Looming over a seriously depressed mānuka honey market is what has variously been described as a honey “oversupply’, “stockpile", “surplus”, “backlog” and even a “glut” stored in sheds around New Zealand. Most-recently estimated by Apiculture New Zealand (ApiNZ) to be anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 tonnes, we explore the data – or lack thereof – behind those big numbers and ask, could New Zealand’s honey inventory really be that large?
Over the past 10 years New Zealand has exported an average of 9595 tonnes of honey a year. And that is where the hard publicly available data on total New Zealand honey production and consumption begins and ends.
As a result, the honey industry remains largely in the dark over not just the size of the honey inventory, but the specifics of it. And when it comes to New Zealand’s honey, particularly the flagship mānuka honey, details count. A honey industry with no honey inventory is susceptible to failing to supply markets if production decreases. And, if mānuka honey is not held in storage to be “aged” or “grown” to maximise antibacterial properties, then there is lost value to producers and packers alike.
Opinions vary surrounding the national honey inventory, its size, how it should be worked through, and if it is a concern at all. However, one thing is for certain, many beekeepers have fallen on tough times in recent seasons as New Zealand’s honey supply far outstripped demand. Now, as droves of beekeepers exit the industry and registered hive numbers, once nearing one million, now fall below 600,000, a future with annual supply and demand equilibrium is being forecast.
The question of now remains though, how much honey is in the shed and what will become of it?
A Faint Light
Statistics New Zealand tracks honey exports and makes data available publicly at www.infoshare.stats.govt.nz where total export quantities and values are detailed, along with a breakdown of various honey forms (bulk, retail packed, comb). Also tracked are monofloral and multifloral mānuka – as per the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) definition – honeydew and varieties “other than mānuka” are collected in that catchall.
Total export quantities for all honey have ranged from 8702 tonnes in 2014 (the year registered hive numbers first passed the 500,000 mark) to the record setting 12,690 tonnes in 2021 off the back of Covid-related demand. The most recent full reported year, 2023, saw 9880 tonnes move offshore, closer to the 2014-2023 annual average of 9595 tonnes.
Diminishing Light Domestically
While international markets buy the vast majority of New Zealand’s honey, domestic market consumption needs to be added to export volumes to complete the demand side of the equation.
New Zealand’s grocery marketplace is dominated by Foodstuffs and Woolworths and, helpfully, their New Zealand honey retail sales data is tracked and available through Nielsen IQ. Unhelpfully, that data is priced at $2375+gst (editor’s note: Apiarist’s Advocate declined the opportunity to purchase).
Various industry stakeholders spoken to have, at times, gained access to the data though. In 2022, as part of their research for the Honey Industry Strategy, ApiNZ bought the retail sales figures.
“It confirmed what we had anticipated and had based earlier assumptions on; that annual sales totalled around 2000 tonnes, and this had fallen over time,” ApiNZ’s Phil Edmonds says.
Bucking that assumed falling trend was a rebound to “about 2600 tonnes” the following year, major local seller Airborne Honey can divulge, having seen more recent sales data.
“The trend for honey sales during the past two years in New Zealand supermarkets is up. The value of honey sold in supermarkets has increased by approximately 37% and the volume has increased by approximately 15%. These increases are as a result of consumers purchasing lower price manuka honey at a higher price than multifloral honey,” Airborne general manager sales John Smart reports.
The increase in larger department-store-type retail businesses in recent years, such as Costco and Chemist Warehouse, has provided new avenues in which honey is sold. Online trading is likely increasingly prevalent, and ‘door sales’ by beekeepers have traditionally been avenues for direct honey sales, including local farmers’ markets. Pharmacies sometimes stock honey, especially mānuka honey, while airports and tourist stores also retail the sweet stuff.
How much is sold through those channels is a guessing game though.
So to is the size of the “daigou” trade of visitors to New Zealand (typically Chinese) buying honey to take or post offshore to be on-sold. In recent years, both New Zealand and China governments have sought to crack down on the daigou trade with law changes. What impact this has had on honey sales is, like much of the domestic consumption sales picture, a complete unknown.
Edmonds says that prior to Covid and the attempts from China to stymie daigou, there were assumptions made that “off-retail” honey sales could amount to double the supermarket sales. That is likely to be “much reduced” since, given visitor numbers to New Zealand still haven’t returned to their pre-Covid levels.
Groping in the Dark for Production Figures
Each year MPI produces Apiculture Monitoring Data, included in which is their estimation of honey production. Despite the numbers presented often being reported as an in-the-field factual reality, they are but an estimation in the truest sense of the word.
