Doug McGinnis, the second generation owner of Tropical Blossom Honey Co., Inc., in Edgewater, Florida, has built a life around honey. His day starts with a shot of pollen and a call to his international vendors, and ends with a check-in on the production line. Just back from his annual visit to New York City for the Fancy Food Show, we caught up with him to find out about the state of the honey business, its daunting challenges, and, of course, the sweet side.

Casual Flavors: How was the Fancy Food Show? What did you see?

Doug: It was tremendous. 2,400 booths of gourmet food—cheese, olive oil, coffee, a huge international pavilion, and spirits. I’ve been going to it since 1976, and we’ve been members since 1959.

CF: So it’s been good for business?

Doug: Yes. Plus it has a huge international section, and we’ve been very active in exports. It’s a great opportunity to touch base with those customers.

CF: Tell me about your operations in Florida. Is it correct to call it a farm?

Doug: No. We’re a honey packing facility. It’s a family business. My sister, Patricia, and I are the co-owners. What makes us unique is the fact that we pack only domestic honey. We’re in Edgewater—20 miles south of Daytona Beach on the East Coast—and right now we have about 36 suppliers, many of whom have been with us for years, from Florida and South Georgia. We do things the opposite of everybody else. Instead of importing cheap honey, we export fine quality Florida and Georgia honey. We were beekeepers up until the mideighties, but even then it only supplied a small amount of the honey that we packed. You really have to do one or the other. Both are extremely hard and extremely labor intensive.

CF: How so?

Doug: If you have a lot of hives, you have to migrate often. Most people don’t realize that beekeeping is a migratory business and you have to move your bees all around. If you’re a major beekeeper here, you’re going to move your bees all around Florida and then out to the Midwest (like North and South Dakota), which is a big hassle.

CF: How exactly do you transport them?

Doug: Four hundred colonies on a semi tractor-trailer. They’re open and on a flatbed truck. To prevent them from flying away, you hose them down with water, which makes them think it’s raining. Then you put a net over them and take off. Believe me, gas stations don’t like it when a beekeeper shows up. And if you have a poor honey crop, it’s really hard to make ends meet. So we decided to get back to what we did best. So after the mid-eighties, we went back to honey packing alone, which is where we started.

CF: And how did the business start off?

Doug: My parents came to Florida in 1937 and moved in with my great uncle who had a homestead. He had bees. He had citrus groves. And he had moonshine. He taught my father about beekeeping. Then in 1940, my dad found a piece of land in downtown Edgewater, an old dairy barn. He put his station wagon up as collateral and purchased for $12,000 the block where we are right now. My dad would keep the bees and collect the honey, and my mom would pack it into jars. We also had a citrus packing operation. And they started selling their honey and citrus there near our present location. And it just moved on from there. Although we had a fruit stand there on that corner until 1958, we’ve always been associated with the Florida gift fruit shipping industry. Often we’re the honey when you get a box of oranges up North or wherever.

CF: That’s a nice arrangement.

Doug: Yes. It’s one of our niches in the business. But around 1965, the tourists started to change. So my parents attended a foreign agriculture service trade show in Hamburg and discovered that the types of honey we have in Florida (which tend to be a little bit darker than clover honey up North) and things like honeycomb (which weren’t in mainstream American taste) were in fact the preferred way of having honey in Europe. And so we started exporting to Germany and things took off from there. At various times export has been over half of our business. So we sell to Europe, to the Middle East, Japan, the Caribbean, and Canada.

CF: How does the honey packing process work?

Doug: We bring in honey in drums and honeycomb from the beekeepers. We store it and blend it to provide as much as a uniform of batching as possible, but every batch of honey is unique. And then we pack it. You know it’s nature’s most perfect food. It never spoils. Way back before anybody was talking about this, we had to meet European standards for honey, and that is minimally processing. So we just warm the honey. We don’t filter it in highspeed filter presses. We try our very best to make sure that the honey retains all of its natural pollens and enzyme content because this was required in Europe from the very beginning. So our honey might be a bit cloudier and darker than other honeys, but we’re not cooking it. We’re not subjecting it to stresses that are going to change it. I have issues with the word “raw,” because people overuse it today. So we call our honey unfiltered and uncooked. And when people ask me for raw honey, I always take them the honey comb. To me, that’s really raw honey.

