2015 honey prices

[busybeephilip]

Are You selling your honey too cheap or too expensive, here are some prices that I dug up advertized on line as being sold by the beekeeper so I assume this is retail prices. I suppose for whole sale one would knock 20% off these ?

Hampton 12oz @ £5, 8oz @£4
North London Beekeepers 1lbs @ £8.50, 12oz @ £6-50, 8oz @ £5-00
Leicestershire 1lbs @ £5, cut comb £5
Mourne honey N.I. 1lbs @ £5-50
Essex honey, Ilford 1lbs @ £7, 12 oz @ £5-50, 8oz @ £4
Welsh 12 oz @ £4-50
Lincolnshire 1lbs @ £5
Dartmoor 1lbs @ £6
Essex 1lbs @ £5-00
Nottinghamshire 1lbs @ £4-50
Hemel Hempstead 1lbs @ £6
Abergavenny 1 lbs @ £3-50


That makes the average price for jarred honey direct from the UK beekeeper as ..... 1lbs @ £5.58, 12oz @ £5.37 and 8oz @ £4.30


Any thoughts?

[mazza]

Interesting to see the variety of prices charged!

Was going to sell 8oz jars for £4, but then dropped the price to £3.50. Anyone from Scotland / central belt know what the 'average' is in our area?

[prakel]

That makes the average price for jarred honey direct from the UK beekeeper as ..... 1lbs @ £5.58, 12oz @ £5.37 and 8oz @ £4.30


Any thoughts?

We all know how easy it is to produce massive quantities of honey, year in, year out. So, £6 p/lb is probably somewhere near. Not so sure about the 12oz as I've long thought that some people use that measure in a somewhat artful way. Can't beat a lb jar in my oppinion.

Now, the problem is that @£6 p/lb a lot of good people are being priced out of the market. I know that I wouldn't be able to justify buying a jar at that kind of price, not when there's some perfectly good honey in the supermarkets for a fraction of the cost. Can't really see a way around this issue though. Like it or not we're producing a luxury product even if the net returns aren't actually that high.

[mbc]

30% for wholesale.
Agree on the 12 oz being artful (good description! )
It's always a balance between good healthy local food priced whithin reach of local families or maximising profits by making it twee and expensive. I'm for the quality local food market myself, avoiding pricing people out but making enough to keep the rats off my back. No one goes into honey production in marginal areas to get rich quick.

[prakel]

I'm for the quality local food market myself, avoiding pricing people out but making enough to keep the rats off my back

Totally agree, but here (at least) it's not possible to find an easy marriage. Many people are more than happy to pay £6 for a lb jar (and the same for half a pound of cut comb) but they're the ones which have sufficient disposable income to invest in quality local food. Unfortunately for a lot of people that's a hour's wage. A hard choice to make for many.

This is pretty much how things are going to remain because the one thing we can be fairly certain of is that local honey isn't going to start getting cheaper.

[mbc]

It's a massive problem in this country in particular. Gov UK obviously stands to gain (or lose the least) by devaluing food as we import such a high proportion. Its utterly depressing to see so many farms go out of dairy at the moment, those surviving aren't your traditional family farms but businessses obsessed with margins which are happy to keep their cattle in sheds most months of the year and have feed delivered in artic lorries. A lot of farms now rent their best land to corporations who employ contractors to plough, sow, feed, spray and harvest whatever crop with little regard for rotation or medium to long term sustainability, wildlife habitat or pollinators. It is the American model and it's impersonal approach and calous disregard makes me retch and fear for the future. This is happening all over the place in the county side near you and it's consequences will be disastrous for the rural sector.
Soz for the rant but this sort of changing land use is accelerating and it is diametrically oposite to the sort of sustainable future I think we should be working towards with more people, not less, living on the land and working in the countryside. Once intimate knowledge of land garnered over generations is lost its a hard road to relearn it all and I don't think we know what we're losing until it'll be too late .

[prakel]

Something which really stands out is how quality local produce is benefitting from an ever growing interest in good food. We know various small local producers who are all doing exceedingly well with their different products and there's nothing wrong with that. You can see a snapshot of this in the pubs; the old drinking dens which survive are struggling while the ones which have remade themselves as food-havens tend to be going from strength to strength especially when they latch onto the local produce bandwagon.

I'd be interested to know the background of the Abergavenny honey which Busybeephillip listed. £3.50 p/lb. Honey was selling at that price, in this area almost twenty years ago -that was in those exceedingly nice skep jars which were discontinued for some reason which is totally beyond me, but experience proved that the ordinary jar sold just as easily -and with a bigger profit margin.

[busybeephilip]

See pm

[HJBee]

I've got next to nothing, so selling to usual retail for £4.50 per 330g 300ml jar this year, could sell it £5 a jar twice over to people I know. I will be buying another beekeepers produce to consume