How Did We Get Here? The World’s Highest Value Honey, but Beekeepers in Mire

New Zealand’s export honey value per-kilogram dwarfs any other country in the world, thanks to mānuka’s proven antimicrobial abilities. So, why then have so many honey companies – both beekeepers, honey packers, and those who do a bit of both – gone out of business in the past two years? We pose that question to beekeepers whose families have ridden the highs and lows of the honey industry through numerous generations.

A watershed moment in the New Zealand honey industry was reached last month when Tweeddale’s Honey in Taihape, the largest single beekeeping entity in the country with approximately 19,000 hives, entered receivership owing NZD24million. They are not alone though, with many more lower-profile operators suffering a similar fate in recent years, or pulling up stumps themselves to exit the industry before being forced out the door.

While the big picture reasoning as to why so many beekeepers and honey sellers have not been able to make the numbers work comes back to the age-old problem of an imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting pricing, there are also more nuanced considerations which bring the sustainability of purely honey-production-focused beekeeping businesses into question.

Gavin’s Apiaries owners Liam, left, and John Gavin. The Northland beekeepers, the third and fourth generation in their 114 year-old family business, are dedicated mānuka honey producers.

The “Wrong Type” of Honey

The huge surge in New Zealand’s hive numbers, more than doubling over a seven-year period to peak at 918,000 in 2019, brought with it a surge in honey production. That led to an oversupply of honey, but more so an oversupply of the “wrong type” of honey says Gavin’s Apiaries owner John Gavin, a third generation Northland beekeeper.

“You talk to people in shops and they'll tell you that the UMF20+ honey would sell if they could get it. So, we were getting good prices, and they were making real good money on packing it too. Everyone was happy at that stage,” Gavin says of the key mānuka years in the 2010s.

James Jeffery, manager of SummerGlow Apiaries alongside several family members until it closed its doors recently, believes the mānuka honey industry needs to correct how its product is labelled, marketed and sold if its true value is to be realised.

“The real question was, what was happening to the honey which was being stuck in the corner of the shed until such time as it was needed, or not?”

When the pendulum swung more to the “not”, that put pressure on price to the producer, the backlog grew, and needed to be cleared.

Cleared, But at What Cost?

Market signals within beekeeping would suggest that backlog, which has clouded first the non-mānuka honey side of the industry and then mānuka honey for more than half a decade, has been cleared. In-market prices for mānuka honey have fallen globally though, driven by bulk exports as well as cut-price and low-grade honey selling. MGO 30 and 40 mānuka honeys have emerged, offering consumers access to cheaper mānuka honey, with greatly reduced antimicrobial abilities for which it gained fame.

“If you wanted to pick on one particular Achilles heel that has caused the damage to our markets, the multifloral and MGO 30 and 40 ‘mānuka’ would be our biggest issue,” says James Jeffery.

From 2012, until recently, Jeffery worked alongside his in-laws, Bill and Margaret Bennett, and brother-in-law Alan Bennett at SummerGlow Apiaries in the Waikato, which the Bennetts founded in 1976. The business held the distinction of being awarded the UMF Honey Association’s inaugural licence to sell. SummerGlow Apiaries was recently wound up though, after fighting years of diminished honey pricing. 

“The mānuka honey industry has constructed a consumer base that are looking for numbers and looking for prices, rather than looking for quality and efficacy,” Jeffery says.

“We've got a generation of consumers now who don't understand the difference between a MGO 20 and a UMF 20 honey, and why one of them is $12 and the other $120. It serves the volume-based supplier or producer well to have that confusion in the market and there are hundreds of brands out there that the viability of their business relies on volume,” says Jeffery, who also served several terms on the UMF Honey Association board.

He believes that the confusion in market was potentially a greater contributing factor to the mānuka backlog than just soaring hive numbers.

Husband and wife Rhys and Pam Flack, owners of Arataki Honey’s Havelock North operation.

“There's only so many jars of honey that people are going to buy and if they're buying the $12 jars, instead of the high-grade jars, that's what creates the backlog,” he says.

Costly Stuff

The price returned from the final markets back to beekeepers for their honey is just one side of the equation though. Several long-time beekeepers say, on the other side of that equation, their cost escalations feel greater in the past two season than at any other time. With ongoing price pressures caused by the war in Iran, that doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.

Gavin also points out that while mānuka might be the most valuable honey in the world, per-hive production is low, limiting total hive returns.

It all contributes to rising cost, for too low of a return. However, beekeepers and the honey industry as a whole went through a period of overcapitalisation too, so say those who have come through the other side.

“I've seen some very expensive looking factories and things that require throughput to pay the cost of them,” says Rhys Flack, who manages Arataki Honey Hawke’s Bay, alongside wife Pam Flack (nee Berry), a third generation in the family business.

While the world’s highest value honey needs greater resource thrown at it not just to collect it, but also ensure best processing and handling, Flack believes the honey industry to be well over resourced for the amount of production and packing taking place – “we’ve facility to pack 10-times the honey produced in the country,” he says.

