Honey,’ I shrunk the formal market
Armed with a smartphone, these unorganised players market honey at 1/4th the cost of branded ones.
Chennai
Like a swarm of bees, a handful of honey vendors travel through the city, selling their wares street to street. They hawk it on their two-wheelers. Their USP is the use of aluminium vessel with a honeycomb cover. That display is to show how fresh the extract is before it is bottled. Velu, one such honey seller, gave us the economics of this seasonal trade. With not enough job opportunities at hand, the Class 12 passout took to this traditional business. Sourced from interior TN, sellers like Velu price a litre of honey for Rs 600 to well-heeled customers. Armed with a smartphone, these unorganised players market honey at 1/4th the cost of branded ones. They take pre-orders also, delivering honey to countries like Malaysia and Singapore. But, it is the by-product wax that gets sold to a major retailer in Chennai, who buys a litre of output for Rs 4,000! That is used for gold polishing and curing ailments of various kinds, Velu said.
- 15 countries together contribute 90% to global production of honey
- 19k tonnes is the rise in global demand for honey per year since 2010, primarily led by USA
- 30 lakh bee colonies produce 94.5 thousand MT of honey as per 2016-17 estimates
- China
- India
- Mexico
- USA
- Argentina
- Ukraine
- Turkey
- Russia
- In 1953 the All India Khadi & Village Industry started the work of organising the honey industry in India which was subsequently taken over by Khadi & Village Industry Commission (KVIC) in 1957
- Beekeeping supplements income from agriculture, generates employment and helps in improving nutritional intake of rural population. It provides employment to about 3 lakh citizens in rural areas.
- Value of additional yield from pollination services by honeybees alone is about 15-20 times more than the value of all hive products put together.
- More than half the honey produced, or 75-85% of apiary honey is being exported now.
- 61% Contribution of 4 States- WB, UP, Punjab and Bihar to the India’s honey production in 2015-16.
- Based on potential of production the states categorised under ‘High Potential’ are Punjab, WB, Bihar, Kerala, Karnataka, UP, TN & Uttarakhand.
- India is one of the major exporter of honey. Top destinations included USA, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Morocco, Bangladesh, Canada among others.
- In 2015-16 India exported 38.2 thousand MT of honey valued at Rs 706 crore.
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