This Kenyan explains how he bought fake honey in Nairobi.The story will be useful for people who like buying honey from the streets.
Friends, please be careful when you buy honey out there. Jana nilijionea maajabu.
Last evening, a lady calls, desperate, that she urgently wants honey. We had been in communication for afew days but never came to an agreement about price because her previous supplier is ksh. 100 bob cheaper than me.
She drives all the way from deep in Kiambu, meets me in town after which we drive to kitengela, we get there at 10.00pm, looks at the honey I have and is utterly impressed. Initially, she was to buy 5 jerrycans weighing 30kgs each but only ended up buying 2, I ask her why? Said I was too expensive, so she bought three jerrycans from someone else. They’re in her boot, so I request to have a look at this honey that is extremely cheap. I take an empty jar, pour in some, put some on a spoon and have a taste, I look at her with so much sadness and tell her you’ve bought 90kgs worth of syrup. My heart breaks a thousand times.
‘This is the honey I usually sell, my customers like it’ she says. At this point, I’m too angry, telling myself how I should have gone home instead, I however decide to compose myself because this is biashara.
‘Now that I’ve given you good honey, what are you going to do with the rest?’ I ask her.
”I’ve already paid for the three jerrycans and there’s nothing I can do about that, so I’m just gonna use your honey to blend what I have so that it doesn’t taste entirely like syrup”, I look at her in disbelief, yaani how can someone buy honey from me aende afanyie vituko hivyo? Trust me, I almost took back my honey.
She’s been doing this ‘honey’ biashara for three years, but haven’t invested a single minute of her time to learn about honey, she simply sells whatever comes her way. I ask her to give me a sample of what she has already cleaned and packed, goes to her car, gets some honey in a squeezy jar, I have a taste, machozi tupu, it tastes cameralised. I’m like, how do you clean the honey ? ‘I put the honey on a meko, bring it to a boil, then sieve’, she says. ‘When I buy very watery honey, the boiling helps to make it thick’, she adds. I die a thousand times upon hearing that. ‘Honey should never be boiled mama’, I tell her, ‘Assuming it’s real honey, you kill all the nutrients when you boil it. If you really have to heat it, do it over a water bath and make sure the temperature doesn’t go beyond 38 degrees Celsius which is body temperature. Also, its not your job to dehydrate honey to make it thick, this is,a process that must happen in the hive’, I add.
I then take my time to explain to her how cells, enzymes etc are denatured at 40 degrees and above and the same happens to honey when overheated. You remain with nothing but syrup, but then I remembered that she doesn’t start with good honey in the first place so it doesn’t really matter what she does.
I tell her about varieties of honey, different hues of honey, moisture content etc only to realise she had no clue about the test parameters for honey. I ask her who her supplier is, where she gets the honey from and whether she tests the honey before selling, She says ‘Sometimes my supplier tells me hata yeye hajui ni honey ya wapi, and if I ask her if it’s good, she says she can’t be sure because she buys from several people’, I’m livid! ‘It’s her job to know whether the honey she supplies is good or bad, it’s also your job to know whether the honey you buy is good or bad, you just can’t go paying for goods you’re not sure about and you can’t go marketing things whose quality you don’t know of!’ I tell her
Yaani I’ve never been this upset over honey. Tafadhali, don’t get into the honey business if you’re not willing to invest your time and money in learning about honey, you’ll just be out here selling syrup.
Aki ya mungu I’m still upset.