Project 2030 – A Model for Matching Honey Supply and Demand

At Mānuka Orchard’s annual Open Day for 2026, July 24 in Paengaroa, Bay of Plenty, the do-it-all honey facility unveiled their vision for the future of the honey industry. Dubbed ‘Project 2030’, it seeks to marry new-found optimism in honey markets with the organisation required to better match supply and demand.

Mānuka Orchard owner Logan Bowyer welcomes almost 200 attendees to the honey facility’s Open Day on July 24 in Paengaroa where he announced ‘Project 2030’, including a plan to try and better match honey production with demand. Photo: Dean Taylor

“I’ve got a vision that ours is an industry that other primary sectors look up to,” Mānuka Orchard founder, owner and director Logan Bowyer led his presentation to around 200 Open Day attendees with.

That is where the hyperbole began and ended though, as Bowyer fast moved to a practical assessment of the New Zealand honey industry’s present situation and how his facility hopes to help guide a sustainable path forward, primarily by providing an online platform where honey buyers can register their needs and producers can forecast their production capabilities.

“The previous model nearly broke us all. We deserve better,” Bowyer says of what is commonly referred to as the mānuka ‘gold rush’, a period in the 2010s where registered hive numbers ballooned 144% from 377,000 to 918,000, creating a ‘honey glut’.

The Project 2030 vision, while detailed from the stage of the Paengaroa Community Hall down the road from Mānuka Orchard’s honey extraction, storage, processing and sales facility, is also backed by a ‘white paper’ document which was released to coincide with the July 24 event. That nine-page paper analyses reports from the Ministry for Primary Industries, KPMG and Apiculture New Zealand to paint a picture of a significant increase in demand for New Zealand honey (primarily mānuka) in the next five years, against a supply base at risk of having growth potential handbraked by rising costs. The growing demand in the US mānuka honey market and the potential provided in the India free trade agreement are highlighted as significant drivers of demand.

Mānuka Orchard’s ‘Project 2030’ includes a white paper which sets out both the huge potential and challenges in front of New Zealand’s honey industry.

Bowyer calls the new paradigm “a positive market not a gold rush”, as registered hive numbers sit at 480,000.

“Right now it is a strong spot market for the producer, but that will have to change,” he warned the audience of largely beekeepers.

Mānuka Orchard’s answer to the question of how to maintain positivity while avoiding a second mānuka honey gold rush is to increase the connection between what the markets need and what New Zealand’s beekeepers and landowners are able to produce. Bowyer believes Mānuka Orchard is the place to do that.

After beginning life in 2019 as a honey storage and processing facility, Mānuka Orchard has added honey brokering to their service offerings in recent years, with buyers able to register their honey interest through www.manukaorchard.com and beekeepers able to list their honey for sale on the platform. Now, Bowyer is requesting that buyers signal their future honey needs via the platform, while beekeepers forecast their honey production for the coming season.

“The orders for volume and type are there. What I don’t know is what the beekeepers are producing. It would be great to marry that up ahead of time,” Bowyer says.

Off-stage, Bowyer acknowledged the challenges of predicting honey crop volumes and varieties months out due to unknown climatic influences, but that as a bank of longer-term data is built predictions will likely become more accurate.

At present the supply-demand coupling area of Mānuka Orchard’s website is not live to clients, but he says their staff is using it on the back-end of the website and a screenshot of a bar graph was presented to the Open Day audience. Bowyer expects it go fully live to their users in late-August.

Presently available for purchase through the platform is 457 tonnes of honey and in 2026 more than 120 tonnes of honey has between traded through Mānuka Orchard. A June snapshot of the business presented listed 2044 drums or IBCs of honey in the facility, down from 2480 the previous June and 3500 in June 2024, likely mirroring the reduction in New Zealand’s honey backlog. Bowyer summarised that all up through their various services they “deal with” approximately 1400 tonnes of honey a year.

Those volumes make Mānuka Orchard an important service provider for many beekeepers, but they are just one player in a much bigger national industry which saw nearly 13,000 tonnes of honey exported in 2025. However, Bowyer believes the data collection which they hope will underpin Project 2030 will be a scalable model for the wider industry in time.

‘The best years for mānuka are ahead,’ Mānuka Orchard’s white paper declares.

‘But those years won’t arrive on their own – they’ll be built, deliberately, by the people who decide the industry deserves better than the model that nearly broke it.’