How to improve quality of honey and other products

Indisputable is the fact that the quality of honey you as beekeeper can not change. But you can improve quality of honey and other products from the perspective of the buyer.

We all know that hobby beekeepers are vital part of beekeeping, however there is every year bigger risk that hobby beekeeping will disappear. Reason is in bigger / professional beekeepers who can afford better honey product quality for lower price. Because of that honey products has to be even from hobby beekeepers every year better.

With the new year 2014 can be one of the goals the improvement of the quality of honey products. Below we present a few ways how can every beekeeper take care for better quality of honey from the perspective of the buyer.

1. Make a brand

Brand is not relevant only for large corporations is key factor also for smaller companies and beekeepers. Many people say that a brand carries the DNA of a company in our keys beekeeping. If you offer a unique product it can also help your brand to stand out from the competition.

In the first phase you need just unique design, the logo (picture of the brand) and slogan. A carefully selected, stylish and clean slogan can really help your logo as a trigger to get a unique feeling among potential customers about your work.

If you have a tight budget and no designer that you can afford to create a design for your logo, you have some good low-price options in which you can search for logos and other visual elements in your logo: 99designs,LogoDesignLab or you can pay lower price for student of graphic design.

Then use the logo on all labels, letters, boxes… 

2. Controlled quality of honey products

Beekeepers that their honey products sell on the market, we have, in addition of considering good beekeeping practice, for a better quality, implement internal control over food production. This type of supervision can ensuretraceability, regardless of whether you produce 1 kg or 1 tonne of honey.

A Case of traceability system:

• Site or location of grazing: (place where you have bees)
• Honey from beehive: beehive – 3, 5 and 6
• Date and place of extraction of honey: 7. 7. 2014, Piacenza
• The amount of honey: 50 kg
• Type of honey (beekeeper opinion): Flower honey
• Tag Series / LOT (L): L-12013258
• Date shelf life marked on the packaging by the retail sale: 5. 5. 2015
• Customers who bought honey: Company 1 – 120 kg, Nina – 3 kg…  

By controlled system LOT number is the important part, because if in the worst case when honey is contaminated, you have to recall just honey produced by contaminated LOT number. If you don’t have a traceability system of production, if you have case of contamination you have to recall all of honey and you cannot track the origin of the contamination! Our advice for small bekeepers, for LOT number use date of honey production with extra numberwhich tell you number of extraction series, example L-1007072014. However all this data you can use in future also for your personal statistic.

3. Take care for different honey Jar

You can not imagine how much can you make just with a simple change of honey Jar. If you canchoose between more honey jars that use this advantage. By picking right one don’t forget on practical use of jar, customers will appreciate that.

Beauteful, unique and simple honey jar

4. Tell the story

The best products are the one with an original story. Almost every beekeeper has unique story why he started tobeekeep, why not tell that to your customers? Like in the case of success of Apple, where all was about Steve Jobs, make a similar story about your goals of beekeeping. So design your brand personality over the story. Customers choose of a brand is not always because of the quality of product but also often because they perceive the brand positively. This is the moment when the brand personality comes into play. Ensure that you keep your brand promise. Give insight into your beekeeping and try to actively communicate with your customers. That will definitely pay off!

Whatever you will change / implement for better quality, have in mind that customer satisfaction is in first place.

Source: ahandoh.com, designarchives.aiga.org/ and Slovenski čebelar 12/2013.