Honey supply chain

Mānuka honey is a natural product. Every step in the Mānuka honey supply chain is monitored to ensure that the honey is kept as clean as possible. Why is this important?

Transcript

Scott Coulter (Comvita)

The disadvantage around natural products is often around your supply chain. Getting consistent supply, getting consistent efficacy, and building a complete supply chain from the ground up is a real challenge for natural products.

Young Mee Yoon (Comvita)

Comvita’s Mānuka [honey] supply chain is developed to meet the quality requirements of our medical manufacturing. This includes landowners, beekeepers, extractors and processors.

Best practice to create best quality Mānuka honey would be preventing contamination from things like pesticides, microorganisms during beekeeping; or from tools in a beekeeping practice; or from cleaning chemicals that you use during extractions; or something like that. For example, we use really clean frames for the bees to build [wax] cells and create clean honey. The honey boxes [hives] shouldn’t be located where pesticides are sprayed around.

During transporting of the honey boxes after harvest, our beekeepers put the honey boxes onto pallets and wrap the whole pallet with plastic wrap. Otherwise dust can contaminate the honey or, on a wet day, moisture can get introduced into honey as well.