Selling Honey

If you decide to sell your honey, there are several ways to do so. The way you choose to sell your honey depends on how much honey you have, the time and effort you want to spend selling it and how much profit you want to make.

1. Bulk Sales- the easiest way to sell your honey is to put it in buckets. Then sell it to someone who buys honey in large amounts. At the time this book was written, the Solomon Islands Honey Cooperative and the Bulk Food Stores in Honiara were buying honey this way. You will have to pay the cost of transporting the honey to Honiara. It is less work to sell your honey in large buckets. You usually get a lower price for it than if you packaged it yourself in small bottles. If you choose to bottle your honey yourself, you will have to buy the bottles and this is an expense.

2. Shops and trade stores – If you package your honey in small jars or bottles you can sometimes sell these bottles to shops in town. You should always buy new bottles to use. You should make a label for your honey that has your name or the name of your honey business on it. It should also tell people how much honey is in the jar. Honey is usually sold by weight not volume, so you need to know how many grams of honey are in the jars. If you know how many millilitres your jar contains you can find out how much honey in grams will fit inside. Honey is heavier than water so multiply the volume x 1.5 to get the weight.

Usually you have to pay to transport your honey to the shop. After the people who own the shops buy your honey from you, they will then sell the honey to their customers. Usually the shop owner will give you a lower price for your honey than he or she resells it for. Charging the higher reselling price is how the shopkeeper makes money.

Activity: Honey Calculation:

Use the information you learn in the lesson to make the following calculations:

If the honey coop pays $10 per kilogram of honey, how much will the coop pay for a 20 litre pail of honey? Remember that honey is heavier than water.
REMEMBER: 1 litre of water (volume) = 1 kilogram

1 litre of honey (volume) = 1.5 kilograms (1.5 X the volume)
If you want to put your honey into jars to sell it, how many 250 millilitre jars can you fill with 20 litres of honey? (note: a 250ml jar holds a little more than a small Schrepps bottle)
REMEMBER: 1 litre= 1000ml= 4 X 250ml

Local Market – Another way to sell your honey is to take it to the market. You will have to pay transport costs and perhaps a market fee. Again, you must put the honey in small jars to sell it to individual customers, but you get to choose how much to charge for the bottles. You keep all the money. This may be the way you make the most money with your honey. This method also costs you the most time and money. If you are producing a lot of honey you may not be able to sell all of your honey this way.

Village (Farm Gate) – You may decide to sell your honey in your village at your house. You will not have transport costs, but perhaps you will not be able to charge as much for each container as you would in the market.

Of course you may decide to keep all the honey for your family to eat. Or you may decide to trade your honey with people for other goods. What you do with your honey will depend on how much honey you have, and how much time and work you want to put into packaging and selling it.

Activity: Drawing Activity

Design a label to put on the bottled jars of honey. Think about how the label on your honey may have to change depending on where it is sold. (Bulk honey may only need your name so the purchaser knows where to send the cheque. Honey to be sold at shops in small jars may need a colourful fancy label to attract the customer’s attention).