Selling the Honey Crop

Topic: Honey Production/Selling the honey Crop

The commercial beekeeper can deal with this question in two ways:

Sell the crop in drums to honey packers/processors
Sell the crop directly by bottling and processing their own crop

The larger honey producers usually do not bother with bottling and selling their honey to the honey consumer. They sell their honey to the honey processor. There are advantages to this:

Once the crop is harvested, they fill drums with honey and deliver or have it picked up by the processor. The honey season is over and time is used to prepare for the next honey season.

The down side is they receive market price for the honey which is being paid by the processor. Large honey producers usually have developed a good working relationship with packers/processor and have little trouble selling the crop. Sometimes the processor will give the large producer several cents per pound more than others because of the past quality of honey sold to them.

Large commercial honey producers think in terms of truck loads of honey being sold -- 50 barrels to the semi-truck load.

On the other hand, many smaller commercial beekeepers sell their own honey.

Rather than selling the honey at $1.00 a pound, they sell it for $2.50 a pound or more.

Many successful small commercial beekeepers have developed a number of wholesale outlets such as grocery stores, health food stores, gas stations, feed mills, restaurants, orchards, etc. to sell the honey. They can sell distinctive local honey with a private label.

However, this requires just as much work as producing the honey and it requires selling skills, business knowledge, and personal relation skills.

First the beekeeper must process the honey beyond just extracting it. This means bottling it, labeling it, delivering it, and servicing accounts.
Second, the beekeeper must find a market place to sell large quantities of honey.
Third, the beekeeper is held to a higher standard -- His/her name is on the label. The honey in the bottle is expected to meet all health standards including the facility where it is packaged. The producer must sell a quality product.
In the digitized age, the beekeeper may be expected to put bar codes on labels so the reading devices at the retail level can scan the product and record information on sales as well as print out a sales price for the customers grocery bill. As a management tool for the retailer, the bar code has been an accounting miracle. It will indicate what products are selling and which ones are not. Shelve space holding a product which is not selling is quickly identified and that product is replaced with one that does sell.
The beekeeper as a salesman/saleswoman must have people skills. Dealing with customers, complaints, etc. is part of the business. And this is an area that many beekeepers fall short.
Finally, the beekeeper must be a good book keeper, record keeper. Batches of honey sold need to recorded, amounts of honey sold need to be recorded, dates when honey is sold need to be recorded, and one might want to purchase product insurance. We live in a world today far different than just a few years ago. Product recalls due to contaminated honey are not unusual and legal proceedings are common place. If you sell your honey to the public, you are held accountable for any fault found in that product. As they say at an auction, "Fair warning"!