Mānuka honey pioneer Phil Caskey is largely removed from the industry these days. While still holding a non-controlling ownership share of New Zealand Mānuka Group he is no longer involved in day-to-day operations. Caskey has previously built mānuka honey businesses from the ground up though, and is disappointed to see an industry built around a unique and once-prized honey, now in crisis. He’s confident there’s a way out though, and New Zealand land owners, beekeepers, and honey packers have the vehicle to realise mānuka honey’s full value in their grasp – the Unique Mānuka Factor. He shares his vision for a better UMF™ brand and a better mānuka honey industry.
By Phil Caskey
Having been involved with New Zealand’s mānuka honey industry since it first gained traction in the mid-1990s, while not surprised, I am deeply saddened by what has become of it. The mānuka honey industry had so much potential for New Zealand based on the plant with a Māori name which then Associate Professor at the University of Waikato Dr Peter Molan made famous through his passion and determination. After identifying its ‘Unique Mānuka Factor’ in the 1980s, there arose a unique product and brand opportunity with huge potential for New Zealand, its apiarists and marginal land farmers.
The Early Years
I first met Dr Molan in the early 1990s, when we began trying to take mānuka honey to the market. My wife Sharan and I, and other early industry participants including Bill Floyd, Bill and Margret Bennet, Bruce and Barb Stevenson, John Rawcliffe, Richard and Moira Haddrell, Malcolm Haines, John and Cushla Gavin, et al. found his passion for his findings about mānuka contagious. We collectively set about carving out a credible reputation in the global market place for what was a very credible product.
Sharan and Dr Young Mee Yoon, who was then food science manager of Bee & Herbal Limited, were responsible for taking mānuka honey from food grade, to the first New Zealand honey to achieve medical device status. They worked tirelessly to develop the Good Management Practices (GMP) quality control system and become the first honey plant to gain GMP status as a medical device manufacturing facility. We went on to form a 50/50 joint venture medical honey company together with the University of Waikato called Apimed Medical Honey. This company later partnered with Brightwake in the UK and worked to establish patented mānuka honey wound dressings into medical markets around the world.
10+ or Bust
From the get go, Peter Molan was very specific that only honey with a UMF factor of 10 and above could truly be considered to have credible health benefits. He documented this in his early publications and reviews.
This focus and intent served the industry well and in the early 2000s an outbreak of the infection MRSA in the Waikato Hospital was the catalyst that put UMF mānuka honey on the map. Julie Betts, the then head nurse of the hospital’s surgical ward, used high UMF™ honey supplied by us to help rid the ward of this superbug infection.
In 2003, at Bee & Herbal Limited we were exporting around 80% of New Zealand’s mānuka honey and were struggling to fund the business growth. Then Comvita helped drive the mānuka industry and the mānuka and UMF™ brands when they purchased our mānuka honey business. In 2004 they publicly listed the merged businesses under Comvita Ltd., which would go on to become the world’s leading advocate for UMF™ mānuka honey.
Prices Soar and Confusion Reigns
With mānuka honey prices rising from $2/kg to the beekeeper, to $15/kg in five just years, the booming industry soon attracted those that would take advantage of the credible status the UMF™ brand had achieved.
In order to capitalise on the opportunity Dr Molan and others had created, the first problem to overcome was how to create enough supply volume to meet perceived market growth potential. With tight controls around how the UMF™ brand could be used and a strong scientifically supported emphasis on only the higher UMF honeys, an obvious direction was to confuse an uneducated consumer market with branding and numbers – enter NPA, PA, MGS, K Factor and MGO.
With no brand use controls over these acronyms, it was open slather on what could be presented to the consumers as genuine mānuka honey, and full advantage was taken by some marketers and traders. Consumers became confused and soon the term “mānuka fraud” was being bandied about in the market place.
Cracking the China Market and Filling the Lines
There was a worrying perception that the market opportunities for mānuka honey were a bottomless pit and this was supported by the seemingly endless demand coming out of China. In truth, the so-called China market was a complex and deceiving product-demand conundrum. While China is indeed a huge market, the reality is that honey is a low-cost staple item in China and in the early 2010s, when the China market started to take off, the Chinese consumer was paying the equivalent of around $1NZD for a jar of Chinese honey. Gift giving is an important part of the culture though and mānuka grew its popularity in China from not just its credible health properties, but also in the holiday gift-market, which boosted sales.