“You've got to absolutely make sure you don't overcapitalise,” says Russell Berry from Arataki’s Rotorua base, himself also of the third generation of the 82-year-old family business.

It’s a point the veteran beekeeper has long reinforced, along with the need to diversify operations.

“We do lots of different things and that is to our advantage. We run a tavern. We run a service station. We run a honey shop. We pack honey for the New Zealand market. We do kiwifruit pollination. We do a lot of bee exports. We do all sorts of things. I say that to everybody. You can't just be an individual on anything. Because anything you do these days, you may be going broke tomorrow,” Berry says.

Husband and wife duo Neil and Wendy Mossop own 79-year-old Bay of Plenty business Mossop’s Honey. There’s no place for MGO 30 and 40 honeys in a sustainable mānuka honey industry they say.

A Free Future

While that tomorrow arrived for many beekeepers yesterday, mānuka honey exports hit record highs in 2025, and total honey exports of 12,732 tonnes equalled the record volumes of 2020 after several years of decline.

While the method of selling that amount of honey might not please all, those with generations of experience in the industry still see the free-market model which the industry operates under as best suited to building a more sustainable model for beekeepers. Certainly government intervention, such as something as overbearing as the Honey Marketing Authority (HMA) which controlled exports from 1954 to 1983, is not remembered fondly.

“My dad supplied the HMA as a single desk seller, and that did not work. You think we're price takers now, but we were very much price takers then. They just set a price,” says Neil Mossop, owner of Mossop’s Honey which was founded by his father Ron in the Bay of Plenty in 1947.

The HMA was government-established and took control of all honey exports and marketing, outside of comb honey. Even cooperative selling, such as the Honey Producers Cooperative which operated 1981 to 2014 and succumbed once mānuka honey entered prominence, is looked upon warily by those with lived experience. Instead, there is a feeling that with recent knowledge of a boom-bust cycle and now around half the number of beehives in the country as at the peak, supply, demand and better optimised markets could organically result.

“For those selling a whole lot of MGO 40 honey, where are they now going to get the old honey which they were blending down with a whole lot of other stuff to get the MGO that they need?” Gavin asks.

“They were getting that old honey real cheap. You try and buy some of that old honey now and there is not much of it around.”

That should mean better prices to the beekeeper now, Gavin says, and hopefully into the future as consumers access to low-grade mānuka honey is reduced.

“You've got to absolutely make sure you don't overcapitalise,” says Arataki Honey Rotorua branch owner Russell Berry of running a beekeeping business.

Mossop believes there is no longer a place for the cut-price, low-MGO honeys for the industry going forward, despite that tactic helping to clear the honey mountain that beset the industry for so long.

“That was yesterday. We live in today,” Mossop says.

“Hive numbers have dropped from close to a million to 400-and something thousand. The market has changed. Those in the market offering minimally priced honey and hoping the beekeepers will supply them simply have to get the price up.”

The “Polite Lie”

Jeffery calls the use of the multifloral mānuka honey category and low-grade MGO selling as a “polite lie” being told to consumers. Rather than simply relying on the market pricing to correct itself, he would like to see greater leadership and stricter rules put in place to prevent the type of selling he calls “counterproductive, counter-intuitive and ridiculous”.

“There has to be a willingness to move away from volume sales to value-added products. But how do you manage that transition and then how do you deal with the short-term pain for the long-term gain? Because, at some point – and our customers aren't stupid – they're going to understand they spent 10 years buying a low-grade product and ‘you were lying to us’… There's got to be the willingness to say it's not sustainable for us to keep pumping out this low-grade product because eventually it'll be no more expensive than clover honey, but with the price of getting our product from all the way down here to all the way up to the international markets, we can't compete,” Jeffery says.

Can a Beekeeper be ‘Just’ a Honey Producer?

In a country at the bottom of the world with the highest value honey by far, can a beekeeper survive as just a bulk honey producer? Most of the long-established beekeeping businesses have their own retail brand.

“There is a need for those who just produce honey and sell in bulk,” says Wendy Mossop, wife of Neil and general manager of their honey business.

“If everyone put it in jars and sell like we do then you get the issue we had a few years ago with a glut of packed honey brands. No one wins, apart from consumers.”

If those producers are truly needed, the free-market approach being favoured will mean appropriate pricing must follow. When it comes to mānuka honey, for those who wish to build a business specialising in production of the comparatively higher-cost and fickle-flowering shrub at the bottom of the world, it might just be a matter of higher risk versus higher reward. New Zealand’s beekeepers have seen plenty of both over the industry’s first two decades and where the chips fall in the future is a question best answered by gazing into a crystal ball, even with the hindsight of exploring ‘how we got here’.

“Can you run a business with a good income one year and no income for the next two years?” Berry asks, having seen his family’s honey operation survive for the best part of a century.

“It's pretty hard, and only heightened when all your eggs are in the mānuka basket.”