What is the HS code for natural honey exported from India?

Natural honey sits under ITC (HS) code 0409 00 00. That eight-digit code is what appears on your shipping bill, your commercial invoice and your certificate of origin, and it is the code against which the minimum export price and any destination tariff are applied.

Is there a minimum export price on honey from India?

Yes. As of August 2026 the Directorate General of Foreign Trade has fixed a minimum export price of USD 1,400 per metric tonne FOB for natural honey under ITC (HS) 0409 00 00, extended by Notification 09/2026-27 and in force until 31 December 2026. Exports below that price are not permitted. Always check the current notification, because the figure has moved before and the expiry date is a real date.

Do I need APEDA registration to export honey from India?

Yes. Honey is a scheduled product under APEDA, so a Registration cum Membership Certificate from APEDA is required. This is the requirement most first-time honey exporters miss entirely, because general export guides list IEC and stop there.

Can I export honey from India to New Zealand?

In practice, no. New Zealand's biosecurity rules for imported bee products are among the strictest in the world and there is no ordinary commercial route for Indian honey. This is a biosecurity restriction, not a tariff, so no amount of Indian registration opens it, and repacking Indian-handled honey in a third country does not change the position either. Australia, by contrast, clears retail-packed honey normally.

Export

Exporting Honey from India: The Paperwork, in the Order You Need It

By Dev Mehta, Founder, Miss Miel · Published 6 August 2026 · Last updated 6 August 2026

Honey is a scheduled APEDA product, which means an ordinary import export code is not enough to ship it. You need an IEC, an AD Code registered at your port, an APEDA Registration cum Membership Certificate, an FSSAI licence, and for several destinations a plant-level approval under the Export Inspection Council's residue monitoring plan that takes months and cannot be bought at short notice. There is also a minimum export price. Most first-time exporters discover the last two items far too late.

This is a sequencing guide rather than a legal one. The individual requirements are documented on the relevant government portals and those are the authority; what is much harder to find is the order, and which items are long poles that gate everything downstream. Getting the order wrong is what turns a three-month runway into a nine-month one.

All figures below were checked in August 2026. Trade notifications change, sometimes at short notice, so verify anything you are about to rely on against the current notification rather than against this page.

The registrations, roughly in order

What	Why it matters for honey	Rough effort
PAN and a current account	Everything else keys off these	Days
GST registration	Needed to invoice, and to file a LUT	Days to weeks
FSSAI licence	Food business licence. Central licence for exporters	Weeks
IEC (Import Export Code)	The basic permission to trade across the border	Days
AD Code registration	Bank code registered at each port you ship from	Days, but port by port
APEDA RCMC	Mandatory. Honey is a scheduled product	Weeks
LUT (Letter of Undertaking)	Lets you export zero rated without paying IGST first	Days
Legal Metrology (packaged commodities)	Governs how declarations appear on a retail pack	Weeks
EIC / RMP plant approval	The long pole. Gates the EU and matters elsewhere	Months
GS1 barcode	Required by most retail buyers, not by law	Days

The two that catch people out

APEDA is not optional

Honey appears on APEDA's schedule. That makes a Registration cum Membership Certificate a legal requirement for exporting it, not a trade-body nicety you can skip. Almost every general "how to start exporting from India" guide lists IEC, AD Code and GST and stops, because those are the requirements common to all goods. Scheduled products carry an extra layer, and honey is one of them. If your plan currently has no APEDA line in it, that is the gap.

Residue monitoring sits with the plant, not with you

This is the single most important structural fact in the whole exercise, and it is the one that most often forces a change of plan.

Approval under the Export Inspection Council's Residue Monitoring Plan attaches to a processing plant. It involves inspection and sample draws, it sits downstream of the FSSAI licence, and it takes months. If you own the plant, start it the day your FSSAI licence issues, because nothing you do later shortens it.

If you do not own the plant, which is the case for anyone selling honey packed by a contract manufacturer, then you cannot obtain it at all for a facility that is not yours. It has to already exist there. That makes it a hard selection criterion when you choose a co-packer, not a detail to sort out afterwards. Ask about it in the first conversation. A packer without it forecloses several of your best markets no matter how good their price is.

The minimum export price

India applies a minimum export price to natural honey. As of August 2026 it stands at USD 1,400 per metric tonne FOB for ITC (HS) 0409 00 00, extended by DGFT Notification 09/2026-27 and in force until 31 December 2026. Below that price, the export is simply not permitted.

