Sweeteners . 22 National Honey Show . 33 Organic Honey . 42 Bee CultureSEP 2003 Catch The Buzz www.beeculture.com September 2003 BEE CULTURE 1 The Not So Sweet Story Of SWEETENERSSWEETENERS Start A Counter-Revolution. Know The Enemy. James Fischer The Honey Counter-Revolution not like to be misled, especially those cup holders in newer vehicles A counter-revolution? Don’t about food. You need not make ex- should be clear – will the minivan worry; no one needs to worry about travagant claims about honey, you replace the dining room? No one is buying camouflage fatigues or tar- only need to debunk the mislead- saying, but the 2000 Ford Excursion get practice at the rifle range. It’s a ing propaganda about the alterna- SUV came with seating for nine and kitchen-counter revolution. The tives. 10 cup holders. The current Volvo goal is to liberate the slaves to sugar Honey was the original sweet- V70 seats five, but has nine cup and artificial sweeteners, by replac- ener. Every other sweetener was holders. You do the math. ing sugar bowls with honey jars. created in an attempt to replace While we can all understand Ambitious? Yes. Difficult? Yes. But honey with something cheaper. that life can get hectic for people without a strategy that promotes Most people will agree that life is who have not discovered “life in the your honey as a healthy and natu- too short to tolerate cheap peanut slow lane” as a beekeeper, it seems ral alternative to the sugar bowl it- butter, so honey should be an “easy clear that cooking (with or without self, national trends appear to in- sell” to anyone who cares at all honey) is slowly becoming as ob- dicate that honey sales will shrink. about what they eat. (To quote my scure and arcane a skill as beekeep- father, “Sure, you could use the ing. Let me explain cheaper stuff, but people will notice To make matters seem even My father was a salesman until and remember.”) worse, the same surveys found that he retired and started keeping bees. 77 cents of every dollar spent on He sold lighting fixtures, and devel- The Decline Of Cooking “dining out” in 2002 was spent at a oped an encyclopedic knowledge of The NPD Group, a market re- fast-food chain restaurant. not just the products he sold, but search firm, found that in 1993, 99% more importantly, the competition’s of U.S. households had a skillet. In What Happens After What products. He was able to discuss 2002, the number dropped to 93%. Comes Next the advantages of one light versus That’s a net decrease of over one The combined impact of these another in great detail, so his way million skillets per year. (If one trends means that we can’t expect of “selling” was more “applications does not even own a skillet, one can to increase our honey sales to con- consulting” to builders and archi- be assumed to have abandoned sumers or expect demand to keep tects than a “sales pitch.” It cooking for mere “reheating” of pack- the prices up unless we can get worked. aged food.) In 1993, 21% of U.S. din- them to think about replacing the What does this have to do with ners eaten at home had ready-to- sugar bowls on their kitchen tables honey? Well, if you want to sell eat main entrees, in 2002, it was with honey pots, and consider aban- honey, it helps to know “the com- up to 36%. Over the same time pe- doning artificial sweeteners for petition.” Consumption data indi- riod, meals served with homemade honey. Taking on the competition cate that honey is one of the more desserts decreased from 7% to 3.5%. head-on means that you need to rarely-used sweeteners available, Your grocery store may have al- know more about the competition so even a small change in consumer ready expanded their “deli” and than the customer does. habits for a tiny percentage of con- “bakery” into a “ready-to-eat meals” Price alone can’t be the prob- sumers would have a significant department, complete with a salad lem, given what people will pay for impact on the demand for honey. bar. These “meal solution centers” Ghirardelli chocolates. The The good news for us is that the are cropping up everywhere. Conve- Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts cof- competition makes claims that are nience stores, gas stations, air- fee shop chains have clearly shown most charitably described as “bla- ports, and shopping malls all offer that marketing alone will convince tantly misleading.” Consumers do “take out.” Now the reason for all people to pay them more than triple 2 BEE CULTURE September 2003 the going price for a cup of coffee. Honey has a fine “premium product” reputation, proven by the large num- ber