Liquid Gold And Dirty Money: How Food Fraud Feeds Financial Crime in New Zealand
Callaghan Innovation has reported that six times more mānuka honey is sold around the world than New Zealand actually produces
Pick up a jar of mānuka honey in any pharmacy from Shanghai to San Francisco and you will see two words that carry extraordinary weight: New Zealand. Those words signal purity, science-backed health benefits, and a landscape free from industrial contamination. They also signal money.
A single kilogram of high-grade mānuka can fetch more than NZ$300 at retail. Multiply that by a global market running into billions of dollars and you have a product that attracts entrepreneurs, scientists, and beekeepers in roughly equal measure. It also attracts criminals.
Callaghan Innovation has reported that six times more mānuka honey is sold around the world than New Zealand actually produces (Callaghan Innovation, 2024).
For every genuine jar reaching a consumer, five more carry the name without the substance. Someone is filling those jars, printing those labels, forging those certificates, and pocketing the margin. That is fraud. And where there is fraud at scale, money laundering follows like a shadow.
What Is at Stake
New Zealand's food and fibre sector delivered a record NZ$65.2 billion in export revenue in the year to 30 June 2026, a full billion dollars above official forecasts (Ministry for Primary Industries, 2026). Food and fibre now accounts for 83 per cent of all goods leaving the country, and one in every seven New Zealanders works in the sector (Devdiscourse, 2025).
The entire edifice rests on reputation. Buyers in Tokyo, London, and Dubai pay premium prices because they trust the provenance stamped on the packaging. Undermine that trust and the consequences ripple through every farm gate, every processing plant, and every port in the country.
Globally, food fraud strips between US$30 billion and US$50 billion from the legitimate economy each year, according to the World Trade Organization's 2024 report on illicit trade in food (WTO, 2024). In the United Kingdom alone, the Food Standards Agency estimates the annual cost at between £410 million and £1.96 billion (Food Safety News, 2023). These are conservative figures. Food fraud is designed to be invisible, so the true losses are almost certainly larger.