On behalf of MPI, AsureQuality carry out an annual survey of a range of beekeeping enterprises that account for approximately 30 percent of registered hives in New Zealand. Within that survey the respondents provide information on the total volume of honey extracted that season, and their hive numbers at June 30. An average hive yield estimate for both North Island and South Island is then calculated, which is multiplied by the registered hive totals for each island. Those two results are combined to give MPI’s estimated national honey yield – 12,000 tonnes in 2023, 22,000 the year prior, 20,500 before that and a record-high estimate of 27,000 in 2020 as beekeepers reported a bumper 2019-20 summer.
Other than the North Island to South Island differentiation, MPI does not express if any level of regional production fluctuations are accounted for in their calculations, or the level to which the representative sample of honey producers surveyed matches with hive spread across the islands.
In the absence of more credible information on production figures, the apiculture industry has jumped on the MPI estimate to fill the hole in the supply and demand equation.
“It is an estimate, but it is the only estimate we have,” Edmonds explains.
“The trend – proportional changes year-to-year – does however generally reflect what the industry has anticipated, based on changes to hive numbers and regional weather during honey production months.”
The bluntness of the MPI production estimate is perhaps best represented by the trend, since 2017, of rounding the total to the nearest 500 tonnes.
Grasping at Something
The equation to determine annual honey surplus therefore relies on the broad production estimate generated from surveying, proportionally, less than a third of the beekeeping industry as a starting point. From that number, known honey exports are subtracted, along with a domestic honey sales assumption, which can seemingly only be reached following considerable guess work.
What you’re left with is the surplus (or potentially a deficit). If totalled over several seasons, such as the last 10 years – the period since supply is believed to begin significantly shading demand – you have your stab in the dark at the current inventory.
According to ApiNZ, that’s anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 tonnes.
It's hard to argue with, in large part because it is such a broad range, but also because without better data – particularly around honey production – there is not a lot else to bring to the discussion.
The Mānuka Collective chief executive and ApiNZ board member, Sean Goodwin takes a keen interest in honey production and sales trends, having come from a FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) background prior to taking up his role in the honey industry 10 years ago. He has labelled the last 10 years in honey production and sales the “Decade of Disruption”.
In Goodwin’s view, in 2018 an inventory of around 20,000 tonnes of honey probably existed and it has since grown, not off the back of any increase in demand from consumers, but off internal industry demand. The introduction of methylglyoxal (MGO) growth forecasting in mānuka honey by laboratories in 2016, then MPI’s mānuka honey export definition in 2018, both saw bulk honey buyers within the industry seek out greater volumes of honey.
“Hive growth and production was well in excess of actual outgoing sales. Why? The need to buy in advance because of the ageing process and the need to buy regional variation to meet MPI mānuka standards created an artificial demand which, in hindsight, has us thinking, ‘that was crazy’,” Goodwin says.
“By the time we got our head around that we were hit by a big crop in 2020, but also Covid, which led to a massive increase in exports. But what we didn’t see at the time was, all of that was going into market and going to sit there for a while. While at the same time the daigou market and anyone who was travelling here was completely cut off. But, you would have been mad if, in 2020, you had said to a beekeeper that you don’t think they should place hives that year. They would have said ‘nah, it’s Christmas’.”
Goodwin recently made a presentation to Mānuka Collective personal explaining those factors, which included the graph in Figure 1. It details registered hive numbers, MPI’s production estimates, his own estimation of total sales volume (underscored by the export figures) and a cumulative surplus of honey which rises steeply from 2018 to land at approximately 50,000 tonnes.
“I don’t intend this to necessarily be the Bible, but I think it is illustrative of what has gone on,” Goodwin explains of his modelling.
What’s in the Shed?
Defining the size of the national honey inventory is one challenge, it’s another to determine the variety and – in the case of mānuka – age and grade. Anecdotal evidence would suggest it is largely a mānuka honey backlog though, and that’s what Goodwin is seeing presented to The Mānuka Collective by beekeepers.
“There is not much, if any, bush or low-grade mānuka honey and it is probably mostly higher-grades, 15 and 20+ (UMF), based on what I am seeing from suppliers around the place. That really is a legacy from the 2020 season where it seemed like everyone did well and it seemed like everyone got 15+,” Goodwin says.
MPI estimated the national honey crop to be 27,000 tonnes that year.
A Safe Number
No industry would want to run at an inventory level of zero though, and the complexities of mānuka honey mean a significant supply should be held in the sheds of honey packers, beekeepers and storage facilities to both maximise its value through “growing-out” which allows DHA (dihydroxyacetone) in the honey to convert to MGO, and to protect against low production years.
