We got into the laboratory business by accident
For the first six years we did what most Chinese honey traders do: buy from consolidators, blend to a colour, ship, and hope. It worked until 2012, when a container of what we had bought as pure vitex came back positive for C4 sugar at a customer's lab in Hamburg. We took the loss, refunded the customer and spent nine months working out how it had happened.
The answer was that we had no idea where our honey actually came from. Three intermediaries stood between us and the hive, and each of them had a reason not to tell us. So we stopped buying from consolidators. We went out to the apiaries, signed direct annual contracts with beekeepers, and — because contracts alone prove nothing — we bought an HPLC and learned to run it ourselves.
That is the whole company, really. Direct contracts so we know whose honey it is, and our own instruments so we can prove it. Everything else — the drumming line, the organic programme, the four regional desks — was built on top of those two decisions.
How the company was built
Founded in Hangzhou
Two staff, one customer, one variety. First container of acacia honey ships to Bremen in October.
First direct apiary contracts
Forty beekeepers in Henan sign annual supply agreements, cutting out the consolidator layer for acacia.
The Hamburg lot
A C4 sugar failure at a customer's laboratory triggers a full rebuild of how the company sources and tests.
In-house laboratory opens
HPLC and GC installed. Every incoming lot screened before purchase — a policy that has not changed since.
Processing plant commissioned
Own drumming and filtration line in Xiaoshan. Capacity 6,000 MT. ISO 22000 certified within the first year.
Organic programme certified
EU and NOP certification for reserve-sited apiaries in Heilongjiang and Jilin. First organic linden ships in 2018.
LC-MS-MS residue capability
The 600-compound multi-residue panel comes in-house, ending the four-week wait on third-party screening.
BRCGS grade AA
Unannounced audit passed at the top grade, opening UK and Irish retail programmes.
Capacity to 20,000 MT
Second plant and 6,000 MT of temperature-controlled tank storage. Retail OEM jarring line added.
Lot-level digital traceability
Every drum's QR code now resolves to its apiary, beekeeper, harvest date and full certificate of analysis.
2,400 apiaries, seven production belts
Chinese honey is a migratory business: the same beekeepers follow the bloom north from Guangdong in March to Heilongjiang in July. We contract them for the season rather than buying spot at each stop.
Yellow River locust belt
Henan · Shaanxi · Shandong · Hebei
Acacia. 620 contracted apiaries. A two-week bloom in mid-May that decides our largest line for the whole year.
Northern mountain scrub
Hebei · Shanxi · Beijing districts
Vitex. 480 apiaries. A long six-to-eight-week flow, which is what makes vitex our most contract-stable variety.
Northeast forest
Heilongjiang · Jilin
Linden and organic. 310 apiaries inside nature reserve and state forest land, with no conventional agriculture in range.
Date orchard belt
Henan · Shanxi · Xinjiang
Jujube. 290 apiaries working orchard blocks under agreement with the growers' cooperatives.
Northwest field crops
Inner Mongolia · Xinjiang · Gansu
Sunflower and buckwheat. 380 apiaries on contract plantings, with spray schedules agreed in writing before the bloom.
Yangtze rapeseed basin
Hubei · Hunan · Jiangsu · Anhui · Sichuan
Rapeseed. 240 apiaries on the season's opening flow, from late February through April.
Subtropical south
Guangdong · Guangxi · Fujian · Hainan
Longan. 80 apiaries on a short March bloom, bought through orchard cooperatives we have worked with since 2011. This is our tightest allocation every year.
What a contract commits us to
A guaranteed floor price before the beekeeper leaves for the flow, free veterinary advice and approved treatment products, hive equipment financing, and a written no-antibiotic protocol with unannounced apiary inspection. Roughly 70 % of our contracted beekeepers have been with us for more than five seasons.
Testing before we buy, not after you complain
Our Hangzhou laboratory runs HPLC-RID, GC-MS-MS, LC-MS-MS and EA-IRMS, staffed by fourteen analysts. Every lot offered to us is sampled and screened before a purchase order is issued — because once adulterated honey is in a tank, it is in every drum that tank fills.
