Honey House – Experience Natural Honey at its Best!

What is Honey House?

Honey House is an e-commerce portal dedicated for pure honey and honey-based products. In addition to the usual honey which all of us must have tasted, we bring certain unique honey products to the table, including Monofloral Honey (honey collected from a single species of plants), Flavored Honey, Bee Pollen and Honey Dips.  

What is the current size of the Indian Honey Market?

The branded honey market in India has a current market size of INR 700 crore, growing at a CAGR of 10%. India produces 7,000 million tons of honey, out of which 50% is exported annually. Major players in the honey market include Dabur, Jhandu and Kejriwal Honey.  Source: Technopak

What are the current shortcomings of Indian Honey?

•  Adulteration: Most of the Indian honey brands, in a fight to offer low prices, resort to contamination of honey by mixing sugar. Even popular brands like Dabur reportedly add 20%-70% sugar. Source: TOI. Adding sugar suppresses the primary benefit of honey. Refined dietary sugars lack minerals and vitamins and are often called empty calories. Honey, a natural sweetener, on the other hand, contains 22 amino acids and a variety of minerals essential for human metabolism.
• Contamination: Most developed countries have banned harmful antibiotics or regulated strict quality standards for honey. Most of the Indian branded honey makers meet those standards when exporting honey, but resort to dumping their contaminated honey in the Indian market. The potent antibiotics found in commercial honey samples in India are Chloramphenicol, Fluoroquinolones, Tetracyclines, Nitrofurans, Streptomycins and Sulfanomides. These antibiotics are fed to bees to prevent diseases, promote quick growth and increase production numbers to meet commercial targets. Source: The Hindu
• Honey Laundering/Circumvention: Honey has become a staple food in the West. Due to heavy demand, they started importing honey and as with any other case, China started polluting the American honey market with sub-standard honey. In 2001, the US government increased duties to 221% for honey imports from China, to curb this. Unfortunately, a lot of this Chinese honey is coming into India now. Most of the popular brands mix Indian honey with Chinese imported honey to bring down their selling price. Contrary to other product industries where branded means more expensive, you can get branded honey in India a lot cheaper than pure natural honey. 
• Harmful Honey Processing: To standardize the taste and improve the texture, Honey is pasteurized by heating. The pasteurizing process in turn destroys the essential enzymes and converts the nutrient-rich Honey to a mere sugar syrup. Poor quality of the Honey leads to decreased consumption in India. An average German consumes 2.1kg of honey per year, whereas it is limited to around 8gm for an Indian. 

What is the current beekeeping scenario in India?

• Beekeeping is an excellent source of employment for the rural unemployed in India. Currently, more than 350,000 farmers in India are employed through Beekeeping.
• Climatic changes have resulted in lesser rainfall, leading to increase in difficulty to maintain bee colonies. It is because of this that sugar feed and antibiotics usage is on the rise.
• Due to the domination of bigger brands and inflow of cheap honey from China, native beekeepers are forced to keep lesser profit margins, and in many cases end up selling for a loss.

How HoneyHouse was conceptualized?

I come from a family where Agriculture is the family business. And my dad is always fascinated by the extraordinary world of bees. We have our own farm in Coonoor, a beautiful hill station in the Nilgiris, and we do small volumes of Honey business in the district, my dad does it more out of passion than the money. You can see a bit of our farm in the video below – an amateur video shot by me around 5 years back.

As with any other kid in India, education took me out of the family business, into the Software Engineering domain. After 4 years in the industry, I came out and co-founded HashTag Technologies, a technology company along with my college buddy Prem. Prem and myself are always eager to try out new things, and sometime in March 2015, the idea came up that why not do something which leverages our technology skills and also our historic association with beekeeping and honey. 

Then we spoke to Mr. Jeykumar of Shamee Bee Farm, who is a Limca Book of Records holder, and has been in the honey business for the past 25 years, a man who is forever passionate and fascinated about the exciting life of bees. He was equally interested in the venture and thus we laid the seed for Honey House.  After almost a year of back-end work, we launched on the 18th of March 2016. 

What products do we sell?

We sell five categories of Honey to start with and have more in R&D, which we are planning to add sometime during the second half of this year. 

