More sweet success for mead guru
Work with Zambian company yields honey vinegar product for market
GRAHAMSTOWN mead guru Dr Garth Cambray is working on a Zambian project to bring honey vinegar to the market. The venture is aimed at adding further value to Forest Fruits, a company based in Mwinilunga in Zambia’s North-Western Province, which is already Africa’s biggest honey exporter.
About 7 000 rural Zambian beekeepers provide the backbone for the company, which was initiated a decade ago by Zambian-Canadian eco-entrepreneur Dan Ball.
Cambray has been working with the Forest Fruits team since the outset on the development of a honey vinegar and he returned to the Eastern Cape just before Christmas from his latest visit, with some good news.
“It should be available in about three months,” he said.
“The first target market is Saudi Arabia and thereafter the 17 different countries the company already exports to, from the US to Europe and South Africa.
“The Sadec [Southern African Development Community] countries have such a lot in common and this is one example of the cooperation we should be looking at.”
The hope was that the take-up in Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world would be substantial, linked to the Muslim emphasis on the health values of a daily dose of both honey and vinegar, Cambray said.
“The market demand for honey in the Muslim world is already huge. Related to this, however, there is the global problem of the rising prevalence of diabetes – and the sugar content in honey. With our new product, the sugar is converted via a multi-step process into vinegar, leaving only the other components of honey like antioxidants, enzymes and micro-nutrients. We’ll be the first to supply honey vinegar in commercial quantities.
“So Muslim diabetics looking to maintain their daily dose of honey and vinegar can now get both products in one.”
Forest Fruits annually exports 600 tons of its signature Zambezi Gold honey harvested from traditional bark hives as well as 30 tons of beeswax used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, organic sweets, candles and for baiting organic hives.
It also exports propolis – a natural sealant produced by the bees – which is used to combat dental disease, as an immune booster, and for healing burns and wounds.
Cambray, who has a doctorate in biotechnology from Rhodes, won the business category of the 2007 Herald Citizen of the Year for his work with Makana Meadery in Grahamstown, which he set up to produce the mead Iqhilika.
As part of that scheme, he created 200 jobs and trained up hundreds of beekeepers.
The meadery markets the honey-based alcohol to the US and Switzerland.
The new Forest Fruits product will be a cloudy vinegar rich in probiotics and free of sulphites, a preservative used in most wines that form the basis of wine vinegar. This was another benefit because of growing concern about the health effects of sulphites, he said
“The North-Western Province villagers are mind-bogglingly poor so I’m also very interested in how successful the company has been in getting so many of them involved. This new product will add value to their business.”
The possibility for large-scale production of honey and honey-based products was limited in South Africa because of drought, reducing nectar-producing plants, and theft, he said.