The sweet price

NZ firm breaks into Harrods with ma¯ nuka honey at $2724 for a jar

Harrods in the United Kingdom will this week start selling a jar of Kiwi honey for £1388. To save you doing the maths, that’s equivalent to $2724 per 230-gram tub of golden nectar from The True Honey company.

While there’s still a week until it’s available in Harrods, one individual has already pre-ordered 10 jars of the honey batch, which has been limited to only 1000 jars worldwide.

So what is it that makes this honey so special that the more privileged members of society are willing to drop thousands of dollars to get a taste?

Jim McMillan, founder of the True

Honey Company, says the value comes from the way the honey is harvested.

A former agriculture pilot, McMillan flies his hives into some of the most remote parts of the country where a high concentration of ma¯nuka trees leads to the production of some of the purest ma¯nuka honey in the world.

“Working across the North Island, I identified that there were large expansive areas of pristine ma¯nuka in areas that were very difficult to access with no roads or tracks,” he says.

“We’re able to put the hives right into the centre of the some of the most highly concentrated areas of ma¯nuka to limit gathering of nectar from other sources.”

McMillan says that while it might seem extreme to fly a helicopter into these areas, it’s simply the most unintrusive way to access the areas.

“You can’t access those areas with ground vehicles without carving up the countryside with big bulldozers, which is something we didn’t want to do.”

In the seven years he has operated his business, his product has regularly registered high UMF ratings (the scale of ma¯nuka purity), but the batch set to sell at Harrods caught him off guard.

The honey came in with a UMF rating of 31, which, according to UMF Honey Association spokesman John Rawcliffe, is the highest recorded accredited result since testing first began.

UMF testing focuses on identifying three chemical markers in the honey — Leptosperin, MGO and DHA — and this honey scored off the charts in each case.

McMillan describes this particular batch as a “vintage”, saying that a number of environmental factors combined to make it possible. He won’t reveal the exact location from which this batch came, but says it was a coastal location where the ma¯nuka trees were exposed.

Just as a grapevine under stress creates a better vintage, McMillan says challenging conditions in 2017 drove one single windswept, remote ma¯nuka block to produce particularly potent nectar, resulting in this harvest.

“You’ve got the locality, the management element in terms of how the hives are placed and then the seasonal element that all combined to cause the plant to stress in a particular way that produced much higher levels than we’ve seen.”

McMillan has already sold around 100 jars of the limited batch to exclusive retailers.

Kiwis with a few spare thousand

dollars lying around are able to purchase a beautifully presented hand-signed jar of this special edition honey online for a slightly more affordable $2170.

The cost of this honey may be high, but it’s far from unique in the strange world of highend food. The price of McMillan’s high-end honey is, for instance, dwarfed by the mammoth US$34,500 ($55,132) charged for a kilogram of the Almas brand of Iranian Beluga fish caviar produced from the eggs of a rare albino sturgeon. Equally outrageous is the rare black-skinned Densuke watermelon, which has previously fetched more than US$6000 ($9584) at auction.

From our perspective, we really want to play a role in building the integrity of ma¯nuka . . . Jim McMillan

McMillan says there’s more to exclusive food than simply harvesting something and selling it in a jar. He says the story behind the company and the trust in the authenticity thereof play a big role in determining whether customers are willing to pay such excessive prices for products.

“From our perspective, we really want to play a role in building the integrity of ma¯nuka not only for the True Honey Company but for all stakeholders in the industry.”

McMillan says that it’s incredibly important to ensure that the more unscrupulous operators aren’t given the opportunity to degrade the trust that’s been established in the standards created by the government.

“We’d like to play a role in educating honey lovers around the world about the importance of the definition of [ma¯nuka honey] and show them why it’s something they should really look for when purchasing honey,” he says.