Project 2030: Building for the Future
The best years for mānuka are ahead of us. But they won't arrive on their own.
On 24th July, close to 200 beekeepers, landowners, scientists and industry people filled the Paengaroa Community Hall for our annual Open Day. It's become a fixture on the honey calendar, and this year it was bigger than it's ever been. It was also the day we put a name to something we've been quietly building for the past five years.
We call it Project 2030.
Logan opened his address with a vision: "I've got a vision that ours is an industry that other primary sectors look up to."
Everything after that was practical - because the industry has heard enough vision. It's had a decade of promises, a gold rush, and a hangover that a lot of good operators are still paying off. Registered hive numbers ballooned 144% from 377,000 to 918,000 through the 2010s, and the glut that followed did real damage.
"The previous model nearly broke us all, and we deserve better." Logan told the room
A positive market, not a gold rush
Here's the good news, and it is genuinely good. Hive numbers now sit around 480,000. Backlogs are clearing. Demand out of the United States is climbing, and the India free trade agreement opens a door the industry has been pushing on for years. Our own honey "left to sell" as of June has fallen from roughly 50% in 2023 and 2024, to 35% last winter, to 20% now.
That's the shape of a recovering market. But it's also the shape of the last one, right before it went wrong.
"Right now it is a strong spot market for the producer, but that will have to change," Logan warned the Open Day audience. As he put it to Farmers Weekly the following week: "How we are now has not served the industry well in the past for planning and supply into the future."
The Apiarist's Advocate summed up what we're trying to do better than we could: Project 2030 "seeks to marry new-found optimism in honey markets with the organisation required to better match supply and demand."
That's it. That's the whole idea. Take the optimism, and put some structure underneath it.
Three pillars
Project Foundation is about land. Working alongside landowners to convert and manage mānuka country properly, so the supply base grows on purpose rather than by accident.
Project Future is about connection. A structured supply pool that links beekeepers to the honey brands buying at the other end - with visibility on volume, type and timing before the season starts, not after.
"The orders for volume and type are there," Logan says. "What I don't know is what the beekeepers are producing. It would be great to marry that up ahead of time."
Project Elevate is about capacity - and this is where five years of investment starts to matter.
Extraction and processing capacity is the visible part. Our Paengaroa facility handles around 1,400 tonnes of honey a year across our services, and the ambition Logan outlined to Farmers Weekly is a network of sites nationally where beekeepers "drive in like milk tankers, dropping off their honey, and having it processed at economic scale."
The less visible part - and the part that makes the whole programme work - is the software we've been building and investing in since 2019. Every drum in, every blend, every trade, every buyer enquiry has been building a data set.
More importantly, it gets better the more people use it. The more beekeepers producing at medium to large volume through the pool, and the more brands registering what they need, the sharper our picture gets. Enough of that data, over enough seasons, and we can start forecasting properly - reading demand and supply trends ahead of time, spotting the opportunities early, and steering around the mismatches that have burned this industry before.
Nobody can predict a season's weather. But we can absolutely stop being surprised by the same problems twice.
Planning, timing, execution
"To get to that 2030 vision we need to be an industry built on planning, timing and execution," Logan told Farmers Weekly. "If we want to be the next Fonterra, how are we going to get there?"
The supply-and-demand matching function of our platform goes live to users from late August. Beekeepers will be able to forecast production. Brands and buyers will be able to signal what they need, six to eight months out.
One long-serving beekeeper at the Open Day - someone who'd stepped back from industry events years ago - said the mood on the day had "reinvigorated" them. That's the bit that'll be putting a smile on our faces!
As the whitepaper puts it: "The best years for mānuka are ahead. But those years won't arrive on their own - they'll be built, deliberately, by the people who decide the industry deserves better than the model that nearly broke it."
Get involved
Download the Project 2030 whitepaper. Drawing on MPI, KPMG and Apiculture New Zealand data, setting out both the opportunity and the risk in front of us.
Beekeepers - forecast your production for the coming season. Brands and buyers - register what you need, and when.
Talk to us before the platform goes live (in the next few weeks), and let's build this properly.
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