of packaged food products that feature the word “Honey” in large letters on the label. Honey even has a very valuable cachet of “natu- ral” that sugar and artificial sweet- eners can never gain. “Natural” sells, if for no other reason than it makes Mom feel less guilty about owning a stainless-steel Sub-Zero fridge filled with heat-and-serve packaged foods and using the mi- crowave more often than her $4,500 Aga range. The only hurdle appears to be that beekeepers are unwilling to ask food product is to increase the opposed to naturally occurring sug- people what else they currently keep amount of sweeteners they add. ars in fruit and other foods, are a on the kitchen table, and discuss little more than 15 percent of Ameri- the merits of that sweetener as com- Fat-Free and Fact-Free cans’ daily caloric intake. pared to honey. So read on, and For at least a decade, “reduced While doctors, health experts think about how easy it would be to fat” and “fat-free” food has been pro- and regulatory officials now realize convince people to try using honey moted as “more healthy.” Makers of that their emphasis on “fat free” instead of sugar or chemical sweet- packaged foods have responded to has resulted in a problem worse eners. demand, and in some cases, helped than the one they hoped to solve, to create concern about fat. This their attempts to educate consum- A Brief History Of Sweeteners meant more demand for “fat-free” ers about “added sugars” have been It is likely that humans sought food. The problem was that in re- frustrated by sophisticated market- out honey even before they were moving fat, the packaged food prod- ing of high-profit products like soft recognizable as human. Food was ucts were left bland and tasteless. drinks and packaged foods. likely in sporadic supply for early The “answer” was to add sweeten- man, energy requirements were ers, most often corn syrup. But Big Profits Versus World high, and honey would have been a when you add sweeteners, the calo- Health rare treat. Man was predisposed by ries go up. As a result, many people This Spring, the World Health instinct to favor sweet things, since buying “low-fat” foods are actually Organization published a report most everything that tasted sweet consuming more calories than be- suggesting that all forms of “added was not poisonous. fore due to added sweeteners. “Low- sugars” (over and above the natural Most present-day humans have fat food” did not result in people sugars found in foods) should make easy access to abundant food, and becoming less fat. It made many of up no more than 10% of the daily are not required to physically exert them even fatter. diet. While 10% is a very high num- themselves very much, but we are ber, the sugar lobby in the United still influenced by the same drives Added Sweeteners And Health States reacted by demanding that as our primitive ancestors. We still The expanding waistlines of the Congress cut off the World Health crave sweet stuff. population of the industrialized Organization’s funding. Since the Despite the near total lack of world has resulted in a new and U.S. funds roughly a quarter of the situations where modern humans unique health problem. The rich and WHO’s operations, this would could might need a high blood sugar level middle classes are thin and healthy, put the WHO out of business. to help them escape from large while the poorer among us suffer The sugar industry was not at toothy predators, sugar or sweeten- from obesity. Traditionally in human all happy with anyone suggesting ers are added to nearly every pack- history, the poor have been thin, that added sugars should be re- aged food product sold. These hid- while the rich have been fat. Ongo- stricted to a mere 10% of our total den added sweeteners are the ing obesity in most cases leads di- diet. They want us all to buy more dreaded “empty calories” that your rectly to diabetes, and not surpris- of the packaged food products that mother warned you about, devoid of ingly, medications to help diabetes contain added sugars. The sugar any food value other than the sug- patients are suddenly one of the industry is a significant special-in- ars themselves. Sweeteners are largest growth markets for drug terest group in U.S. lobbying and added for two reasons. First, they makers. politics, handing out over $3 million are cheap. The USDA says that Americans’ in donations in last year’s federal Second, there is a direct con- consumption of sweeteners has elections, according to the Center nection between sweetness and risen significantly over the last 40 for Responsive Politics.