Bee & You Wins Gold at London Honey Awards
One year ago, almost to the day, we wrote a blog post titled, “A Remarkable Woman and her Propolis Formula.”
The woman was Asli Samanci.
Last week we learned that she and her colleagues at Bee and You have won a gold medal in the quality category from the prestigious London Honey Awards Jury 2020 for their wildflower raw honey. An LHA award is a great honor, but this is far from their first award. Based in the Anatolia region of Turkey, Bee and You has won over 30 awards already in the past 6 years.
You can find our original story about her here. As both a professional career woman and a young mother whose son developed serious allergies, we followed along as she developed a solution that grew into a successful business. The amazing formulae created by her company have ensured that Bee and You has expanded into a global business in over a dozen countries with access to over 3,500 retail outlets, so people everywhere can find these precious high-purity products.
If you didn’t read our original post, take a moment to catch up on it now, it is super inspiring.
Enjoy this Bee and You video that is 2:24-minutes long:
Equally as worthy of an award is the business model Asli and her colleagues at Bee and You have created. They are strong advocates of bees and beekeepers and have created a “Contract-Based Beekeeping Model” that establishes safety rules and regulations that protect bees, beekeepers and consumers.
Here is a 12.5-minute interview with Asli from 2017. Her strategy has been unfolding in a bee-utiful way ever since.
Beekeepers who wish to partner with Bee & You must be willing to agree to and uphold strict standards, like they must never feed their bees with sugar or derivatives, and hives must be positioned a certain distance from industrial compounds.
In return, Bee & You promises to purchase their entire harvest for a fair price. A team of professional food scientists and chemists at the labs inspect the products for purity, biological activity and quality. This contract from Bee & You ensures that the honeybees are healthy, cruelty-free, and live away from harmful toxins and chemicals. It also gives full tracking and transparency over raw materials and products, like where they originated, who harvested them and under what conditions they were produced.
Sustainability is vital to Bee & You. As beekeepers themselves, they know the importance of honeybees and their role in pollination, as well as how crucial it is to keep them alive and thriving for the health of the ecosystem.
The fact that Bee & You pays fair prices to beekeepers for their harvest helps to ensure that they treat their bees humanely and don’t resort to animal cruelty for financial gain. The company only works with beekeepers who strictly comply with these standards for the sustainability of bees.
Congratulations to all of you at Bee and You for birthing this unique and potent line of bee products into the world. And thank you for creating a business model that hopefully will inspire other apiary groups around the world to set up and implement a similar structure for the greater good of all. Bee & You, we wish “you and bee” every success!