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Category: honey

  • Melibio’s Bee-Free Mellody Honey Makes Its Retail Debut at Eleven Madison

    Mellody honey

    2 Mins Read

    Melibio’s Mellody plant-based honey is making its direct-to-consumer debut via chef Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Home store in New York City.

    Following up from its debut at the Natural Products Expo in Anaheim, Calif., last month, Mellody will be available as part of the Eleven Madison Home’s Tea & Honey box.

    Mellody x Eleven Madison

    The collection features honey oat shortbread cookies made with Mellody honey, one jar of Mellody plant-based honey, a honey dipper, and three single-origin teas from In Pursuit of Tea: Himalayan Black, Thunderdragon Green, and Elderflower.

    The culinary team at Eleven Madison Home is also developing an infused flavor of the Mellody plant-based honey that will be released in the next month as a duo with the original flavor. 

    Eleven Madison Home brings curated vegan food boxes to Manhattan

    “We were blown away by the quality of Mellody and were excited at the possibilities of how we can incorporate it into our kitchen through recipes and products,” Eleven Madison’s Director of Operations Chef Daniel Distefano, said in a statement.

    “A plant-based diet can often be seen as limiting. This product and what we’re doing with Eleven Madison Home goes a long way to discredit that notion,” he said.

    Benefits of going bee-free

    Melibio created Mellody to provide a vegan alternative to honey but also to help protect the world’s pollinator populations. The company says its plant-based honey addresses critical environmental issues caused by the commercial honey industry.

    “Native bees are critical to food production and biodiversity conservation, but they are under increased pressure due to fierce competition from invasive European honey bees,” Melibio says.

    Mellody comes to Eleven Madison

    “Many people are unaware of the issues surrounding commercial honey production and its impact on the 4,000 native bees in the US,” said Darko Mandich, co-founder and CEO of MeliBio. “By providing restaurants and consumers with a delicious and sustainable alternative, we hope to help restore ecological harmony and make room for native pollinators.” 

    Melibio says its Mellody honey is “molecularly identical” to conventional honey, so users experience the same taste, smell, look, and texture that they’re expecting from a honey product. The vegan honey works just like conventional across applications, and is “a vegan’s best friend in terms of sweetener,” Mandich says.

    The post Melibio’s Bee-Free Mellody Honey Makes Its Retail Debut at Eleven Madison first appeared on Green Queen.

    The post Melibio’s Bee-Free Mellody Honey Makes Its Retail Debut at Eleven Madison appeared first on Green Queen.

  • Are Consumers Ready for Bee-Free Honey? MeliBio Debuts Mellody to ‘Help Restore Ecological Harmony’

    MeliBio's honey is coming to food service

    3 Mins Read

    MeliBio, one of the more recent hyped-up food tech companies to come out of the Bay Area, has released its first product: bee-free honey.

    MeliBio has been promoting its bee-free tech for several years, keeping ingredients and technology under wraps. At last week’s Natural Products Expo in Anaheim, Calif., MeliBio debuted Mellody, its first product, to a crowd of more than 65,000 attendees.

    Mellody honey

    While other companies have launched bee-free honey products made from ingredients like apples and lemons, Mellody claims to mimic the signature taste and performance of honey from bees while offering consumers a more sustainable and ethical product.

    Mellody bee-free honey is launching in food service

    The ingredients label on the new product shows fructose, glucose, and a range of plant extracts including sumac, fava d’anta, Indian trumpet flower, green coffee bean, chamomile, and seaberry, among other ingredients.

    Mellody is launching first in food service accounts, MeliBio says. The product is already available at Baia in San Francisco, Little Choc Apothecary in New York City, and Motel Fried Chicken in Philadelphia.

    “By providing restaurants and consumers with a delicious and sustainable alternative, we hope to help restore ecological harmony and make room for native pollinators,” Darko Mandich, CEO and co-founder of MeliBio, said in a statement.

    Honeybees

    According to Nielsen data, 2022 saw honey sales reach $920 million with double-digit dollar growth in the latest year. But commercial honey production faces a number of threats.

    “Many people are unaware of the issues surrounding commercial honey production and its impact on the 4,000 [species of] native bees in the U.S.,” Mandich said.

