Buy Honey Online – Your Top 5 Choices

Honey can be a great addition to any diet, offering some of the sweetness of sugar but in a healthier and less processed manner.

Choosing to buy honey online gives you many advantages. You have access to a wider selection, more convenience and you can get higher-quality honey overall.

After all, most of the health advantages of honey come from raw honey – not the processed junk you find in grocery stores. What’s more, raw honey tastes much better and it doesn’t have to break the bank.

Instead, you can find many high-quality and inexpensive honey options online and get them delivered right to your door.

What’s not to love?

The Best Online Honey Choices

There are countless brands of honey online. Some of them are amazing, others not so much. The choices below are some of the best.

GloryBee Honey

What I love the most about this brand is the range of options. GloryBee offers 12 different flavors of honey, along with 5 sizes. The sizes start at 18 ounces (pictured below) and go up to 5 pounds.

The nature of honey means availability will vary from one season to the next. In the 18-ounce size, the main options are the Blackberry Blossom above and the White Clover Blossom below.

The Blackcurrant Blossom is a liquid honey, while the White Clover Blossom is a creamed honey. Both are entirely natural.

The 18-ounce jar is perfect for anyone who wants to try out the various honey varieties, along with people who use honey rarely. You could also go to the 48-ounce container if you want a better deal, like the product below. 

They also offer some more unusual products, such as honey sticks. These are basically straws filled with honey. This makes an easy way to add honey to drinks and can be appealing to kids too.

There are also flavor variations, including lemon and habanero. The flavored versions still use the same honey type (clover) and are infused with lemon or habanero oil to create the flavor.

Overall, the brand tends to offer exceptional products with minimal processing. Some are organic and are non-GMO verified. That’s not true for all of the options – but you’ll find the same pattern with other brands too.

The Big Island Bee Company

Another interesting choice is The Big Island Bee Company. Like GloryBee, this brand has a high emphasis on quality and all of the honey is raw.

In this case, the range is smaller, with 4 flavors and 2 sizes. However, all of the honey is produced in Hawaii and is labeled organic.

Once again, some of the flavors are creamed and others are liquid. The honey itself receives good reviews, particularly for the way that the varieties taste.

The relatively small jars also work well for many situations and most of the varieties are also available in the larger jars as well.

Tasmanian Honey Company

The Tasmanian Honey Company is another location-specific option. In this case, the honey is from Tasmania, which is an Australian state. The main variety sold is Leatherwood, which is pictured below.

The company describes the variety as a ‘the red wine of honey’, suggesting that the flavor is robust and different than most other types of honey. This makes it an interesting option if you want something a little different as well.

The honey also comes in a can, which would be more resilient to transport. Many people prefer glass containers but the metal is still better than plastic.

There are also some other options available, including a meadow variety.

However, the leatherwood honey is the most popular (by far) and is what makes the company stand out. As such, that would be the best option to go with.

Nature Nate’s Natural

Unlike the previous brands, Nature Nate’s Natural doesn’t focus on individual varieties of honey. This means the honey is multi-floral and comes from multiple species.

Multi-floral honey isn’t a bad thing for health. The main difference is flavor. Honey like this will often have a less distinct flavor profile and it will be more similar to what you find in the grocery store.

Nevertheless, the products are still raw and unfiltered. Part of the range is also organic.

The regular versions also come in a range of sizes, up to 40 ounces. Additionally, there are also small packets of honey available.

The company also operates on a larger scale than most of the other producers. This means there are more reviews for the products and the average price is lower.

The products here aren’t my first choice for raw honey. Realistically, smaller producers often make healthier products. Plus, the flavor profiles of the different varieties are too good to miss. In contrast, this honey ends up being much milder.

The products are also in plastic, rather than glass, which is another disadvantage.

That being said, this brand can be a good introduction to raw honey – especially if you’ve never tried it before. This may be important, as raw honey is distinctive and some people do find it overwhelming at first.

A higher UMF rating means a more beneficial product. But, the price increases along with the UMF rating.

The list above highlights one reason for buying honey online – the selection.

When you shop online, you have access to many different brands at once, including all the varieties they offer. In contrast, most physical stores have a limited range of products.

So, they’ll typically offer fewer brands and types, limiting your options. As a result, you might have to visit multiple stores to find the specific product that you want. Likewise, some of the varieties mentioned previously can’t even be found in regular stores.

There is also the convenience factor. Shopping online is fast and easy, and you don’t have to go anywhere.

You also have all the information you need and can easily compare products and reviews. As such, it’s easier to find good honey.

And finally, honey in the stores often isn’t that great.

You should be consuming raw honey, which has gone through minimal processing. It’s also best if you know what flowers the honey comes from. So, manuka honey or orange blossom honey is more appealing than simply ‘honey’.

Achieving these goals is much easier online than in a physical store.

When you shop online, you can pick and choose the best honey

How Honey Can Be Beneficial

So, why choose honey anyway?

After all, honey is still a source of sugar and sugar can be dangerous. In fact, many people need to significantly decrease their sugar intake.

Even so, honey has some advantages. For one thing, it is less processed, making it more natural.

