The Bitter Sweet Scales of Justice – Springbank Honey Victims Balance Fairness with Forgiveness

While many around New Zealand beekeeping circles have viewed the news of Springbank Honey’s forced receivership (as detailed in Springbank Honey Forced to Receivership, Beekeepers Owed Millions) with a “good riddance” response, for some it is not as simple as that. At least six beekeeping or honey businesses are still owed substantial sums of money, including two couples at either end of their careers. Dale Gifford, limited physically, has seen his plans for retirement upset due to the missing money, while a burgeoning Northland business grinds forward against a tight financial handbrake.

The sun has set on Bay of Plenty beekeeper Dale Gifford’s working career earlier than he had planned, due to a combination of a rare muscle-degenerating disease and the injustice of a “charlatan” honey buyer in Stephen Brown who owes him nearly $485,000.

After the best part of 40 years beekeeping Dale Gifford thought he had a plan to stay closely connected to the industry he loved in his retirement years, through honey trading. Inclusion Body Myositis – “IBM, but I am not a computer,” he quips – hastened the sale of his and wife Donna-Marie’s Bay of Plenty beekeeping business to their staff in 2019, but there was still honey trading to be had.

“All it involved was paperwork, the forklift occasionally, and keeping up with the RMP. All of that can be done without a great deal of physical danger,” Gifford explains.

IBM is a rare muscular disease, but more common in men over 50, which causes slow, progressive weakness of finger flexor and quadricep muscles, among others.

“There is currently no human cure and no interventions. It is not life threating, but a gentle downhill over a long period of time. Early onset muscle wasting,” Gifford explains with well-versed succinctness.

When they sold the hives, the Giffords held onto the honey in the shed, looking for a buyer, but after being in business for nearly four decades through good times and bad, their timing and luck on what was to be their last significant honey sale was poor.

“With Covid the prices plummeted and the sales dropped through the floor. So, what I stored up as my retirement honey wasn’t moving, but it was ageing,” the now 71 year-old explains.

“I sold to Springbank. They offered me a bargain basement price. I thought, take the money and refresh. Get fresh honey stock.”

A “bargain basement price” but still more than $700,000 that should have come the Giffords’ (along with some minor shareholders’) way through a series of instalments in 2024, culminating in a final payment January 2025.

“Of course, they took the honey and paid less than 20 percent of what the contract was for. All I ended up with was less than two drums in my store,” Gifford rues.

Claim v Counter-Claim

By July of 2025, 15 months after first signing the sale contract with Springbank Honey and six months after the final payment should have been made, the Giffords had tired of what would later be detailed by the judge assigned to rule on the case as “explanations and excuses” so numerous that “I will not traverse them all”. The Bay of Plenty retirees issued a statutory demand on Springbank Honey to settle the nearly $485,000 owed to them and their business partners.

That year at least two other beekeepers would make the same claim, with Springbank launching counter-claims in an effort to slow the aggrieved party’s efforts to be reimbursed for honey supplied. In two cases Springbank Honey was successful in throwing enough doubt into the argument that judges ruled the statutory demands, each for between $500-600,000, could not be upheld, but in the case of Gifford and Gifford versus Springbank Honey Ltd, the flailing business which would ultimately be only a little over a month out from the receivers moving in to halt trading, was ordered to pay the full $484,795.80 within 15 days.

The Bumbling Honey Traders

Stephen Brown, owner of Springbank Honey, is all laughs at Gulfood food show in Dubai in February, where he travelled with his family in last-gasp efforts to trade honey, while the business captioned photos “#holiday”, despite still owing millions to Kiwi beekeepers who supplied him honey.

The hearing report paints Springbank Honey as bumbling in many dealings with the Giffords, with a regular lack of attention to detail, bringing Springbank Honey’s competence as honey traders further into question.

“I find that the set-off counterclaim raised by Springbank is no more than an assertion and not a genuine and substantial dispute,” judge Brittain ruled.

Among the blunders from within Springbank was the revelation they sent a letter in March 2025 to “Mr Gillford”. But the gaffs didn’t stop at the top, within it they referred to supply contract “2423” when the Giffords’ contract was in fact number 2427. Astonishingly there was more, “that document appears to be a draft” the judge’s ruling bluntly states, referring to the letter which still had key details omitted. In their place templated terms of ‘[Supplier Name]’ and ‘Sincerely [Your Name]’ were used.