Logan Bowyer runs Bay of Plenty honey storage facility Mānuka Orchard and believes New Zealand should hold an inventory of between 20,000 and 30,000 tonnes.
“At this time of the year, New Zealand should have about 8000 tonnes in stock maturing. We should also have the final 5,000 to sell from last season, because we both produce and sell 15,000 tonnes a year. Then we should have another 10,000 for when we don’t produce enough, which tends to happen every three or four years. So, that is about 20,000 to 30,000 we need in the sheds,” Bowyer says.
New Zealand exported just over 6000 tonnes of monofloral mānuka honey in each of the past two years, and between 2000 and 2500 tonnes of multifloral mānuka.
Goodwin concurs with the need to hold honey stocks for ageing purposes, and as an insurance against the fluctuations of honey production from season to season.
“We are not producing widgets. If we have a year where rewarewa is flowering and thus a lot of mono mānuka becomes multi, then you need some flexibility,” Goodwin says.
Maintaining Perspective
While beekeepers might be copping the brunt of a large honey inventory depressing mānuka honey prices offered to them, at Egmont Honey chief executive James Annabell believes it can be worked through, and there is a blueprint to do so.
“Hive numbers have dropped significantly, to now be at a sustainable level, and demand for our product is still growing,” Annabell says.
“We shouldn’t over-estimate the glut. With the reduction in hive numbers, we think it will balance out quite nicely. A few years ago, no one thought we were going to sell through our backlog of bush honey, but within 18 months it was gone.”
At Airborne Honey, Smart says you could argue a production and supply equilibrium.
“If you assume the current estimated 580,000 hives produce an average of 25kg of honey per hive, that totals 14,500 tonnes. Estimated export sales for 2024 are 10,000 tonnes and New Zealand supermarket sales are estimated to be 3,000, including retail sales not captured by Nielsen and the non-recorded bulk honey and gate sales,” Smart says.
Working Through It
Regardless of its value, the existing inventory over and above what needs to be held will have to go somewhere. Any honey remaining unsold from the bumper 2020 season would now be in its fifth year off the hive. That’s at least two years longer than mānuka honey is typically aged to maximise its value, and with it comes the risk of its less desirable traits – principally HMF – outweighing the well-known benefits of an “active” mānuka honey.
More recently harvested mānuka honey is fetching higher prices to the producer than honey stored for multiple years, but with a similar rating, Goodwin explains.
“You need to freshen it up. If it was a year or two old you could do it one-to-one with a fresh drum. Now, you might be using two or three fresh ones. That comes at a cost. So, you are seeing very low prices for some of the old stuff. There has to be a realisation for some people who are sitting on older honey that, very soon, some of it will be unsaleable,” he says.
If it is sent offshore in bulk, Goodwin is concerned it could pose a risk to the reputation of the New Zealand mānuka honey industry if it doesn’t present to consumers as a high-quality product.
“Artificial demand led to an oversupply. We are back in equilibrium now, but there is still a hang-over. Is it two years’ worth? Two and a half? Three? Not sure, the bigger question is, what to do with it? Ultimately, that is an issue we all have to resolve. It can’t be left sitting in beekeepers’ sheds. It has to be pulled through, blended and moved, in a way that is – hopefully – responsible,” Goodwin says.
Finding the Light Switch
If beekeepers had greater and more timely visibility of how much honey, and what type of honey, the industry was producing over the last 10 years, would they have been able to make better business decisions? ApiNZ believe so, and say beekeepers have told them there is a desire for this data.
The voluntary industry body has plans to implement a compulsory levy on mānuka honey exports, and one of the benefits would be a greater ability to collect and distribute information Edmonds says.
“Levy-funded industry good organisations do a much better job at producing their own data reports, such as DairyNZ, Beef & Lamb and New Zealand Avocado, or helping fund MPI expertise in this field to deliver meaningful data like NZ Winegrowers and Kiwifruit NZ. There are also other private initiatives that do this work on behalf of paying sector participants, and the forestry and wool industries tap into this,” Edmonds says.
ApiNZ has funding from MPI’s SFFF fund which they are using at present to advance their Honey Industry Strategy project. Part of that includes a commitment to exploring what data could be delivered that exceeds, in quality and frequency, that which is currently being generated.
“Once that is clear, the next step will involve understanding the willingness of relevant operators to participate, by submitting their own data. Issues of anonymity, trust and reliability will obviously be important to work through,” Edmonds says, adding “In the first instance, however, we need to make sure the kind of data and information we would look to collate is what beekeepers want and would value.”
In other words, is turning the light on going to be worth the power bill?
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