    Last year, the USDA reported that honey production declined by more than 125 million pounds — a 14 percent decline per colony. Issues affecting colony health, including the mysterious colony collapse disorder (CCD), have continued to increase in recent years. From spring 2020 to 2021 colony losses were the second highest on record since first tracked in 2006.

    We tried Melibio Cruelty Free Fermented Honey
    Melibio honey | Courtesy

    Experts link bee decline to a number of issues, namely agricultural pesticides and herbicides. In 2018, the European Union banned the most popular class of insecticides, neonicotinoids, because of their link to CCD.

    The ban followed a report from the E.U. scientific risk assessors, which concluded that the pesticides posed a risk to honeybees and wild bee populations. A recent study that looked at honey samples from around the world found widespread contamination with neonicotinoids.

    Bees play a vital role in the food system, pollinating more than 130 fruits and vegetables; they also pollinate 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants. 

    The post Are Consumers Ready for Bee-Free Honey? MeliBio Debuts Mellody to ‘Help Restore Ecological Harmony’ appeared first on Green Queen.

  • Memories from Sweden of the dedicated peace researcher Owen Wilkes

    Peacemonger, the new book published last month to celebrate the life and work of peace researcher and activist Owen Wilkes (1940-2005), is being launched in Auckland on Friday. Here a close friend from Sweden — not featured in the book — remembers his mentor in both New Zealand and Scandinavia.

    COMMENT: By Paul Claesson in Stockholm

    I got to know Owen Wilkes through friends in 1980, when as a 22-year-old student I ended up in a housing collective where his ex-partner lived. He was then at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), having recently arrived from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and was, in addition to his collaboration with Nils-Petter Gleditsch, already in full swing with his Foreign Military Presence project.

    He hired me as an assistant with responsibility for Spanish and Portuguese-language source material.

    During this time I got to know Søren MC and Kirsten Bruun in Copenhagen, who had recently launched the magazine Försvar — Militärkritiskt Magasin. I contributed a couple of articles and was then invited to participate in the editorial team.

    Peacemonger cover
    Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press

    A theme issue about the American bases in Greenland grew into a book, Greenland — The Pearl of the Mediterranean, which apparently caused considerable consternation in the Ministry of Greenland. The book resulted in a hearing in Christiansborg.

    I was also responsible for a theme issue about the DEW (Early Warning Line) and Loran C facilities on the Faroe Islands. I was in Stockholm when SÄPO’s spy target against Owen started, and I was there the whole way.

    SÄPO interrogated me a couple of times, and at one point during the trial, when I took the opportunity to hand out relevant material about Owen’s research — all publicly available — to journalists in the audience, I was visibly thrown out of the case by a couple of angry young men from FSÄK (the security service of the Swedish defence establishment).

    Distorted by media
    Owen and I saw each other almost every day — sometimes I stayed with him in his little cabin in Älvsjö — and together we wondered how his various activities, such as his innocent fishing trip in Åland, were distorted in the media by FSÄK and the prosecutor’s care (SÄPO had subsequently begun to show greater doubt about Owen’s guilt).

    In 1984-85, after he had been expelled from Sweden, I was Owen’s house guest at his farm in Karamea, Mahoe Farm, on New Zealand’s West Coast, at the northern end of the road. He was in the process of selling it.

    With his brother Jack, he had started a commercial bee farm, and together we spent an intensive summer — harvesting bush honey, pollinating apple and kiwifruit orchards and building a small harvest house for the honey collection.

    In the meantime, we sold — or ate up — the farm’s remaining flock of sheep. When the farm was sold, we moved to Wellington — I was offered a room in the Quakers’ guest house, where I joined the work at Peace Movement Aotearoa’s premises on Pirie Street.

    Then Prime Minister David Lange had recently let New Zealand withdraw from ANZUS, as a result of his government’s refusal to allow US Navy ships to call at port unless they declared themselves disarmed of nuclear weapons.

    As a result, PMA organised a conference with the theme nuclear-free Pacific, with participants from all over the Pacific region. Together with Owen, Nicky Hager and others I contributed to the planning and execution of the conference.