Two practical notes. First, the figure has moved before, having previously sat at USD 2,000 per metric tonne, and some secondary sources still repeat the older number, so check the notification itself. Second, and reassuringly for anyone in the premium or single-serve end of the market, the floor is a bulk commodity floor. USD 1,400 a tonne works out to well under two US cents per 8 gram serve. If you are exporting retail-packed or single-serve honey, your realised price per tonne will be far above the minimum and this constraint will never bind. It is a live constraint for bulk drum exporters and effectively irrelevant to packed goods.

What changes by destination

Registrations get you to the border. What happens on the other side varies more than most exporters expect, and the differences are worth mapping before you choose which market to chase first.

United Kingdom. The India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement entered into force on 15 July 2026. Without preference, honey carries a material third-country import duty into the UK, which is precisely why a valid statement of origin under CETA is worth the administrative effort rather than being a formality. On UK import VAT, treatment of food for human consumption is not uniform and sources conflict, so confirm the position for your specific product with a customs broker rather than assuming.
European Union. The residue monitoring approval described above is the gate. Plan around it or plan elsewhere.
United States. There is no VAT or GST, but a merchandise processing fee applies, and a harbour maintenance fee on sea freight. Food facility registration with the FDA plus a US agent are required, and the label is a separate design task because US format requirements differ from Indian ones. Note also that US antidumping duties on honey from India apply to bulk raw honey; retail-packed and single-serve consumer goods commonly sit outside the scope of those orders, but scope is a legal question about your specific product and is worth confirming rather than assuming in either direction.
United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Both apply a recoverable consumption tax at import for a registered importer. Generally the most straightforward of the major destinations.
Australia. Clears retail-packed honey through normal channels, with GST at import recoverable by a registered importer.
New Zealand. Effectively closed. See below, because this one is genuinely different in kind.

New Zealand is a biosecurity wall, not a tariff

It is worth stating separately because it is regularly misdiagnosed as a paperwork problem and treated as something a better freight forwarder can solve.

New Zealand's rules on imported bee products exist to protect its own bee population, and they are among the strictest anywhere. For Indian honey there is no ordinary commercial import route. No Indian registration opens it, because nothing on the Indian side is what the restriction is about.

Two follow-on points that are not obvious. The rules key on where goods ship from and how they have been handled, not only on where the honey originally came from. So honey opened, handled and repacked in an Indian facility that also handles Indian honey remains an Indian-origin biosecurity risk in the eyes of the regulator, even if the honey itself started somewhere else. And setting up an entity in a neighbouring country does not help either, because goods arriving in New Zealand face the same rule whichever country they ship from. What such an entity opens is that country's own market, which may well be worth having, but it should be pursued for that reason and not as a workaround.

If your customer base is genuinely in New Zealand, the honest options are a specific permit from the regulator or filling locally. Anything else is wasted effort, and it is better to know that in week one.

A word on entity structure

One decision worth making early, because reversing it is expensive. A sole proprietorship is quick and cheap to start, but it is not a separate legal entity, which means there is no certificate of incorporation for it. Some larger overseas retail and hospitality buyers ask for exactly that document during vendor onboarding, and there is nothing you can produce in its place. Proof of existence has to be assembled from GST, Udyam and a shop establishment registration together, and not every procurement team will accept the substitute.

Converting later is possible but not free: a new entity means a new PAN, and a new PAN means new GST, new IEC, new FSSAI, new APEDA RCMC, new AD Code registrations and a new bank account. If you expect to convert, plan it for a slow season, and hold your trademark, tooling and domains personally rather than in the proprietorship so they survive the change without a separate assignment.

The short version

Sequence around the two long poles: FSSAI, then residue monitoring approval. Everything else is fast by comparison.
APEDA RCMC is mandatory for honey. Do not let a generic export checklist convince you otherwise.
If you use a contract packer, plant-level approvals are a selection criterion, not a later task.
Check the current minimum export price notification. It binds bulk exporters and is irrelevant to packed goods.
Pick your first market for its rules as much as its demand. The UK, the UAE and Australia are meaningfully easier first destinations than the EU, and New Zealand is not a destination at all.

None of this is a substitute for advice from a customs broker and a chartered accountant who have handled food exports. It is the map we wished existed when we started reading, and it is offered in that spirit.

Sourcing single-serve honey for an export programme?

Miss Miel supplies sealed 8 gram honey spoons and 16 gram peel-back honey pods from India, under our brand or as a private label programme, with documentation support as part of the offer.

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