The world's most valuable honey carries a Maori name and owes its commercial distinctiveness to Maori traditional knowledge, yet a 2023 IP ruling confirmed neither gives Maori any legal protection or financial claim.
Manuka honey sells for up to $100 per 100 grams. Its antibacterial properties are validated by science, its grading system is certified by independent laboratories, and its name is drawn directly from te reo Maori. The global market for the product is projected to exceed $1.2 billion by 2033. Yet in May 2023, New Zealand's Intellectual Property Office ruled that the word "manuka" cannot be owned by New Zealand. The decisive argument came from Australia. The ruling has become one of the most consequential tests of indigenous intellectual property rights in the era of luxury food premiumization, and its verdict was not kind to the people whose knowledge made the honey valuable in the first place.
The manuka tree, Leptospermum scoparium, flowers for just two to six weeks each year along the hillsides and coastal scrublands of New Zealand and parts of southeastern Australia. For Maori, the tree has never been merely a plant. It is a taonga, a treasure, embedded in rongoa Maori, the traditional medicine system that predates European arrival by centuries. Maori used manuka leaves to treat fevers and urinary complaints, applied bark decoctions as sedatives and mouthwashes, and extracted gum from the tree to soothe burns. The honey produced by bees foraging on manuka flowers occupied a place of particular esteem, its healing properties passed down through generations as part of matauranga Maori, the body of traditional Maori knowledge.
The commercial value of manuka honey rests entirely on a chemical compound called methylglyoxal, or MGO. MGO is the compound responsible for the honey's antibacterial potency, and it is measured alongside two other markers, dihydroxyacetone and leptosperin, under the Unique Manuka Factor certification system, known as UMF. The higher the UMF rating, the more potent and expensive the honey. A jar rated UMF 20 or above can fetch well over $100 for 100 grams. New Zealand exports nearly NZ$400 million worth of manuka honey annually, and the sector represents more than 90% of the country's total honey export earnings by value. The government's official Manuka Honey Science Definition test, introduced by the Ministry of Primary Industries in 2018, uses four chemical markers and one DNA test to certify authenticity. Each of those markers was first identified in the context of traditional Maori knowledge about the plant's healing properties.
In August 2015, the Manuka Honey Appellation Society, a New Zealand industry body funded by the government, filed a trademark application in New Zealand to register "Manuka Honey" as a certification trademark. The goal was exclusivity: only honey produced in New Zealand and meeting defined quality standards would be permitted to carry the name. The Australian Manuka Honey Association immediately opposed the application, and what followed was described by New Zealand Assistant Commissioner of Trade Marks Natasha Alley as a "trans-Tasman tussle of extraordinary proportions" and "one of the most complex and long-running proceedings to have come before IPONZ."
The Australians made several interconnected arguments. The Leptospermum scoparium plant grows throughout southeastern Australia, particularly in Tasmania and Victoria, where it has been known as "manuka" in English since at least 1849. Honey meeting New Zealand's own quality standards for antibacterial activity and chemical composition can be produced from Australian plants. The word "manuka," without its macron, has been in common English usage as a descriptor for the tree for over 170 years, making it inherently descriptive rather than distinctive. The New Zealand applicant, IPONZ ruled, had "fallen short of establishing the necessary distinctiveness, both inherent and acquired." IPONZ ordered the Manuka Honey Appellation Society to pay NZ$6,430 in costs to the Australian Manuka Honey Association. Australian Manuka Honey Association chair Ben McKee called it "a sensible outcome."
The ruling was consistent with decisions already reached in the United Kingdom and in the European Union. No major jurisdiction has granted New Zealand exclusive use of the name. In each case, the legal framework that decided the outcome was developed without any reference to the people who created the name.
The IPONZ ruling turned on the argument that "manuka" has become a generic English descriptor. That argument, legally sound within the framework of the Trade Marks Act 2002, conceals a specific history. The word manuka is a Maori word. The English usage of the term from 1849 onward is a direct borrowing from te reo Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand's first people. There was no prior English name for the plant. European settlers adopted the Maori word because Maori had named it, cultivated knowledge about it, and transmitted that knowledge to arriving colonists. Captain Cook's crew learned to brew tea from the plant from Maori. Mary Bumby, who brought the first European honeybees to New Zealand's North Island in 1839, placed her hives where manuka grew in abundance, on land whose ecology and botanical significance had been understood by Maori for centuries.