CF: And you export the honeycomb,too?

Doug: Yes. Actually chunk comb. Chunk is the term for a piece of honeycomb inside of a jar. People here usually say, “That’s what my grandmother had.” But there’s been this amazing resurgence of honeycomb in the last few years. It’s not only the honeycomb and cheese platters that have become very trendy in California and Colorado and in fine dining restaurants. It’s the Hispanic population in the U.S. growing so much. They love honey with comb. We can’t even supply enough. Demand always outstrips supply.

CF: On environmental concerns, how serious is the colony collapse—the mysterious disappearance of bees we’ve been hearing so much about?

Doug: I can't go anywhere without being surrounded by people asking me about it. I’m trying my best to lead people to some factual sources. It’s a horrible problem that we have. We don’t know exactly the reasons; they’re such sensitive creatures. And they’re such a link between the animal and plant world that it’s indicative of something wrong here. We’re so fortunate that people are listening right now. I have never had a time, ever, when so many people asked me about bees. That’s good for us to call attention to the problems that beekeepers have to make a living. And I just heard some really good news that the government has allocated a lot more funds to study the problems. Whether it be pesticides, GMOs, and all the diseases and viruses from imported and exotic things coming in—there are so many different things that are confronting beekeepers. People are realizing that there is such a bigger picture here. It’s not at all just honey. It’s the survival of all the crops that we depend on for our diet.

CF: What does “organic” mean in the beekeeping world?

Doug: It’s very hard to find organic honey in the U.S. because of the rules involving organic certification and all of the problems beekeepers have with mites and pests. They have to treat them. Most of the organic honey that is certified through the reciprocal agreement with the USDA is coming in from two places: Brazil and India. I was on the subcommittee for the National Organic Program to develop some rules for U.S. beekeepers. We thought we’d get something that was uniform, but there was so much difference from one area of the country to another that nothing was decided. But Hawaii is one place you can get certified organic honey.

CF: How does your honey compare to the stuff we buy in the little bear containers at the supermarket?

Doug: The most common honey you’re going to find in the bear is clover. Clover isn’t produced in Florida. Our most well-known honey is Orange Blossom, which is going to be light, floral, and with those delicate citrus overtones. I often say that honey is either floral, earthy, or herbal in its flavor notes. Our honeys are a little bit stronger flavored than what some people might be accustomed to. The Gallberry is very mild. Palmetto is beautiful, floral, and golden. Tupelo is very high in fructose, so it tastes sweeter on the tongue and you can use less of it. It also has some interesting herbal flavor notes.

CF: How do you personally consume honey?

Doug: I start my day off with a shot of bee pollen and royal jelly. I like to use honey in sauces, marinades, and barbequing. I don’t use white or brown sugar at all, so I probably use about 24 pounds of honey in a year. To bake with honey, you reduce the liquid by a third, reduce your oven temperature by 25 degrees, and add a dash of baking soda as honey tends to be a little more acidic. Orange Blossom and Palmetto are the ones I use the most because I like the floral tones they give to everything; they taste so fresh and right from the flower itself. It’s really good in baked beans, and it’s really good in banana bread. Recently, we put together a honeycomb and cheese tasting platter. We had honeycomb and goat cheese and then served it around with sides of Marcona almonds, sliced oranges, drizzled it with olive oil, sprinkled some sea salt on there, and served it with bread. People absolutely devoured that.

CF: That’s making me very hungry. Create my ideal honey cabinet.

Doug: It’s good to have several different varieties on hand: a dark honey, a very floral honey, and a very mild honey. And support your local beekeepers by getting your honey from your most local source. Check out honeylocator.com. Put your zip code in and you can find out who’s selling near you. Or you can put in the name of a honey you want to find, and it will tell you where to buy it. It’s a great service. And honey.com, National Honey Board’s main site, is full of good information—recipes, too.

CF: Finally, how did the logo come about?

Doug: It was trademarked in the fifties. My dad designed it, and one of his friends drew it. We’re very proud of it. It’s probably the happiest bee out there.

Interview by Buddy Kite