CONSUMER
Show me the honey – Nature Nate’s arrives in Australia Nathan Sheets has spent almost two decades building his brand with a philosophy that it isn’t just about the bottom line. Food & Beverage Industry News explains. Making honey started out as a hobby for Nathan Sheets. Now it is his full-time job.
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urning your hobby into a full time job would be a dream for many people. And turning that dream into a multi-million dollar business would be like winning the lottery. You could argue that is what happened to Nathan Sheets, the CEO of Nature Nate’s Honey Co., a US-based company that produces raw and unfiltered honey. Now, Sheets is making a foray into the Australian market. “When I got married in 1996, my wife Patty said we needed a hobby,” said Sheets. “She was thinking gardening or antiques, but I was thinking bees. We started keeping one hive in my parents’ backyard because we lived in an apartment. I would also go and help the guy who I got the hive from with his 100 beehives on the weekends. He had started a honey company in 1972 – the North Dallas Honey Company – which would eventually become
Nature Nate’s. I then started getting up at 4am to help distribute his honey because he had cancer and needed help delivering to the 20 stores that stocked his product. “Then I started going down to his house and helped bottle the honey. In 1997, I took over the business.” However, Sheets wasn’t ready to go full time just yet. He decided to take up an offer to become a missionary and spent the next 12 years visiting 88 countries doing this work. He sees this time as formative in terms of how he wanted to run the company he now owns. In 2010, he went full time so that now, nine years later, he has more than 85 full-time staff at the company’s headquarters based just north of Dallas, Texas. Like any business, in order to grow, the company needed to expand. Australia was always going to be on Sheets’ radar. “I chose Australia because we had
24 Food&Beverage Industry News | November 2019 | www.foodmag.com.au
some relationships with people down here,” he said. “That opened up the door for us. Personally, I’ve always loved Australia. I’ve always been fascinated with Australia and I love to fish, and you guys have great fishing.”
Australian standards Nature Nate’s has teamed up with Woolworths to launch the product in Australia. How did he find the local market compared to the US? “Australian standards and regulations are pretty similar to what we have in the US,” he said. “I have found that the actual honey in Australia to be cleaner than what we have in the US, which is awesome.” As with any foray into a new market, there are teething issues however, the overall experience has been good. Sheets noticed there is an issue with traceability. In order to deal with any suspicions or any negative impact that might occur with regard
to his products, he has been proactive in letting consumers know the provenance of Nature Nate’s honey. “There was an issue about 12 years ago in the US. I’m talking about food fraud and honey adulteration. People bringing in honey saying it is from one country but might be from another and things like that. Food fraud is so prevalent everywhere. It is in olive oil and seafood. It has been pretty significant in the honey industry,” he said. “When I started doing the honey company full time, we created a robust and uncommon food testing programme where we test 100 per cent of the honey,” he said. “We test for pollen, antibiotics, pesticides – and we do that with gold standard testing via a German lab called Intertek. We created that testing protocol, which we have brought to Australia. I think the beekeepers that we partner with in Australia have clean operations and
