Is Honey Vegan?

Why honey is treated as an animal product

Bees make honey as stored food for the colony, and beekeepers harvest part of that store. Under the common definition of vegan food, an ingredient produced by an animal is not vegan, which puts honey in the same category as dairy and eggs.

Some people who eat a mostly plant-based diet still choose to eat honey. That is a personal decision, but it does not change what the word vegan means on a label or in a search filter.

How this site handles honey

Honey is one of the seven dietary dimensions we track on every recipe, and it has its own value in the vocabulary: a recipe either contains honey, is free of it, or is unknown.

A recipe whose honey status is unknown is not published, because the publication gate rejects unknown values. That is why the honey-free hub can give you a definite answer rather than a guess.

Ingredients that often carry honey without saying so include glazes, some mustards, granola, cereal bars and certain breads. When a tag says free of honey, read it as a statement about the listed ingredients.