Line filling – filling the supply chain infrastructure for products from supplier to consumer – became the biggest driver for sales into China through this period and, while huge in China’s case, this was always going to be a comparatively short window for growth.
To put this in perspective, in New Zealand there are about 73 Health 2000 stores and around 330 Unichem and Life Pharmacies, while in China several of the large pharmacy and health chains exceed 3000 stores each with state owned Sinopharm having a network of 10,000 drug stores. When you look at the volume of product and sheer scale of logistics and timeframes required to physically produce, ship, transport and supply products to every store, then fill the storeroom and all the companies’ warehouses and provincial distribution centres, plus containers in transit and in port, you get an idea of the volume and timelines it takes just to get product on the shelf of every store throughout China. That is before any product can actually be sold to the consumers. To help highlight this, the first major order we had to a significant new customer in China in 2011 was 200 tonne, and that only put a few jars into each of their key stores in a 3000 store chain.
Once all of these supply lines were filled, which took several years to achieve, further sales into that market were totally dependent on consumer uptake. In China’s case this mostly relied on gift season sales. However, when this was not enough to continue to support the volumes of production that had been created to fill the supply chain, a squeeze on these markets was created.
Another phenomenon created by the China market was the supposed coincidental boom in both the New Zealand and Australia markets, which ironically were both largely driven by Chinese nationals buying mānuka honey in New Zealand and Australia and sending it, via mail, to China. Efforts by China to slow this trade have been effective, thus reducing domestic honey sales.
Confusion Reigns
When the New Zealand Government first introduced its new standards for mānuka honey in 2016 the original draft criteria that was set genuinely identified mānuka honey as a monofloral variety of some significance in the market place and only mānuka honey with higher UMF ratings would qualify. Markets we were communicating with at the time were very supportive of this, as it showed government supported integrity for the product.
Unfortunately, this did not fit the mānuka honey profile that a number of marketers had established in the markets where multifloral honey was being branded as mānuka and lower grades of NPA (non-peroxide activity) or MGO (methylglyoxal) were being promoted to consumers as the real deal mānuka. Lobbying and legal pressure convinced the government to change the new standards to include a multifloral grade for mānuka.
Marketers were quick to take advantage of this with advertising and labels where the prominent descriptive brand on labels is MĀNUKA and the classification brand “multifloral” is much less defined. The average consumer, who is unaware of the discernible difference between mono and multifloral, and was already confused with the multiple acronyms being used to describe the strength of mānuka honey, is understandably misdirected when confronted with an MGO 40+ MĀNUKA multifloral versus a UMF™ 10+ MĀNUKA mono floral. The perception is that they are buying a genuine higher grade of Mānuka when they buy the 40+ option.
The net result of this has been a flood of the more affordable so called MĀNUKA Multifloral honey into the market and the blending of multifloral honeys has become a major part of the value-add process. This means margins are much higher for the traders, and volumes of mānuka honey available to the market are significantly higher than the current market can absorb. Therefore, the market for the higher grades of mānuka honey will continue to struggle, unless either we move back to a mono-floral only grading for mānuka honey or, as a minimum, we regulate the labelling to highlight the difference between the genuine monofloral mānuka and the less credible multifloral mānuka.
Taking Back Control
Therefore, I think we should change the focus slightly from chasing the elusive and costly rainbow that is in trying to protect the brand name ‘mānuka honey’, which seems to be struggling to get traction in many markets. We have already largely destroyed the credibility of that as a quality brand with consumers, with what is essentially the pretend or ‘wannabee’ mānuka, aka multifloral mānuka honey.
The industry already owns a credible and long-established brand that signifies quality in genuine mānuka honey – UMF™. We should be using this as a phoenix that rises above the ashes of what was once a very real opportunity for a unique New Zealand product that one man, Dr Peter Molan, had an intense vision for. He spent much of his life dedicated to promoting the genuine active quality that lay within that truly unique New Zealand product. Now, for all intents and purposes, that has been forgotten because marketers realised it was not in their best interests to promote a scientist or his science when it did not support the multifloral mānuka angle that they were using to create super profits from cheaper honeys.
