Honey is produced from the nectar of flowers and tree blossom and varies in colour according to its source. Honey producers and blenders have their own colour scale which is used to gauge its market price, and in the case of blenders, to standardize their product.

Syrups used in cough mixtures are often coloured for recognition purposes and sugar when refined is required to be colourless.

Scales & Values

Grading techniques are widely used to assess product colour by comparison with a representative series of fixed colour standards.

For many product types, a characteristic set of standards was agreed and adopted to aid colour control and the communication of colour specifications; the result is a selection of traditional colour grading scales that have been adopted as industry standards and are still in common use today.

• CIE L*a*b
• Delta E* colour difference
• International Fruit Juice Union (IFU) Colour
• Maple Syrup
• Spectral data
• Transmittance
• xyY chromaticity co-ordinates
• XYZ tristimulus values
• ICUMSA Colour Index (ICUMSA GS1-7, ICUMSA GS2/3-9)
• Honey Colour(Pfund Equivalents)