Wendell Estate Honey Debuts On Cbc Dragon’s Den

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Watch the CBC Dragons evaluate Wendell Estate Honey with its pure, unpasteurized honey.

https://wendellestate.ca/2020/03/31/wendell-estate-honey-successfully-debuts-on-cbcs-dragons-den/

Wendell Honey Farm
The Wendells’ honey farm straddles the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border near MacNutt, Saskatchewan.

The original farm site sits on the Saskatchewan side of the line. Jeremy’s grandfather, John Wendell, bought his first beehives over 80 years ago and expanded to make honey his primary source of income shortly thereafter.

“We have a time difference between one side of our farm and the other,” Jeremy Wendell told the Manitoba Co-operator.

John Wendell and his wife, Alvera, had four boys, Jeremy said. They all worked the farm together. Tim Wendell took over the farm in 1974. At the time they had about 600 hives.

Isabel Wendell is daughter of Manitoba horticulturalist Frank Leith Skinner, the farm’s website says. She grew up at her family’s nursery near Dropmore, Manitoba.

Jeremy Wendell, who received his doctor of medicine at the University of Manitoba in 2002, according ...
... to LinkedIn, worked abroad for several years before returning to work the farm. There he spends most of his time in the office, but occasionally chips in with the farm work.

The farm now has about 4,000 producing hives, Jeremy Wendell said, and produces about 1.5 million pounds (about 680,000 kilograms) of honey per year.

They sell honey in bulk, but they select the very best and jar it on farm during harvest. It goes from extraction into the jar raw, and as quickly as possible — usually the same day it’s extracted, or the next day. This is important for keeping the honey as fresh as possible, and to ensure they don’t need to heat it to make it workable, Jeremy Wendell said.

Heating the honey destroys some of the enzymes that give raw honey its health benefits, he said. Their motto is to take out nothing but wax, and to put nothing in.

The result is a premium honey product, housed in elegant Italian glass jars. It’s not cheap. One kilogram (2.2 pounds) retails for $44 on their website (for contrast, the same amount of regular, Bee Maid honey sells for about $11).

They pitch it on its quality, health benefits, and premium look, which is what they did when the company appeared on CBC’s “Dragons’ Den” in an episode airing January of 2013.

At the time, the company had just begun selling Wendell Estate premium honey. Previously it had just sold bulk.

Marketing director Martin Neuhofer, in an orange beekeeping suit, gave each of the “dragons” a jar of honey to taste.

“Oh is that awesome,” said dragon Jim Treliving, licking the honey off a spoon. Treliving ended up making Wendell Estate an offer, which it accepted.

Just appearing on the show gave the company a big boost, Neuhofer told the Brandon Sun in 2014. It boosted morale and opened doors with distributors, he said.

The London award is also not the farm’s first brush with international success. In 2019, Wendell Estate Honey took home a gold medal from the World Beekeeping Awards.