If that wasn’t enough to erode confidence in the capabilities of Springbank Honey, admission from staff that contracts “could have been put in the wrong place” and hence they were not aware of the full amounts owed won’t have helped.

In further sign of the storm circling the Cust-based company owned and directed by long-time beekeeper Stephen Brown, administrative tasks were hindered in April 2025 due to a raid by police and the Ministry for Primary Industries, “resulting in the seizure of all laptops and phones”, so admitted a staff member in correspondence to Gifford.

The Brown family continued to travel the world attempting to sell honey though, as recently as February in Dubai at Gulfood, the world’s biggest food show. From there Stephen, Tracy and many of their children showcased their travel photos via Facebook, captioned both '#FamilyBusiness' and '#holiday'.

Hillside Honey

“I feel really sorry for Benji at Hillside,” Gifford says.

That’s Hillside Honey, based in Northland, owned by Benji and Katie Raumaewa, and operating for the past 10 years.

Benji Raumaewa, owner of Hillside Honey in Northland, is still waiting on nearly $580,000 he says is owed by Springbank Honey, which entered receivership in July.

“He got smoked worse than me, because he had actually done his due diligence,” Gifford says, regarding a written and signed personal guarantee from Brown which Benji Raumaewa obtained before releasing $580,000 worth of honey to Springbank in 2024.

Hillside Honey beat the Giffords to the statutory demand station by a couple of months and, despite that personal guarantee to pay from Brown, Springbank were able to introduce enough doubt into the case to say the demand need not stand, thanks to some expert advice.

“It’s all a croc, their whole story, but it’s just enough to put a grain of doubt in there,” Raumaewa says, his business still waiting on the money he says it is owed.

In an almost identical move to that which would be presented months later against the Giffords, Springbank Honey claimed there was an inherit defect in the honey supplied by Hillside causing its HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural) levels to spike. Springbank Honey claimed, without evidence, that a customer in Germany rejected their supply of honey, which included both the Giffords’ and Hillside’s honey, due to high HMF levels.

By the time the batch reached Germany and was tested in January 2025 it had been out of the producers’ possessions for approximately eight months, Springbank had admitted blending it, and it had negotiated a 57-day journey via ship.

“How long can you hold onto honey until you stuff something up then go back and say ‘it is someone else’s fault’?,” an incredulous Raumaewa asks.

“We test, we get the results, there is not really anything else we can guarantee. I wouldn’t sell my honey if I had to guarantee an HMF level. The HMF is impacted by storage, its temperature … you can’t predict what the buyer holds it in. You have no control of that honey once it leaves your yard. It doesn’t make sense.”

Court findings detailing the Hillside case state that the honey supplied had HMF readings of less than 3mg/kg upon dispatch from Northland in April 2024 – “it was fresh honey, straight from extraction, good quality, Northland, mānuka,” is how Raumaewa describes it. The batch it was blended into was sampled and this was sent to Germany for testing where an HMF reading of 9.7 was returned in October. On November 10 Springbank happily exported the honey and upon landing in Germany it was tested in a German lab in January, returning an HMF reading of 28.5.

“Blending low HMF with high is what these guys do. They punch things into a calculator based on what they think they can blend. It is not my problem. I supplied the honey with test results. You are talking six months after I gave up the honey that they did these blends. What sort of conditions were they sitting in for six months? There are so many unknowns,” Raumaewa says.

Springbank claimed the honey was not acceptable to their German client and, at a cost of $600,000, honey was required to be airfreighted to Germany as compensation. No evidence was provided of this in the case of both Hillside and the Giffords though. In ruling the Giffords’ case, the judge called them “no more than an assertion”.

Enough Doubt

So, why were then Giffords able to uphold their demand for payment and the Raumaewas at Hillside not?

“In the Hillside case they produced a supposed expert, and in our case they didn’t, which allowed us to win,” Gifford says, while conceding that the cases were actually near identical.