1. Exotic Honey: Our exotic range of honey products are collected from exotic regions in India such as the Kashmir valley and the Sub-Himalayan mountains. These regions are considered to be the most scenic and idyllic locations for beekeeping. The valleys are blanketed by saffron and mustard flowers, apple blossoms and acacia. The quality of honey obtained is of the premium range.
2. Monofloral Honey: Monofloral Honey is a special type of honey which has a distinctive natural flavor, due to being made from the nectar of one particular plant. Monofloral Honey is made possible by the beekeepers by making sure of two things. Firstly, the bee hives are placed in an orchard where that plant dominates. Eg: Mango Honey is collected by placing bee hives in a mango orchard. Secondly, the beekeeper must carefully time the placement of the hives in the orchard in such a way that the honey harvest time coincides with the blooming period of the plants. Just like wine, each type of monofloral honey has a distinct aroma and taste. Each type has its own health benefits as well. Owing to the complexity of harvesting, the availability of monofloral honey is seasonal.
3. Flavored Honey: Our special range of flavored honey products have small amounts of natural flavors added to natural pure honey. Typically we add Ginger and Thulasi flavors, to add more goodness to the already virtuous honey. Ginger treats loss of appetite, indigestion, heart burns and gastritis. Thulasi serves as an excellent cure and relief to all sinus related ailments such as chest cold, common cold, cough, sour throat, mild fever and allergy due to dust.
4. Honey Dips: Honey goes as an accompaniment with almost any health-rich food and nuts & dry fruits are probably something which come close to honey in health benefits. So we decided to combine the goodness of both in our Honey Dips product range. Honey Dips go very well with kids and the sumptuous taste of dried fruits in honey makes them keep coming back for more. A couple of teaspoons of honey dips would give enough nutrients for the entire day.
5. Bee Pollen: Pollen is found in all flowers and is responsible for the germination of seeds. They stick to the bees’ bodies when they collect honey and finally get collected inside the bee hive. Bee Pollen is the primary source of protein for the hive. Bee Pollen helps one to stay active and improves longevity. It also strengthens bone ligaments, improves sexual potency and effective in controlling diabetes. Bee Pollen has high medicinal value and is used in manufacturing many medicines.

Why should you buy honey from Honey House?

As we mentioned above, the current honey products in the market do not adhere to strict quality standards. In a country where honey is considered to be the food for the Gods, we are in a sad plight where we do not know if the honey we are going to consume is adulterant and antibiotic-free. We start out on a mission to provide 100% pure honey to every household ready to consume, without any doubts about quality in mind.  We highlight a few of our unique selling points below:

• No antibiotics: Bees require water as much as humans to thrive. In order to not use any antibiotics and for natural bee health, we choose regions which are in close proximity to natural water sources.
• Organic Fields: Pesticides and Artificial manure affect the bee health in a big way. We choose farms which use organic feed and natural pesticides.
• No mobile towers: Microwaves adversely impact pollination and the health of bees. So we choose farms which are away from mobile phone towers.
• Constant Migration: Since India is a huge country with a variety of flora, the flowering season of each region keeps changing, and we need to migrate the honey colonies at strategic intervals to keep the bee population on the rise and also improve the quality of honey.
• 100% natural honey without any artificial substances. We are proud to have obtained “Special Grade” classification under AGMARK by the Central Bee Research and Training Institute(CBRTI), Pune, something which even the big brands like Dabur are not able to achieve yet.
• Unique Product Range and Economical Pricing: Most of the products we sell are unique to the Indian honey market. Our Monofloral varieties are very strenuous to collect but have a distinct natural flavor. The pricing is also made to be very easy on the pockets. 
• No artificial sugar feed. All our honey comes from 100% natural nectar. However, during rainy seasons, in order to save the bee population from dying, we provide sugar feed, but that is only for the bee colony. We do not extract that honey and sell it commercially.
• No harmful honey pasteurization processes which major brands use where they heat honey up to 160 degrees Celsius, thus making honey lose its natural goodness. Our post processing involves mere removal of bee body residues, dust and wax – which are not fit for human consumption, and making honey homogeneous.
• Our Honey is subjected to thorough lab examination by the CBRTI to keep our moisture, sugar, acidity and other levels as per international standards.

Our Appeal to Rodinhooders:

As you have read above, it is our noble initiative to make pure natural honey available to everyone in India. Pure Honey has innumerable health benefits including weight loss, memory enhancement, boosting energy levels, healing wounds, healthy hair & skin, etc., We would like all of your encouragement and support in this venture of ours! #SayYesToHoney

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A modified version of this article can be found here. 

@lorzinian @honeyhousein