Food In Canada Features Wendell Estate

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Food in Canada features Wendell Estate. A good way for a company to differentiate itself in any market is to produce a premium product. But because so many others may have the same idea — or follow your company’s lead — you have to market your premium product with care, and keep at it.

https://wendellestate.ca/2020/03/12/food-in-canada-features-wendell-estate/

How Wendell Estate Honey is marketing its premium Canadian honey to consumers at home and abroad

A good way for a company to differentiate itself in any market is to produce a premium product. But because so many others may have the same idea — or follow your company’s lead — you have to market your premium product with care, and keep at it.

Wendell Estate Honey in Roblin, Man. has accomplished this feat in Canada and around the world, even in the ultra-competitive Chinese market. The family-run business began in the early 1940s with John Wendell, who founded Wendell Honey. Over the years, he grew the farm business and sold in local markets. Now, the farm property houses over 3,500 beehives. In charge of all this humming activity ...
... is and John and Alvera’s son Tim and his wife Isabel. In turn, their sons Jeremy (along with his wife Carol) and Nathan are responsible for business development and production and sales, respectively.

It was a little before 2011 that Tim and Isabel, along with Martin Neuhofer (their honey house manager at the time), got to thinking about the lack of raw “from the farm” honey readily available on the market. Every year, they had dedicated customers stopping by to pick it up, so the demand was there. The three of them thought about how this honey could be marketed to the general public, explains Jeremy, “so that people who lacked convenient access to a trusted local honey producer could still enjoy genuine fresh farm honey.” Wendell also still sells its regular honey as well.

They marketed their very finest raw product in 2011 as a premium brand called Wendell Estate Honey. It’s now sold in Canada, the U.S. and several Asian countries, enclosed in high-end imported European glass jars of various sizes (and in 2016, they also added one kilogram plastic tubs to the lineup for big fans). In late 2018, the business also launched Wendell Estate Organic Honey, sourced from a remote partner farm in northern Saskatchewan.

“Sales have been better than expected,” Jeremy Wendell said. “Genuine organic honey is a rare find. Bees forage… easily travelling three kilometres to reach a good nectar source. Regardless of beekeeping practices, if any farmer seeds any of the crops proscribed by the Canadian Organic Regime within three kilometres of the beehives, the honey… does not qualify as organic.”

China adventures

For its hard-earned success in China, where fraudulent white honey abounds, Wendell Estate Honey recently won a Jury’s Choice Alizé Award (formerly the Canadian Export Business of the Year Awards). At first, moving into that market was pretty much effortless.

“The market was already there waiting, and we just provided a quality product that wasn’t yet available,” Wendell explains. “China has a deep food culture and specifically a strong honey culture. Many Chinese people drink honey in warm water daily as a health supplement, and [many] are sophisticated honey consumers. Even in a smaller, lower-price supermarket chain in China, you’ll see 20 varieties of honey on the shelf. Our honey has a fresh, delicate taste and uniquely smooth texture, which appeals to the sophisticated Chinese palate.”

In addition to meeting demand for high quality, Wendell Estate Honey also addressed a demand among Chinese consumers for authenticity and traceability. Adulterated or downright fake food products abound in China, and sometimes, beekeeping practices in China and elsewhere, says Wendell, can involve giving sugar syrup to bees and the use of banned antibiotics. This honey is often exported as well; in early July this year, surveillance by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) prevented adulterated honey of unspecified origin, valued at close to $77,000, from entering the Canadian market. Wendell says the fact that he and his family members are involved in the entire beekeeping and honey production and packaging process is a “huge” selling point.

“Our own marketing efforts, and those of our retail partners, really stress the fact that our honey all comes from our farm,” he says, “and that there is no opportunity for any third party to adulterate the honey.” He adds that Canada’s “thorough and well-respected regulatory environment add to the reputation of Canadian honeys as being pure, authentic and safe.”

In addition, their traceability is top-notch. All product can be traced by date of packaging and back to the individual apiaries (bee yards) it hailed from. “That gives us some idea of the ‘floral composition’ of the honey,” Wendell says. “When pushed for a floral description, I like to call it ‘prairie blossom,’ which will include clover, canola, alfalfa and lesser amounts of whatever pasture and wild-flowers that happen to be in blossom.”

Traceability, food safety, quality and health benefits have all been important in marketing Wendell Estate Honey in China, but in Japan for example, it’s a little different. There, Wendell explains, “we shift the emphasis more to our family’s 80-year-plus experience and the unique flavour and texture. Each market is completely different. It is interesting to learn about the honey culture in each new market (South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore) and to work on tweaking our marketing to suit the local culture while retaining our core values and brand image.”