QA/QC staff, including four instrument analysts.
independent checkpoints: intake, post-blend, and pre-shipment batch release.
retained reference sample for every batch shipped.
What we test for
- Authenticity — C4 sugar by AOAC 998.12, SCIRA, and NMR profiling on disputed lots
- Sugar profile — fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose and higher sugars by HPLC-RID
- Freshness — HMF and diastase activity, on every batch without exception
- Botanical origin — melissopalynology to confirm the declared monofloral claim
- Veterinary residues — chloramphenicol, nitrofurans, sulfonamides, tetracyclines, tylosin, streptomycin
- Pesticides — a 600+ compound multi-residue panel, plus glyphosate as a separate method
- Plant toxins — pyrrolizidine alkaloids, screened for all EU-destined shipments
- Contaminants — lead, cadmium, arsenic, and yeast and mould counts
Where the honey gets rejected
In 2025 we screened 3,180 incoming lots and turned away 381 of them. The reasons matter more than the number, because they show what is actually going wrong in the supply base:
| Rejection reason | Share |
|---|---|
| C4 sugar above 7 % | 34 % |
| Sulfonamide or tetracycline traces | 23 % |
| Moisture above contract limit | 18 % |
| HMF from over-heating | 11 % |
| Pollen inconsistent with declared variety | 9 % |
| Other (pesticide, sensory, foreign matter) | 5 % |
What happens between the drum and the container
Honey is easy to ruin with heat. Our line is designed around keeping HMF low and diastase high, which mostly means being patient.
Intake & segregation
Each beekeeper's delivery is sampled, numbered and held in quarantine. Nothing is combined until the analysis is back.
Gentle liquefaction
Warm-room liquefaction at 38–42 °C over 24–36 hours. No flash heating, no plate heat exchangers running hot.
Blending to specification
Lab-scale trial first, approved against the retained reference, then scaled to the production tank and re-verified.
Filtration
Coarse screen, then 200 µm filtration to remove wax and debris. Pollen is retained — we do not ultra-filter.
Vacuum moisture control
Applied only where the natural moisture exceeds the contract limit, under vacuum at low temperature.
Batch release
Full analysis against the contract spec. A batch that misses on any parameter goes back, not out.
Drumming & coding
New lacquer-lined drums, nitrogen-flushed headspace on request, QR-coded to the lot record.
Loading
Photographed drum by drum, container seal number recorded, images sent with the shipping documents.
The supply base is 2,400 families
Migratory beekeeping in China is hard, badly paid and ageing out. The average contracted beekeeper in our network is 54. If that number keeps climbing, there is no honey to export in fifteen years, whatever our certificates say.
So the beekeeper programme is not corporate social responsibility for us, it is supply security. It costs us roughly 4 % of gross margin annually, and we consider it the cheapest insurance we buy.
- Guaranteed floor price fixed before the beekeeper leaves for the season
- Payment within seven days of delivery and lab clearance — not on 90-day terms
- Interest-free financing on hives, extractors and transport
- Free veterinary advice and subsidised approved treatment products
- Annual training on residue avoidance, moisture management and record keeping
- A young-beekeeper apprenticeship placing 30 entrants a year with senior members
Certification held
All certificates are current and available on request, along with the most recent audit reports.
| Standard | Scope / body |
|---|---|
| ISO 22000:2018 | Processing & packing — SGS |
| BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9 | Grade AA, unannounced — Intertek |
| HACCP | Both plants |
| EU Organic 2018/848 | Apiculture — Ecocert |
| USDA NOP | Apiculture — CCOF |
| Halal | Islamic Assoc. of China / GSO accepted |
| Kosher | OU certified |
| US FDA | Facility registered, FSVP support |
| CIQ / GACC | Registered exporter, honey category |
Come and see the plant
Buyers are welcome at Xiaoshan any working week. We will walk you through intake, the laboratory and the drumming line, and you can pull your own samples from any tank.