Record breaker: True Honey produces highest grade mānuka honey recorded

Helicopters are deployed to drop the hives into secret locations.

Jim McMillan says there are a lot of smart people within his company and without them, he wouldn’t be where he is today.

But what’s so special about Jim’s company True Honey Co?

True Honey Co founder and CEO Jim McMillan.

Just that it has broken a record for harvesting a mānuka honey that has the highest grade ever documented.

The Rare Harvest 2050 MGO was tested by independent verifiers, the UMF™ (Unique Mānuka Factor) Honey Association which confirmed the honey’s position as the highest UMF™ manuka honey in world history.

Association acting chief executive Campbell Naish says seeing the Rare Harvest achieve the grade came as little surprise.

Each jar of The True Honey Co’s Rare Harvest 2050 MGO comes with its own drizzler.

The association conducts up to 3000 batch tests each year, under more than 200 brands.

MGO is methylglyoxal, a sugar molecule that has special health properties and usually found in most table honey in small quantities.

Jim says the team at True Honey is “pretty chuffed” at what they’ve been able to achieve.

Around New Zealand, there are up to 5000 beekeepers or beekeeping companies around the country and he’s proud that a little Dannevirke company has been able to make the highest grade mānuka honey.

True Honey started about 10 years ago, with Jim’s story being well-documented on the website, and has progressed from there.

Jim says the honey industry has been through a number of changes over the last few years, which he says was lucrative from a production perspective.

“Demand was really high, prices were strong.”

A lot of new participants were attracted to the industry due to low barriers for entry, but what that did was create a bit of oversupply. “Not of high-grade honey, but sort of the mid-grade mānuka honeys.”

True Honey has been working to grow the range of products, as well as the markets internationally they were selling into.

The mānuka honey is produced from locations all around the North Island and Jim says from a risk perspective, he likes to have a bit of a geographical spread.

Last year, with the poor weather on the north and east coasts and extreme weather events at the critical time for honey production, it was good to have a bit of a spread around the country, he says.

Jim says he is “super proud” of the team that has been “extremely committed” to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

He says the team has mastered the art of producing and maturing the gift from nature and has treated it in such a way as to give it “the mana it deserves”.

Jim and his team partner with landowners who have large stands of pristine mānuka on their properties.

As most of them are remote, Jim deploys helicopters to drop the hives into their top-secret locations, where they stay for the duration of the mānuka flowering season before being lifted out.

“It’s a precision operation,” he says. “Using helicopters means we can place our hives in the middle of remote dense stands of mānuka – places roads don’t reach – ensuring only the absolute purest mānuka nectar is sourced.”

Now that Jim and his team have achieved this, his next goal is to build the company into a global health and wellness business.

He says he wants to play a role in trying to build the industry, seeing what he can do to produce the highest quality and lift the whole mānuka honey industry, giving customers confidence around the authenticity of the product.

Leanne Warr became editor of the Bush Telegraph in June 2023 and has been a journalist on and off since 1996 when she joined the Levin Chronicle, before moving on to other publications. She re-joined NZME in June 2021.