Is Australian Manuka real Manuka?

Yes. Australian Manuka is Manuka, and the question has now been settled twice in law, once in New Zealand's own courts.

If you have wondered why some honey is labelled Manuka and some Leptospermum, or whether the Australian jars are a lesser copy of the New Zealand thing, this is the short version.

The plant, not the country

Manuka honey comes from bees working the nectar of Leptospermum, a genus of shrubs and small trees. Leptospermum grows on both sides of the Tasman. It is not a New Zealand plant that Australia later acquired; it is an Australasian genus, and the overwhelming majority of it is Australian. Australia has more than eighty Leptospermum species.

The word Manuka came into common Australian usage in the 1800s and has been used here since.

What the two rulings said

New Zealand producers applied to register "Manuka honey" as a certification mark, which would have restricted the word to honey of New Zealand origin.

The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office refused the application in December 2021. The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand then upheld the Australian Manuka Honey Association's opposition on 22 May 2023, finding the term descriptive rather than distinctive of one country's product. After that, the New Zealand applicants withdrew their United Kingdom appeal and their European Union application.

That is the whole of it. The name describes what the honey is made from, and a descriptive word cannot be owned.

Australia's advantage is variety

The more interesting fact is what all that Leptospermum actually produces.

In a study of eighty Australian Leptospermum honey samples, honeys from Leptospermum polygalifolium in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales and at Byfield in Queensland reached up to 1,100 mg/kg of methylglyoxal, the compound the MGO grade measures (Cokcetin et al., PLoS One, 2016, PMID 28030589).

A wider survey looked at nectar from fifty-five of the eighty-four Australian Leptospermum species and found dihydroxyacetone, the precursor methylglyoxal forms from, ranging from undetectable in some species to more than 16,000 mg/kg relative to total sugar in Leptospermum speciosum and Leptospermum whitei (Williams et al., Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2018, PMID 30289260).

That range is the point. Australia is not producing a substitute for something. It has the deepest pool of the plant that makes this honey what it is.

What this means when you are buying

Country of origin is not the thing to check. Two honeys from the same hillside can differ enormously, because the species and the season drive the chemistry.

What is worth checking is whether the jar carries a tested grade rather than an adjective, and whether the producer will show you the testing. That is a question you can ask of any honey, from anywhere.