Honey Care aimed to provide additional income to small-scale farmers by helping them produce and sell honey. To make beekeeping profitable for these farmers, Honey Care introduced a new business model that targeted every stage of the honey supply chain. The company produced and sold advanced-technology beehives to farmers, provided beekeeping support, bought the honey produced by these farmers at a fair price, and sold the honey in urban markets. Through this process, the company was able to double the income of many small-income farmers – one hive typically yielded US$42 – US$60 a year at Honey Care’s prices. 1

Although honey had been produced in Kenya for a long time, it had been produced mainly through traditional wooden hives, which were not very efficient and produced low-quality, smoky honey. In order to better equip farmers to produce honey, Honey Care manufactured more modern hives called Langstroth hives. Langstroth hives could produce purer, higher quality honey because they had a queen excluder to prevent the queen bee from laying eggs in the super where the workers bees produced honey.

Since these hives were not affordable for most small-scale farmers, Honey Care also looked for ways to finance these hives. Alex recognized that ensuring that these hives were both available and affordable to farmers was critical to delivering value. The company partnered with other organizations to provide funding or financial assistance to farmers so that they could purchase the hives and produce honey efficiently. Although the company had struggled to find the right financing partnerships in the past, Alex believed that he found an effective financing model in 2012 – providing farmers with loans from Kiva.

Once a farmer bought a hive, Honey Care delivered the hive to the farmer and provided beekeeping support, which was important because the farmer often did not have the necessary experience or skills to produce honey. Honey Care employees colonized, installed, and maintained the hives for the farmers between each honey harvest. These services limited the time and responsibility farmers needed to invest into beekeeping. Thus, beekeeping through Honey Care could provide farmers with a low-maintenance source of additional income. In this way, Honey Care provided income to farmers, as well as the means to produce this income – the hives and the skills.



1 "Building a Scalable Business with Small-Holder Farmers in Kenya: Honey Care's Beekeeping Model." Michigan Ross School of Business, 2013.