The Honey Project

The Honey Project is a true modern love story. It began during our own summer of love, 2019.

Like many couples, we met on Hinge. We started seeing each other in early spring but it wasn’t until a hazy summer afternoon overlooking the backstreet gardens of South London that our thoughts turned to bees, hives and honey.

Laura had been working on a branding project for one of the UK’s biggest honey companies. She had bold ideas for the brand to do good.

To give back to nature and help bees, not just sell more honey. The business, however, wasn't interested.

And so, in an attempt to impress Laura (and any bees who might be eavesdropping too), Ed said something like:

'Why don’t we do it ourselves? Why don’t we create a honey brand that’s about doing good and giving back? Next generation honey where every jar you buy helps plant wildflowers up and down the countryside, and rewards our glorious pollinators.’

Laura said yes and that was the beginning of a three and a half year adventure, bee suits at the ready.

We found out that a shapeless white overall is never a sexy get up. We also found out that honey manufacturing and supply is a scandalous affair. Honey is the third most faked food in the world, behind milk & olive oil.

‘Honey launderers’ (yes that’s a real thing) are cheating authenticity tests by adding cheap rice and corn syrup to the mix.

This lack of transparency makes it harder to trace the honey’s provenance. Before it even hits your toast, your cereal or your smoothie, it’s often travelled halfway around the world with untraceable, unsuspecting and near-endless amounts of air miles attached to it.

It’s not only honey lovers that feel cheated. Beekeepers, we discovered, are angry too – and not just because of the very unsexy but definitely very necessary uniforms we mentioned before. Fake honey oozing into the UK market drives down prices and puts them out of business.

So we’re starting small. Very small. Making honey that’s a force for good – sweet stuff that’ll help reflower the world around us, jar by delicious jar.

The Honey Project partners with Buglife.

The Honey Project donate 25p per jar to rewilding so that pot of honey on your table is really a new plot of forget-me-nots flowering in the real world.

The donation covers 1m squared, roughly 100 wild flowers (more if you’re lucky), planted up and down the UK on established B - Lines. 

B-Lines are an imaginative and beautiful solution to the problem of the loss of flowers and pollinators. The B-Lines are a series of ‘insect pathways’ running through our countryside and towns, along which companies such as The Honey Project are restoring and creating a series of wildflower-rich habitat stepping stones. They link existing wildlife areas together, creating a network, like a railway, that will weave across the UK landscape. This will provide large areas of brand new habitat benefiting bees and butterflies– but also a host of other wildlife. The Honey Project simply use honey as a vehicle to help make this change!

Buy The Honey Project at Ratton Pantry.