Springbank claimed Hillside’s honey must have been somehow defective to cause the HMF spike and thus conducted ‘in-house incubation trials’ on the honey samples at their Canterbury facility. Michelle Hawke, business manager for ALS Foods NZ (trading as Analytica Laboratories), provided independent analysis of the situation in the Hillside case.

“It is impossible for me or anyone to determine how or why [this spike] happened given the incubation study and testing was not conducted by ALS or any other third party,” she concluded, after also saying “based off the incubation study done by Springbank there would appear to be something irregular about the HMF performance of the samples that went into the batch”.

That assessment seemingly threw doubt on the situation. “It was just enough for the judge, coming from an expert witness,” Raumaewa reflects.

Hillside continue to fight for what they say they are owed though, with the dispute moving to arbitration.

Hillside Honey provided Springbank Honey with 41 tonnes of “fresh Northland manuka” honey, but getting paid for it has proven impossible, even with a personal guarantee signed by Springbank owner Stephen Brown before the honey left the Hillside yard.  

A “Huge Financial Hit”

For the Northland couple the whole saga has shackled their business.

“We have had to make different decisions in our business because we have not had that money. It has impacted us for sure,” Raumaewa says.

“It was a huge financial hit. It was three years ago the contract was signed up. With the honey prices being so down it was a double whammy. But hey, we have survived, come through it. Now we look toward the future. You can’t really dwell on it.”

At times it had him questioning whether he wanted to be a part of an industry where such injustice could occur, and then there was the mental strain for both he and his wife. “You can’t bury your head in the sand though,” he says.

“I just don’t want to see the guy trading. He shouldn’t be in the industry.”

Not Trading

Not trading is exactly the position which the Giffords have been left in and, with the recent lapsing of their honey facility registration, the final days have passed in a beekeeping and honey career which began alongside “a bunch of ex hippies” in a small Christian fellowship in Paengaroa in the 1980s.

“Of them were some of those who started Comvita. Alan Bougen was part of that little Christian fellowship,” Gifford recalls.

“The beekeeper for Comvita at the time asked me to shift some hives one night, and I never got away. So, that was how I started. I worked for Comvita.”

When he demanded a wage rise or he would walk, the Comvita board called his bluff and Gifford says he was left jobless. However, he agreed to lease the hives back for one year and then bought them as Comvita sought capital – money which would help grow them into the country’s largest honey business.

All the while the Giffords ran their own business in the Bay.

“I have been beekeeping for 40 years and the New Zealand honey industry ran on trust. Your word was your bond, because it was small. After 40 years I was selling up my final, stored, crop … Then the trust was gone and all of a sudden a charlatan was involved. That is unfortunately the story of mānuka. It becomes a gold rush and a lot of people who are dishonest enter the race.”

Righteous But Not Indignant

Dale Gifford calls Springbank Honey owner Stephen Brown a “charlatan” but says, “I have to walk in forgiveness towards the man".

That dishonesty appears to cut Gifford as deeply as his loss of funds. Ever since he was “saved”, “way back in the Comvita days”, he says striving to practice Christian values has shaped his life.

“You can verbalise the values, but living them is a different story,” he points out.

That mantra has seen Gifford undertake mission work through the church, travelling to Afghanistan and helping several Afghan refugee families settle in Tauranga, as well as being involved in a programme which supports persecuted Christian women in Pakistan. And he lives the values regarding the Springbank saga too, as he seeks justice without revenge.

“I have to walk in forgiveness towards the man,” Gifford says of Brown. “I too was forgiven, so I can’t hold anything against him.”

It’s a magnanimous attitude, but as he watches the sunset over Welcome Bay from his semi-rural home, perched in a raised and spring-loaded chair due to his “it’s not a computer” IBM, Gifford seems content despite the sour taste left by his final honey sale.

“I sleep in white sheets and I get a feed every day. I have Jesus in my life, what more could you want?” he asks, genuinely.

“I was in beekeeping because I loved it. We made an OK living for all those years, we made a good living, but we were in it because we loved it. So, it was a disappointing end to what was a great life,” he says, adding “not that it has ended yet.”

Whether he refers to just life, or also the search for justice in the Springbank Honey saga, remains to be seen.