New-product juries, investors, campers, and tea-drinking honey lovers everywhere are glad John Rowe found a way to make honey portable

Hiking with friends in the backwoods of Whistler, B.C., John Rowe stumbled onto the inspiration for a cutting-edge product innovation. “I opened up my backpack to discover that my jar of honey had shattered all over my tent and my clothing,” recalls Rowe, the president of Island Abbey Foods Ltd. in Charlottetown. “I thought, there’s got to be a better way.”

Returning to Vancouver sticky and frustrated, Rowe soon realized that there were no solid forms of honey available. Products posing as honey supplements were flavoured with honey and made entirely of sugar. “I looked into the ‘why’ and realized that no one had discovered how to dehydrate it,” says Rowe. “It’s a very complex food to work with. If you’ve ever tried baking or cooking with it, you know it’s sensitive to heat.”

Calling upon his engineering degree, Rowe developed the world’s first pure solid honey. Working through several rounds of trial and error in a West Coast lab, Rowe finally had his light bulb moment, and Honibe (pronounced Honey Bee) was born. In 2004 Rowe moved home to Prince Edward Island, where he found business support to follow his product through to the commercial stage. “I grew up in eastern P.E.I., and my family has been in agriculture and business for six generations,” he says. “I’ve always been surrounded by people in the business community, entrepreneurs and such.”

With the help of a team composed of his CFO wife, Susan, and VP of sales brother, Justin, in 2008 Honibe launched its first product: the Honey Drop. “We marketed it on a website called
Nostickyfingers.com,” says Rowe. “The Honey Drop is convenient and portable and the world’s first honey you can actually hold.” Within a year, the product had national distribution across Canada.

Rowe wisely pursued other areas in which honey could replace its sugary counterpart. Honey Sprinkles, Honey Delights, and, most recently, Honey Lozenges followed.

Honibe’s success recently garnered international recognition when the Honey Drop was awarded the 2010 Global SIAL d’Or Award for best new product from the world’s largest food trade show just north of Paris in Villepinte, France. “We were nominated by our customers and the editors of Canadian Grocer magazine,” says Rowe. “It was truly overwhelming, I’m still adjusting to the shock of just
being nominated.”

Honibe would also add Best New Product from Canada to its awards roster while in France. The multiple wins intrigued trade show attendees to the Canadian pavilion where Honibe was exhibiting. “We had brought tens of thousands of product samples with us to France,” says Rowe. “By the second day, we had run out.”

Rowe attributes Honibe’s success to a combination of relatable and strong marketing in addition to great timing mixed with social awareness. “More and more people are recognizing that natural sweeteners are far better for you than refined ones,” says Rowe. “Honey has health properties. It’s actually good for you.”

On top of playing to a health-conscious population, Rowe can’t ignore the successful marriage of Honibe’s products and the recent heightened consumption of tea around the world. Marketing Honey Drops and granulated Honey Sprinkles alongside one’s mother’s honey-and-tea cure-all was no accident. Rowe and the Honibe brand will be featured on CBC-TV’s Dragons’ Den in the new year. Though under contract not to disclose the end result, Rowe did share that Honibe warranted the show’s longest segment in its three-year run as CBC’s top program.

Rowe applies his homegrown modesty to Honibe’s success. Watching well-established companies fold during a time of global economic depression while Honibe developed so quickly and thrived, Rowe is taking the future in stride. “We have a lot in our pipeline, but for the short term we’re going to stick with our existing product line,” he says. “We hope to make some friends overseas, and by this time next year we hope to be in a few companies in Europe and elsewhere.”