Best vegan honey alternatives: 8 bee-free syrups compared

For tea and toast, our pick is Langer Farms Apple Honey, made from apples and nothing else. For baking, our pick is Lundberg’s brown rice syrup, two ingredients long, whose maker tells you to use it in place of honey. Of the 8 bee-free syrups we checked, 6 carry the maker’s own vegan claim, 1 says nothing is added, and 1 you cannot buy.

By the FDA’s definition, nothing on this list is honey, and two of the bottles are sold under the word anyway. The agency’s 2018 labeling guidance describes honey as a thick, sweet, syrupy substance “that bees make as food from the nectar of plants”, and says that definition reflects how the word is commonly used. Langer Farms sells a bottle called Apple Honey, made from only apples. Blenditup’s product page is titled Organic Bee-Free Honey. The guidance we read covers honey and blends that contain it, and says nothing about bottles with no honey in them at all. So on a bee-free bottle, the word honey describes what the syrup is for, and only the ingredient line tells you what it is. Why honey is off the list in the first place, and why some vegans disagree, is in our piece on why some vegans eat honey.

Eight bottles, side by side

We read what each maker publishes about its syrup in October 2026: what it is made from, whether the maker calls it vegan, and what it says about storage. Two of the eight sell themselves under the word honey. The other six are syrups people already pour where honey would go.

Syrup	Made from, per the maker	Vegan, per the maker	Storage, per the maker
Langer Farms Apple Honey	Apples only, no added sugar	Yes	Not stated
Blenditup Organic Vegan Honey-Alternative	Organic apples	Yes	Not stated
Lundberg Organic Brown Rice Syrup	Organic brown rice, filtered water	Yes	Not stated
Just Date Organic Date Syrup	Organic medjool dates	Yes	No refrigeration needed
Agave In The Raw Organic Agave Nectar, Light	Blue agave from Mexico	Yes	Not stated
Lyle’s Golden Syrup	Made in sugar cane refining	Yes, except the chocolate dessert syrup	Use within 3 months of opening
Coombs Family Farms organic maple syrup	Maple syrup, nothing added	No vegan wording	Refrigerate once opened
Mellody (MeliBio)	Not published	No vegan wording	Not published

What each maker says

Langer Farms Apple Honey

Langer Juice Company says this one is 100% bee free, vegan, gluten free, and has no added sugar or sweeteners, made from only apples with the “consistency of honey”. The page suggests it for baking, tea, smoothies and pancakes. A 16 oz bottle was $8.99 on the maker’s shop in October 2026, and a two-pack $15.49, which works out to about 56 cents an ounce for the single bottle (our arithmetic).

That price and the one-ingredient list are why it is our pick for the cup and the toast. The page has no storage advice at all, so skip it if you want the maker to tell you how long an opened bottle keeps. It does not say.

Blenditup Organic Vegan Honey-Alternative

The other apple bottle. Blenditup lists it as organic and made from apples, labels it vegan and 100% plant-based, and says it can replace bee honey, agave or sugar “without any changes to your recipes”. The same page pitches it as a smoothie base, which is a lot of jobs for one 12 oz bottle. That bottle was $12.99 on the maker’s site in October 2026, about $1.08 an ounce by our arithmetic, so roughly twice the Langer price per ounce.

If price per ounce matters to you, buy the Langer instead. The organic claim is the case for this one, since the Langer page makes none, and only you know whether that is worth the difference.

Lundberg Organic Brown Rice Syrup

Two ingredients: organic brown rice and pure filtered water, in a 1 lb 5 oz jar marked vegan and gluten-free. Its substitution advice names honey outright, telling you to use rice syrup in place of sugar, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup or molasses. A short ingredient list plus a maker that has already thought about your recipe is why it is our baking pick.

The catch is on the same page. Lundberg says that because of breakage issues, rice syrup is no longer available for website orders, and sends you to its store finder instead. A syrup you cannot order from the maker is a syrup you will be hunting for, so if your local store does not carry it, the agave below is the fallback, with a conversion table of its own.

Just Date Organic Date Syrup

One ingredient, organic medjool dates, and the product page lists it as vegan. The FAQ backs it up, describing every Just Date product as plant-based and vegan-friendly. It is also the only bottle here whose maker says outright that it needs no refrigeration.

The product page also calls it low glycemic and loaded with antioxidants. We leave those claims where we found them. Buy it because it is made of dates, not because of the nutrition copy.

