The Story

Most of what’s sold as “honey” in supermarkets is anything but.

Why?

For simplicity, supermarket honey can be split into two groups.

The first is cheap imports, often from China: anonymised, blended, sometimes laced with additives, and produced at industrial scale. It is engineered for consistency and shelf life and not flavour, origin, or integrity. It could just as well be called golden syrup; the difference is largely semantic.

The second group is more natural (and more pricey) honey from large local producers. But even here, the problem remains. Most consumers expect honey to be permanently runny. To meet this expectation and satisfy large retail chains, even sizeable local producers often fine-filter their honey. In doing so, they remove pollen — the natural fingerprint that links honey to a specific place, season, and floral source.

Honey stripped of pollen loses its identity. Without pollen, honey can no longer be meaningfully traced to a landscape or forage. It also loses many of its naturally occurring bioactive compounds, including those believed to contribute to honey’s traditional use in supporting seasonal allergy tolerance.

At Natives, we believe in honey that is true to its name: produced by bees, rooted in land, and never stripped of pollen.

Honey of Land

You don’t need to be a honey expert to notice that flavour changes with land - with flowers, soil, light, and weather.

Yet unlike wine or cheese, honey is rarely allowed its terroir moment.

We’re here to change that.

Every jar we sell comes from a known beekeeper, a known place, and a known season.

We celebrate both the complexity of honey and the people who produce it. That’s why we feature the beekeeper on every jar. Through our YouTube films, we take you into their landscapes and apiaries, giving you the chance to build your own honey map: a personal ranking of flavours, stories, and places.

As a member of the Honey Guild UK, we believe honey should tell the story of a land.

Natives is here to help you taste it.

From the founder

In the 1990s, I spent summer nights sleeping under the stars near my grandfather’s hives — riding my dad’s old bicycle and tasting honey that changed month by month.

Those summers ended, but the memory never did.

Years later, in Scotland, through documentary filmmaking and close ties with the local beekeeping community, the scent of honey came back into focus.

And with it, Natives was born.