislative decree 207 of 30 December 2025, which rewrites article 3 of legislative decree 179 of 2004. It has applied since 14 June 2026, so for four and a half months.

The new part is not the list of countries: it is the percentage beside each one. A honey blended from three lots has to say how much each weighs, in descending order, and say it on the front rather than in small print on the back.

The rule allows a tolerance of 5% on each individual share of the blend, «calculated on the basis of the operator's traceability records». The tolerance is not free rounding: it is measured against documents the company has to keep anyway.

The principal field of vision is the part you see without turning the jar. It is the same notion used for other compulsory information, and here it stops origin from ending up where nobody looks.

For a shopper the consequence is concrete. Where two jars cost the same and one declares three countries with their shares while the other declares one, that difference is now visible. What to make of it is another matter, and the rule does not touch it: origin is a fact about provenance, not a verdict on the honey.

There is a flexibility that Italy took up, and it is worth knowing because it explains labels that would otherwise look broken. Where a blend has more than four countries of origin and the four largest shares account for more than 60% of the blend, only those four need to carry a percentage, with the other countries listed in descending order without one.

So a label can legitimately show four numbers followed by a tail of bare country names. It is not a printing error and not a trick: it is the rule.

The limit of that tail is arithmetic. If the first four shares come to 61%, the remaining 39% is spread across countries of which only the order is known. That is where the new transparency stops, and it is worth knowing before reading a jar as though it told you everything.

The 60% threshold is also why the shortcut is not always available: if the top four shares fall below it, the general rule returns and every percentage has to be declared.

The most visible exception covers single portions. For packs containing a net quantity of honey below 30 grams, the names of the countries of origin may be replaced by a two-letter code from the international standard ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.

These are the jars in hotels and bars, where writing out four countries in full would be physically impossible. The European text points to exactly that: small packs and the technical difficulties they create.

In practice a 20-gram jar may carry codes such as IT, ES, HU or UA instead of names. They are the codes used on travel documents, so they are easy enough to decipher.

Above 30 grams the shortcut does not apply and the names have to be spelled out. It is a hard threshold, and the jar in a home kitchen, which usually starts at 250 grams, never falls under it.

The dates are worth lining up, because there are four of them and they get mixed up. The directive is dated 14 May 2024. Its article 5 requires member states to adopt and publish their transposing measures by 14 December 2025, and to apply them from 14 June 2026.

The Italian decree is dated 30 December 2025 and was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale of 5 January 2026, entering into force the following day. Three weeks separate the European deadline for publication from the Italian publication.

The date that matters for shoppers, though, is a different one: article 5 of the decree states that its provisions «apply from 14 June 2026», the same date the directive sets for everyone.

The Italian delay, in other words, concerns publication rather than application: the new labels have been due on the same day across the Union.

Four and a half months on, shops still carry labels with the old wording. That is not an irregularity: it is written into the transitional measures.

Article 6 of the directive provides that products placed on the market or labelled before 14 June 2026, in conformity with the old directives, «may continue to be marketed until stocks are exhausted». The Italian decree repeats the same rule in its article 5.

Honey keeps in a warehouse for a long time, so the tail will be long. A jar bought today saying «blend of EU and non-EU honeys» does not mean somebody broke a rule: it means that jar was labelled before June.

The simple way to tell them apart in front of a shelf is to look for the countries and for the percentages beside them. Where they are there, the label is a new one.

The Italian decree changes two more things that passed unnoticed. The first: the words «filtered honey» were deleted from the letter listing the categories, a technical change about how that product is to be named.

The second answers a recurring question: pollen is not considered an ingredient of honey under article 2 of the European regulation on food information to consumers. It is a point of food law, and it makes clear that its presence is not declared as though it were something added.

What remains to be said is what the rule does not do. It says nothing about taste, quality or properties: it says where the honey comes from and in what proportion. An Italian honey and a four-country blend stand on the same footing before the law, and what the label now shows is a difference of provenance.

So the practical advice is only about reading: look for the countries in the principal field of vision, check whether a percentage sits beside them, and remember that under 30 grams two-letter codes are perfectly regular.