BOGANSKY,RONALD J. wrote:


...I think some folks will buy honey strictly by price alone, others
>will spend more money for specialty or local products.  The trick is to
>educate the consumer on the difference and then allow them to choose.  An
>uninformed consumer, that thinks all honey is the same, is probably one of
>our biggest problems.

Ron, your point is well taken.  But I have found that honey packers have
different priorities.  One packer I sold to last year explained to me that
from his point of view, providing specialty honeys to the general public
hurt his overall sales.  When a particularly good variety was marketed,
such as California sage, purchasers liked it so well that it became a
"sale blocker"--his term.  The next time they looked for honey on the shelf,
if they couldn't find the same variety, they wouldn't purchase any at all.
Sage doesn't produce every year, so his point was that for every jar of
varietal honey he sold today, he didn't sell one tomorrow.  His solution
is to blend and sell only the American standards:  Yellow honey,
or Brown honey.

Interestingly, his other example of a sale blocker was a jar of honey that
tasted so bad that the buyer couldn't finish it, but wouldn't buy any
more because "he still had a jar of honey in the cupboard..."

This packer saw consumer education about honey as not being in his own
best interests.  His priorities regarding informing the consumer were
very different from those of a beekeeper, or at least this one.

Kevin Roberts
California