A Full Rebrand
It’s not just a simple matter of rebranding that’s required, we actually need to completely redefine the genuine UMF™ product itself and distance it from some of the negative stigma attached to cheap multifloral mānuka honey. A full rebrand, calling it UMF Mānuka Honey, as was originally intended by Dr Peter Molan.
It will take a quantum shift of industry supported focus to reposition UMF from its current status as a simple quality mark, into a strong product brand recognised globally as a symbol for its guaranteed product authenticity and genuine quality. It is already New Zealand and industry owned and is a well-established, registered brand in all of our major markets.
There needs to be a focused and determined long-term strategy by those in industry who own the forests and work with commercial apiarists who can constantly supply the higher ranges (UMF 10 and above) to reposition the credible aspects of UMF Mānuka Honey back into the market place.
It will need to be a well-funded programme focusing on re-educating consumers and markets to what actually UMF Mānuka Honey represents. Labels should incorporate the three letters ‘UMF’ as the dominant part of labels and branding. Under that, ‘Monofloral Mānuka’ could serve as a product identifier, with the marketer’s brand at the top. This would allow the UMF to take prominence, rather than as a small and simple so-called quality mark that currently distinguishes the UMF brand. There are many creative ways of achieving this through the modern design process, including a “watermark” style use of UMF, such as in the mock-up design above.
Making it Happen
The extended reach we now have with global digital marketing platforms and social media through influencers can mean instant success for standout products. Monofloral, high UMF Mānuka Honey certainly has the attention-grabbing credibility, combined with a strong and largely untold backstory, to justify some significant attention in the market place – if presented and marketed correctly with full industry support.
As has previously happened, the whole New Zealand honey industry would inevitably benefit from this new profile and ride on its coattails. Our near neighbours would need to start from scratch and invent their own claim-to-fame story, as this is exclusively our own story/brand and has been a good 35 years in the making.
This could initially be funded by introduced capital from licence holders and then from sales levies. If a Co-op structure (which has some strong merit) were to be adopted, then work could also be funded by capital injection from suppliers and landowners as stakeholders.
As has already been established globally, there is a direct correlation between the success of one high profile honey in world markets (mānuka) and the reflected value add rub off impact on all New Zealand honeys. However, this has been diminished by the depreciation of the value of mānuka honey in the eyes of the consumer by the introduction of the low-cost alternative ‘multifloral’. Adding to this is the deliberate blurring of the lines between the tangible health benefits of using genuine high UMF mānuka honey, and the low-MGO multifloral mānuka honeys being marketed by some as the real deal.
There is still room for all honeys and everyone in the industry and, while multifloral mānuka has earned a place at the breakfast table, we should not allow the marketing of this to signify that it is comparable to UMF 10 or higher mānuka honeys, which would carry the UMF™ Mānuka Honey brand. I remind you that, in the early works conducted by Dr Molan he was a strong advocate for only honey with a UMF 10 or greater to be used with the UMF™ logo, because all of the genuine science around bacteria control for internal and external use was based on these higher levels of UMF.
Examples to Follow
In this fast-paced world of changing product options there are many examples of well-established food brands that have successfully rebranded themselves to stay relevant in the modern world. These include Pepsi, McDonalds, Starbucks and Burger King, and none of these have the credible back and front health product stories we have with UMF Mānuka Honey.
The fast-paced global market is largely being driven by the growth in e-commerce trade, which was just 1.3trillion USD in 2014 and grew to 5.7trillion USD in 2023. The upside of a small world, media-based, marketing platform is the speed and global market reach that a genuine product with a great story can travel when it captures the attention of the market.
While it won’t necessarily be a five-minute quick fix, the higher grades of UMF™ mānuka honey are still a very genuine product with significant health benefits and very strong, largely untold, back story. Given time, positive repositioning, a dedicated and well supported industry commitment, it could again make genuine UMF™ mānuka honey the industry and New Zealand flagship success story it once was.
Isn’t that what we should be aiming for?
Share your thoughts on the future of mānuka honey – email editor@apiadvocate.co.nz
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