The argument that "manuka" is now a common English descriptor is, in other terms, an argument that a word can be borrowed from an indigenous language, given commercial value, and then rendered legally unprotectable by the original speakers precisely because it was borrowed so thoroughly. The Trade Marks Act 2002 does contain a section, Section 17, that allows the Commissioner to refuse marks that would be likely to offend Maori. The IPONZ decision noted the Maori dimension but concluded: "Ultimately, it is unclear, on the evidence before me, how Maori interests would be best served in the context of this certification mark application." The protection mechanism existed. It was not applied.
This is not the first time the New Zealand government has been told its intellectual property law fails Maori. In July 2011, the Waitangi Tribunal released its report on the Wai 262 claim, the most comprehensive inquiry into Maori cultural and intellectual property rights ever conducted. The Tribunal found that the existing intellectual property system "does not provide adequate protection of taonga works and matauranga and taonga Maori." It recommended a new legal framework, a kaitiaki register where Maori could formally record interests in particular species and knowledge systems, mandatory disclosure requirements for patent applicants using matauranga Maori, and the establishment of a commission to adjudicate case-by-case uses of traditional knowledge. The recommendations were non-binding.
As of 2026, none of the Waitangi Tribunal's core Wai 262 recommendations on matauranga protection have been legislated into effect. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment announced a whole-of-government review process in 2019. The Copyright Act review that was supposed to address Maori knowledge protections remains incomplete. The kaitiaki register was never established. A Maori Advisory Committee was added to the Patents Act 2013, but it operates only at the Commissioner's request, cannot act independently, and its advice is not binding. The Tribunal had specifically recommended it operate otherwise. What the system produces, in the absence of substantive reform, is outcomes like the manuka honey case: a word created by Maori, encoding centuries of botanical knowledge, ruled in favor of an industry that adopted the word commercially without any obligation to the people who coined it.
The 2023 ruling is particularly striking when set against what Maori iwi and producers have contributed to the industry versus what they have received from it. Some Maori land trusts and iwi entered joint ventures with commercial honey companies, most notably the East Taupo Lands Trust's partnership with Comvita, announced in 2014. But joint ventures represent voluntary commercial arrangements, not rights. No legal mechanism requires manuka honey companies, whether New Zealand or Australian, to pay attribution to Maori knowledge holders for using a system of commercial value built on matauranga Maori. Comvita itself, the country's largest manuka honey producer, reported an after-tax loss of $77 million for the 2024 financial year and was acquired by Florenz in 2025, as the sector faced oversupply and price volatility. The value concentration in the industry has never tracked back to Maori communities with any legal force.
Australia, meanwhile, has used the trademark ruling as a springboard for industrial investment. Australian producers draw on more than 80 native Leptospermum species. By 2016, the company ManukaLife had collected genetics from New Zealand, Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, conducting plant breeding programs aimed at producing cultivars with six-month flowering periods and high MGO yields. Bulk monofloral manuka honey exports from New Zealand hit record levels in 2024, but a rising share of that bulk is now processed under offshore brands that have no requirement to identify New Zealand provenance. The IPONZ ruling removed the last formal barrier to Australian producers marketing their product on equivalent terms globally.
The manuka honey case is a clean example of a structural problem in how international intellectual property law relates to indigenous knowledge. Trademark law protects brand distinctiveness built through commercial use. It does not protect cultural origin, linguistic heritage, or the accumulated knowledge of non-commercial communities. A plant used by Maori for medicine for six hundred years is not a trademark. The traditional knowledge that established the plant's bioactive properties is not a patent. The name given to the plant in te reo Maori is not a registered certification mark. None of these things fit the categories that IP law was designed to protect, because IP law was designed by and for commercial actors in 19th-century European economies.
WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, has been negotiating a treaty on the protection of traditional knowledge since 2001. Progress has been slow. New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which under Article 31 affirms indigenous peoples' rights to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage and traditional knowledge. The declaration is not binding in domestic law. The Nagoya Protocol, which establishes access and benefit-sharing obligations over genetic resources and traditional knowledge, was not ratified by New Zealand as of the time of the manuka ruling.
What remains, in the absence of any of these frameworks having legal force, is a situation where the most commercially valuable honey in the world carries a Maori name, was made commercially distinctive through the application of Maori knowledge, and can be produced and sold by Australian companies without any recognition of that origin whatsoever. The IPONZ ruling did not create this situation. It confirmed it.