Starter Kit. Idea 281 of 500. Cluster 14
Honey from the dry zone, single-origin, tested and branded
The mechanism, from the book
The smallholder sells raw to a collector at the gate and the collector sells to a packer who puts his own name on it. Denmark's farmers got rich the day they owned the creamery.
The first step
Source honey directly from one dry-zone beekeeper and send a sample to a laboratory for a purity test. Label the rest with the village and the test result, and offer it to a delicatessen and a hotel gift shop. Ask what price they would put on it and whether they would reorder. A price offer and a first order are the proof that testing pays for itself.
- Who pays first
- A delicatessen or hotel gift shop whose customers distrust unlabelled honey and will pay more for a tested jar with a village name.
- What leaves today
- Wild honey is sold unlabelled at the roadside and mistrusted, so the price that tested, single-origin honey fetches is never earned.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask which laboratory can test honey for purity to a recognised standard.
- Department of Agriculture. Ask whether beekeepers supplying a brand must register.
Check before you spend
Whether your honey passes a purity test before it is labelled, and what the label may claim about its dry-zone origin.
Find out these three numbers
- What does tested single-origin honey sell for in a shop?
- How much honey does one beekeeper sell in a season?
- What does one purity test cost?
A comparison from the book
Japan. Chapter Eleven
"a Ceylon mark that means something because an inspector will not let a bad batch carry it"
A tested, named honey is trusted only if failed batches never carry the label.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.