    Surveying US signals intelligence
    Before this, Owen and Nicky had begun surveying American signals intelligence facilities in New Zealand. I took part in this, ie. with a couple of photo excursions to Tangimoana.

    Owen and I kept in touch after my return to Sweden. What I remember best from his letters from this time — apart from his musings about his work as a government defence consultant — are his often comical anecdotes about his adventures in the bush as a scout for the New Zealand Forest Service, where his task was mainly to map Māori cultural remains before they were chewn to pieces by the forest industry.

    His sudden death took a toll. I got the news from his partner May Bass. I would have liked to have flown to NZ to attend the memorial services for him, but ironically they coincided with my wedding.

    Owen played a very big role in my life. I admired him, and miss him all the time. More than anyone else I have known, he deserves to be remembered in writing. I was therefore very happy when I heard about the time and energy devoted to this book project. My sincere gratitude.

  • Melibio’s Bee-Free Honey to Launch in Europe Next Year

    We tried Melibio Cruelty Free Fermented Honey
    3 Mins Read

    MeliBio’s novel vegan honey will launch in Europe next year through organic food producer Narayan Foods.

    Melibio’s honey will see its retail launch in European stores next year; Narayan’s products are available in more than 75,000 stores across Europe. The product launch marks the first time vegan honey of its kind will enter the European market.

    California-based Melibio uses plant-based ingredients and novel tech to produce its bee-free honey that looks, tastes, and functions like conventional honey. It even includes plant pollen, but without the impact to bees.

    Bee-free honey

    While bees play a critical role in our food system, pollinating plants that make up 35 percent of global crop production, honey removal is taxing on hives and can often be deadly. Bee populations face a number of other threats including colony collapse disorder, which has decimated hives around the world. Conventional agricultural pesticides and herbicides have been linked to their decline, leading the European Union to ban the neonicotinoid class of pesticides.

    Melibio co-founders Aaron Schaller (l) and Darko Mandich (r) show off their vegan honey
    Melibio co-founders Aaron Schaller and Darko Mandich.

    The European announcement comes just a year after Melibio debuted its first prototype for the honey.

    Melibio has raised $7.2 million since it launched in 2020; it closed a $5.7 million seed round earlier this year. The company’s goal is to produce honey that doesn’t contribute to biodiversity loss. The company earned a spot on TIME Magazine’s 100 best innovations of 2021 list.

    Simplifying honey production

    “We know that science can produce delicious and nutritious honey, which is molecularly identical to traditional honey, at no cost to our precious bees,” Darko Mandich, MeliBio co-founder and CEO said in a statement earlier this year.

    Melibio Honey Consistenicy - Pic by Alessandra Franco
    Melbio’s honey

    “At MeliBio, we are here to introduce certainty in the supply chain and help companies simplify their honey sourcing, while making their honey-based formulations sustainable and delicious. Together with our clients, we can make the future of honey better, for both humans and for bees” said Mandich who worked in the honey industry prior to launching Melibio.

    “Being part of the honey industry for eight years helped me to understand all the challenges ranging from the broken global supply chain to issues of adulteration and most importantly large scale die-offs that threaten 20,000 bee species,” Darko Mandich, the co-founder and CEO of Berkeley, California-based MeliBio, told Green Queen in 2021.

    “If we don’t bring sustainability through innovation into this industry, it could seriously harm bees and humans. So I decided to move from Europe to California and join the emerging community that is working on producing animal products just without the animals.” 

    Lead image courtesy of Melibio.

    The post Melibio’s Bee-Free Honey to Launch in Europe Next Year appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Exclusive: We Tasted the World’s First Real Honey Made Without Bees From MeliBio and We Couldn’t Taste the Difference

    5 Mins Read Californian food tech MeliBio has just unveiled its flagship product, the world’s first-ever real honey made without bees.

    The post Exclusive: We Tasted the World’s First Real Honey Made Without Bees From MeliBio and We Couldn’t Taste the Difference appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • The Single Origin Food Co To Expand Rollout Of Vegan Honey After US$1.1M Raise

    3 Mins Read Vegan honey created without using any bees and is set to rollout across Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, and Safeway Albertsons stores.

    The post The Single Origin Food Co To Expand Rollout Of Vegan Honey After US$1.1M Raise appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.