Honey is also more complex. Sugar is roughly 50% glucose and 50% fructose. On the other hand, honey is around 30% glucose and less than 40% fructose. The remaining 30% comes from a wide range of other sugar types, along with some fiber.

This means that honey is broken down differently. Because there is less fructose honey doesn’t tend to spike blood sugar as quickly (1).

Honey also offers some trace compounds and polyphenols that may provide health benefits. Some of these also have antimicrobial properties (2,3,4).

The flavor and texture of honey also offer some advantages. For example, honey is often used to combat colds, coughs and sore throats. The compounds in honey play a key role in these effects but the texture may as well, especially for suppressing coughs (5,6,7).

Collectively, these areas make honey a better choice than sugar for overall health. If nothing else, it is a more natural alternative and you know exactly what you are getting.

There are also many amazing recipes that use honey.

However, honey is still a source of sugar and it is easy to have too much. So, you do need to be aware of how much you’re consuming.

Taking Full Advantage of Honey

There are many great ways to include honey in a healthy diet – something that countless recipe creators show.

But first, let me make something clear.

Heating honey DOES NOT make it toxic. This is a myth and a slightly absurd one at that. Grist offers insight into why that is.

But basically, heat would only ever denature some enzymes (break them down). At worst, this would decrease the health benefits of honey. But, that doesn’t make it toxic, not at all. There is little evidence that much denaturing occurs anyway.

Cooking any food changes the chemical composition. As with honey, you might lose some benefits along the way but you will still get most of them.

So, the issue isn’t a big deal and cooking with honey won’t actually harm you.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s take a look at some recipes.

In A Hot Drink

Hot drinks are the most powerful use of honey – especially if you’re sick. In many cases, the idea is a variation on lemon water, with honey and some additional ingredients added in.  

Some recipes to try include the following:

• All-Natural Cold/Flu Remedy – from Simple Green Smoothies
  
• Hot Lemon Ginger Tea – from The Spruce
  
• Spiced Hot Port with Lemon and Honey – from Haughton Honey
  
• Honey Ginger Lemon Tonic (with video) – from The Kitchn
  
• Hot Honey Lemon with Vodka – from Global Table Adventure
  
• Hot Honey Ginger Lime Tea – from The Kitchen Paper

Common ingredients across recipes include cinnamon, ginger and lemon, although individual recipes have their own quirks.

Some of these recipes can be considered a hot toddy, which traditionally uses whiskey as an ingredient. This idea is particularly common for combating the flu or a cold and the flavor profile works exceptionally well.  The site Organic Authority also offers some variations on the hot toddy if you want to mix that up somewhat.

You can also use honey as a sweetener for hot drinks – especially if you’re having tea. The flavors of honey seem to work perfectly with tea.

Honey can be a sweetener for coffee too but that’s less common. Most people find that the flavors clash too much. But, the idea can be worth trying – as some people love the combination of flavors.

The flavor profile of honey does vary across the various types. So, you can try out different products and recipes until you find a combination that you like.

In A Cold Drink

Honey is more common in hot drinks, mostly because of its consistency. Cold drinks typically require an extra step, as you must dissolve the honey.

Still, some cold recipes take advantage of honey as well, such as the following examples:

• Lemon Ginger Iced Green Tea with Honey – from My Sequined Life
  
• Iced Green Tea with Lime, Lemon & Honey – from Jessica Garvin
  
• Iced Ginger Honey Lemon Tea – from Bowl of Delicious

In Baking

Honey makes a fairly common sweetener in baked goods. In some cases, honey is used as the only sweetener, while other recipes may use a second sweetener as well.

The site Kitchen Stewardship has a good list to get you started and the recipes below can help as well.

• Honey Pound Cake – from Baking Sense
  
• Honey Mug Cake – from Sweet 2 Eat Baking
  
• Honey Buns – from Baking in a Moment

In Other Recipes

There are many other ways that you can use honey. In some cases, recipes will use honey for its sweetness or they may rely on its texture and flavor. For example, granola recipes often take advantage of honey, as do the recipes below:

• 20 Minute Honey Garlic Shrimp – from Sally’s Baking Addiction
  
• Baked Honey Garlic Salmon in Foil – from Eat Well 101
  
• Breakfast Rhubarb – Olive Magazine
  
• Baked Honey Mustard Chicken – from Jessica Garvin
  
• Baked Bree with Honey and Pistachios – from Serious Eats

You can also substitute honey into recipes that don’t currently use it.

For example, the site Whole New Mom offers a useful guide to using sugar substitutes in recipes. The piece is on multiple sweetener types and the considerations you need to make. So, it isn’t all about honey but the information is useful.

You can also turn to The Kitchn, which offers four rules for swapping honey for sugar when you’re baking. The same rules could be used for other types of recipes as well.

Final Thoughts

Honey is a healthier option than sugar if you watch your consumption. What’s more, the flavor and texture work well in many recipes, including some powerful hot drinks.

For many people, it can be a go-to sweetener. And, why not? After all, buying honey online is easy and there are some high-quality brands to choose from.

I recommend starting off with GloryBee. They have a wide selection to choose from, including multiple products, sizes and styles.