Take yourself down the honey section of a supermarket aisle and you’ll have plenty of options to choose from. But what you won’t see is many UK-sourced honey products of traceable origin.
In fact, most of the honey on the UK market is not only imported, but blended too, making it difficult for consumers to know where their honey has come from.
Black Bee Honey, co-founded in 2017 by former London-based designers Paul Webb and Chris Barnes, has a mission to reignite the country’s appetite and appreciation for British honey.
With 40% YoY growth, the mission seems to be working. But like many entrepreneurial stories, the business didn’t start with such lofty aims.
It was a bee-keeping course, bought as a birthday present experience, that shifted the dial. Back then, it wasn’t necessarily the honey but the craftsmanship behind its production that interested them. “It’s a very manual thing,” reflects Webb, who says the pair were also keen to leave the desk-based office life behind. “There was a huge amount of depth and learning involved.”
Next Barnes went travelling and ended up working on a bee farm in New Zealand. This may conjure up images of green, rolling fields but this was far from it. Barnes had discovered an interesting business model. The company was renting beehives in people’s gardens in the suburbs of Auckland, maintaining them, then sharing the honey afterwards.
Rent a hive – the first honey business
When Barnes returned to the UK, the pair decided to give the hive rental idea a go in the London market. “It was mindblowing,” says Webb. “Seeing the journey and what was involved from the bees and the beekeeping, but also the flavour of the honey and how different it was from anything we had tried in the supermarket before.”
Eventually, scalability issues and the beehive rental space being so “niche” made them take this newfound passion for British honey into a different area. A lifestyle change for Webb and his then pregnant wife via a move to Somerset sowed the seeds for Black Bee Honey, providing them the opportunity to take their passion for UK produced honey to a wider audience not determined by London postcodes.
“A little like the wine and spirits industry, honeys of the same variety can have different flavours due to different seasons and other factors…”
Webb describes the “fragile” UK honey industry they were building Black Bee Honey in which is dominated by blended imports from countries like China, Argentina and Turkey.
UK honey – a “fragile” industry
“We are a nation of honey lovers, but it’s about 90% imports and the National Farmers’ Union doesn’t recognise beekeeping as a form of farming. It’s been in a fragile position and imports have been eroding it over time too.”
What’s more, the imported honey coming into the UK is mostly adulterated, he explains, meaning it has been altered and mixed with other substances.
“The Ivy put our brand name on their menu every time they use us in a dish, which is awesome.”
Depletion of the natural environment for beekeeping in the UK hasn’t helped either, including loss of wildflower meadows and other environments where bees naturally reside, making the ecosystem even more fragile. It sounded like a risky industry to start a business in, but also one, with its then lack of UK-based traceable honey brands, that was ready for innovation.
Aside from unique products, Black Bee Honey’s unique offering is its supply chain, which the co-founders have worked hard at to make transparent and sustainable.
Black Bee Honey – a transparent and sustainable supply chain
Both provenance and transparency is key and includes having the beekeeper’s name and location of the hives on the jar of each honey product they sell. A little like the wine and spirits industry, honeys of the same variety can have different flavours due to different seasons and other factors, Webb explains. “That’s something to be celebrated rather than hidden away.”
Today, the business has over 30 suppliers across the UK from Kent to the Scottish Highlands. A far cry from international imports and the heavy carbon footprint that goes along with them.
The UK honey brand is now stocked in major UK retailers from the luxurious end with Selfridges, Harrods and Whole Foods to high street health staple, Holland & Barrett. Webb puts this down to trade show appearances during the early years of the business.
“There’s nothing that compares with an event when you can show people; they can look at the honeys, see how different they are, taste them all and we tell them the stories.”
Trade show appearances have helped them make inroads in the hospitality sector too. One such business is the Ivy Collection. “The Ivy put our brand name on their menu every time they use us in a dish, which is awesome.”
Yes, Webb concedes, trade shows are a substantial investment for fledging food and drinks brands, but with exposure to potentially game changing stockists, it can be worth it.
With its passion for UK-sourced honey and the beekeepers that produce it, it’s not surprising that sustainability is a big part of the Black Bee Honey story. It became a B-Corp in 2023.
Certification aside, it has a very impactful ongoing project, to save British wildflower meadows and donates 2% of its turnover to help create and restore the wildflower ecosystem. While Webb confirms that consumers like this about them, he says he cares more about the fact Black Bee Honey is giving, rather than taking away from the natural environment.
“You’ve got a net gain rather than some kind of extractive model.” Well, that’s Black Bee Honey, a business that gives.
