Hobby to home business: Manchester Honey Company

Gareth Trehearn’s journey as a beekeeper began in 2016 when he took a course at Manchester’s Heaton Park. He had no ambition to keep bees. His interest was purely academic. This changed when he completed the course. He had to wait a further two years for an opportunity, however.

Unable to keep bees at home, he volunteered to help a beekeeper and gained valuable experience. Finally, he discovered a suitable area in a local park. Now, each of his apiaries (a collection of hives) occupies a secure area of unused or “forgotten” ground with the consent of landowners, including councils and United Utilities.

Long, hot summer

Gareth advertised his willingness to collect swarms on Facebook when lockdown made their presence unignorable. He was soon inundated with phone calls. Swarming is a natural process and passes largely unnoticed in normal circumstances. Covid, however, made the summer of 2020 anything but normal.

Clearing swarms requires expertise but shouldn’t be dangerous. Swarming bees are rarely aggressive. They have no stores to defend or eggs to protect. Rather, the workers that accompany the old queen seek only to assist her quest for a new home when a new queen is born. A hive offers them a perfect solution.

“Beekeeping books will tell you that you have to find the queen and put her into a hive, and the rest of the bees follow her in, but I can tell you that if you have a clump of 20,000 bees shaped like a rugby ball, that’s easier said than done!” Gareth says, laughing.

A family affair

People start home businesses for many different reasons. For Gareth and his wife Louise, pursuing stressful careers that reduced time with children Sam and Naomi, now aged 13 and 10, prioritising family life was the principal factor in founding Helpful Home, a successful cleaning agency that remains their principal source of income.

While planning is a feature both of Helpful Home and the Manchester Honey Company, Gareth says their growth has been organic. Helpful Home does not take on new clients during busy periods of family life, for example, and the Manchester Honey Company depends for its expansion upon the natural occurrence of swarms. To grow the business by importing bees would contradict one of its founding principles.

Stay (hyper) local

The pandemic increased Gareth’s hive count from five to 25. The sudden rise meant a sudden increase in honey. Driven by the need to reduce swarms by reducing the bees’ stores and by pressure from his wife to generate a return from a hobby now occupying increasing amounts of his time, Gareth began selling honey locally.

“We sell it via postcode. There’s M33 honey from Sale and WA15 honey from Timperley, and people really love that. They love saying, ‘I want honey from my town,‘ and I can say, ‘Well, there you go: I can tell you that this honey came from a hive in this apiary on this day,’ and they love that.”

Gareth’s emphasis on the Manchester Honey Company’s local identity extends to his colonies. He does not breed from imported queens. He says that those brought in from overseas, typically from Italy, struggle to survive the harsh British winters when temperatures and supplies of nectar and pollen are low.

Describing the product

Intellectual property is a complex area. Most home businesses are obliged to engage with it only at a superficial level. For example, Gareth has trademarked his logo: a bee shaped from hexagons and a street sign motif bearing the company name. He has copyrighted the phrase “Taste your postcode”, too.

However, he faced an unexpected challenge to his use of the phrase “raw and pure” from Trafford Council, who awarded him the Food Standards Agency’s highest food hygiene rating (five) after an inspection by an environmental health officer.

The council maintains that the phrase breaches regulations and has instructed him to remove “raw and pure” from his website and labels. However, Gareth hopes that a subsequent appeal by Odysea Ltd against the London Borough of Waltham Forest, allowed by the tribunal judge, will allow the matter to rest.

Adding value

Every company has values that codify the way it conducts business. In the worst cases, they can seem little more than airbrushing. In the best cases, they guide behaviours in every area of corporate life, from ethical supply chains to recruitment policies that create a diverse workforce.

The Manchester Honey Company can legitimately claim to be a purpose-led business. Its incremental growth from local colonies has placed principle before profit. Further, Gareth’s commitment to natural production methods makes it a truly organic enterprise. Finally, the low carbon footprint inherent to any hyperlocal business represents a clear commitment to sustainability.

“I have been approached by lots of people across the UK who want it delivered, but I have resisted that because the last thing I would want to do is make all this fantastic honey in Manchester and sell it somewhere else!” says Gareth, laughing.

Such a keen emphasis on local production and retailing has removed the need for any formal market research. Gareth’s interactions with his customers are conducted face to face. He has no need for surveys, questionnaires, polls or other mechanisms. Being awarded three stars by the Great Taste Awards in a blind tasting is about as positive as feedback comes.

Evolving the offering

Product development is an essential component of almost any business. Even established brands like Dr. Martens and McVitie’s continually evolve their products, refining classic offerings and expanding their ranges with creative twists on the original. The Manchester Honey Company has previously collaborated with a business making beauty products, but now makes its own soap.

Gareth is also considering developing mead, an alcoholic beverage whose principal constituent is honey. As with wine, the provenance of its ingredients is a key influence, a variable the Manchester Honey Company has already leveraged with its “postcoded” honey.

A further example of product development can be found in Gareth’s experiments with hive construction. His use of thicker timber has resulted in greater insulation and higher yields. A warm colony, it seems, is a productive colony.

A fair price

Many home businesses wrestle with the issue of pricing. Striking a balance between reward and competitiveness can be tricky. Costs must be covered, of course, and sufficient profit derived to justify the endeavour, but with more established competitors often enjoying economies of scale, start-ups must fight hard to establish a reasonable price.

The Manchester Honey Company has never attempted to compete on price with honey sold in supermarkets. Gareth maintains that the processes vary so widely – industrialised, in the case of major producers; artisanal, in his own case – that the products, and therefore the prices, should not be compared.

“It took quite a lot of confidence in the early days to say, ‘We’re not going to compete with supermarkets. We’re not going to sell honey at £4 a pound. We’re going to price it based on the amount we have and the price the customer is willing to pay once they know what we’re selling.’ And so, we had to build that brand first to try and convince people that it’s not just a sugary syrup that they’re buying,” Gareth explains.

“In terms of setting the price, it really is just trial and error: seeing what people will pay. This is the thing: we always sell out. I hear this from other beekeepers, ‘We’ve sold out,’ and I think, ‘Well, why aren’t you increasing your price? If you have no product to sell and people want to buy it, you could probably sell the same amount for more money.’

“The other consideration is that I don’t want to penalise people, either. I don’t want to block people from buying our honey.”

A buzzing business

The Manchester Honey Company’s future is bright. Gareth has ambitious plans for an extraction suite, a facility in which honey is removed from ‘uncapped’ frames taken from the hive, spun in a centrifuge, stored in vessels and allowed to settle before being jarred and labelled.

Critically, beekeeping remains enjoyable for Gareth. Despite a seasonal commitment of up to seven hours a day, three days a week for hive inspections, and occasional soreness, a consequence of lifting pounds of honey from nearly 200 hives, his passion remains.

Remarkably, collecting swarms has made him a social media star and generated another revenue stream for the Manchester Honey Company. Louise set up ‘creator’ accounts through which platforms like Facebook reward contributors. Their most popular video has achieved more than 20m views, generating a payment of £1200.

Gareth refers proudly to studies that show beekeepers enjoying the greatest job satisfaction and living longer than workers in any other manual job. Further, the Manchester Honey Company, established as a hobby and expanded as a side hustle to Helpful Home, already covers its costs and is set to become profitable. It is not only Gareth’s bees who are buzzing.