Scientists and honey industry experts are to help officially define manuka honey in a New Zealand government consultation process prompted by an international food alert last month.

Food Safety Minister Nikki Kaye on Thursday announced the Ministry for Primary Industries would initiate the consultation to define manuka honey to enable scientifically substantiated truth in labelling on the luxury product.

"The New Zealand honey industry has been working for many years to come up with an accurate way to label, market and brand manuka honey and unfortunately has been unable to reach consensus. There is no international standard for a definition of manuka honey," Kaye said in a statement.

"Recently, the authenticity of some New Zealand manuka honey has been queried in overseas markets. This puts the integrity of our country's export reputation at risk and so steps need to be taken to ensure consumer confidence," she said.

"This is something the New Zealand government takes very seriously as honey is an important food export, worth about 120 million NZ dollars (97.7 million US dollars) per year. There are high consumer expectations both here and overseas that what is said on the label is accurate."

The consultation would lead to draft labelling guidelines that would be tested with industry before they were finalized and published, but compulsory regulation, if it were needed, would take several months to work through.

"The guidelines will be the first step to providing clarity for industry, consumers and our trading partners," said Kaye.

Last month the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency issued a warning about misleading claims made on jars of some manuka honey products, which is prized for its allegedly unique health properties.

The warnings from Britain about fake New Zealand manuka honey was more bad news for New Zealand's brand reputation the same month as Fonterra's botulism contamination scare.