Agave In The Raw Organic Agave Nectar, Light

Made from Mexico’s blue agave plant, and carrying USDA Organic, Non GMO, vegan, gluten-free and kosher marks on its product page. In The Raw says it is about 25% sweeter than sugar, dissolves easily and helps baked goods stay moist and brown. Its conversion table swaps 1 cup of sugar for 2/3 cup of agave. The table converts from sugar and says nothing about honey. The Light comes in 18.5 oz and 36 oz bottles, with a Dark and a 10 oz Hot version alongside.

Read the word on the bottle before you put it in the cart. The same company sells Honey In The Raw, in Classic, Organic and Hot versions of its own, one menu over on the same site.

Lyle’s Golden Syrup

The British tin. Lyle’s says golden syrup is made in the process of refining sugar cane, and that all its products are suitable for vegans except Lyle’s Dessert Syrup in chocolate flavour, which contains skimmed milk powder and sweetened condensed milk, and its flapjacks and snack bars, which contain milk. So the brand is not a shortcut. The golden one is fine, the chocolate one is not.

Lyle’s also wants an opened tin used within 3 months, and warns that pressure can build between the syrup and the lid, so it should not be used past its best before date. It is the only opened shelf life any maker on this list puts a number on, and the only one that comes with a warning about the lid.

Coombs Family Farms organic maple syrup

Coombs says it adds no other ingredients to its maple syrup, that its organic maple products are certified by Quality Assurance International and carry the USDA organic seal, and that an opened container should go in the fridge, because mold can develop once the syrup meets air. Nowhere on the pages we read does it use the word vegan. Skip maple if you need a syrup that can live in the cupboard after opening; Coombs says this one cannot.

Mellody (MeliBio)

The one we cannot send you to. MeliBio calls Mellody the world’s first plant-based honey and says its first customer was Eleven Madison Park. Its site now leads with its acquisition by FoodYoung Labs, announced on 27 May 2025, and on the pages we read it lists no ingredients and no shop or stockist. Until it does, there is nothing on this page for you to buy, and nothing to check a vegan claim against.

Picking one for the job

For tea and toast, where honey is mostly there to be honey, the apple bottles are the closest swap on their makers’ word, and the Langer is the cheaper of the two by the prices above. For baking, start with the Lundberg if you can find it, since its maker names honey among the things it replaces. The agave is the fallback, as long as you work from its sugar conversion and taste as you go.

For pancakes you already know the answer is maple. For a jar that can sit in the cupboard, the date syrup is the only one whose maker says so. The golden syrup is for recipes that were written for golden syrup in the first place.

Gluten is not a worry with any of the six that make a claim about it. Langer, Blenditup, Lundberg, Just Date and In The Raw all call their syrups gluten-free, and Lyle’s says the same of every syrup it makes.

What we left out, and why

Three names from older lists of honey alternatives are missing here. Bee Free Honee, the apple bottle this page named in its first version, is the obvious absence. We found no working maker site for it in October 2026, and we do not send readers to a brand on the strength of a retailer listing alone. We found no maker page for Coconut Secret’s coconut nectar either, so coconut nectar has no bottle on this list. Madhava’s agave site would not open for us at all, which is why In The Raw carries the agave category instead.

Stevia, monk fruit and allulose are not here either. This page is about syrups that go where honey goes, on toast, into tea and into a mixing bowl.

Molasses is left out on flavor grounds, not evidence. A spoonful of it in tea is a decision you only make once.

The maple question

Maple syrup is boiled down from sap, and the boil foams. Sugarmakers knock the foam down with a defoamer, and the Vegetarian Resource Group reported in 2017 that artisanal producers traditionally used lard for this, with butter, milk or cream also used in the past, while plant-based defoamers were the norm at commercial scale. In the same report, University of Vermont Extension said that every defoamer it recommends is vegetable oil based and that it recommends no animal-based ones. Organic producers today rely on cooking oils as defoamers and use them in much larger amounts than conventional producers, according to a January 2026 report on research by the UVM Proctor Maple Research Center and its partners.

The jug will not tell you either way. Federal labeling rules let a food leave off its label substances added during processing that remain only at insignificant levels and have no technical or functional effect in the finished food. A maple label that lists one ingredient, or says nothing is added, says nothing about the defoamer one way or the other. For maple, the extension advice above is the best evidence we found that a modern jug is plant all the way through. If you want it in writing for your own brand, ask the farm. For the other ingredients a label leaves open, start with our guide to checking whether an ingredient is vegan.

Pour the Langer, bake with the Lundberg, and check the bread while you are at it: one of the sandwich loaves in our label check of supermarket bread has honey as its fifth ingredient.

Vegan honey alternatives: 8 bee-free syrups, read from the makers’ own pages

Eight bottles, side by side