Wholesale bee products – how to choose a supplier.

If you look around the web you’ll find many different manufacturers of bee products, most of whom will offer some type of wholesale program. The problem arises for you, the retailer, when you embark upon the selection process. In many cases, retail store owners and or buyers will shop solely based on price. There’s no doubt that for many of the different vitamin supplements around, quality is fairly consistent and price may be the ultimate arbiter. That’s NOT the case with bee products, and here’s why –

Firstly, if you’re new to bee products lets just go over what they are:

• Bee Pollen
• Royal Jelly
• Propolis
• Honey
• Beeswax
• Bee Venom

All of these exist in some form within the beehive, some share nutritional properties, between the first four you can pretty much say that the entire nutritional spectrum is covered.

They’re taken widely for energy, stamina, weight loss, immune system health, reproductive health, libido, hair/skin/nails health and much more.

So why is it not wise to shop based on price alone, what is it about bee products that requires a more careful evaluation?

Well, there are a number of important factors.

Firstly, lets deal with the form they take within the beehive. Royal jelly and honey are liquid. Bee pollen and propolis are not liquid but they have a very high moisture content.

Any liquid that finds its way into a food or a supplement has to be handled in a very specific way. If there’s storage and transportation involved then it’s quite common for these liquids to be pasteurized. If they’re being imported from overseas in liquid form, as many bee products are, then there may well be a legal requirement for them to be either freeze-dried or pasteurized at source.

Since you’re in the retail business and you’re here looking for health products, you know that nutritional integrity and pasteurization do not fit together well in the same sentence.

That’s the easy part, it gets more difficult when you need to convert a liquid, or a substance with a high water content, into a dry powder or granule. There are various methods of accomplishing this, the most common within the food industry is ‘freeze-drying’ or ‘lyophilising’. That’s the safest way to lock-in the nutrients and avoid the damage which comes when heat is applied, but not all processors have the means and capacity to conduct freeze-dried processing. So again, heat may be used.

If you’re familiar with the different types of honey, you may be familiar with seeing the terms ‘processed’ and ‘unprocessed’. Processed honey has invariably been heated to liquify it sufficiently for filtering, and often times the heat involved is compatible with pasteurization. For anyone serious about nutritional integrity, this is an absolute death blow! It’s common with honey and it’s just as common with royal jelly.

So you need to look for clear statements from your supplier that non-heat processes are in use and that the substances have not been pasteurized, or anywhere close to it.

Why? – well, in our experience, the key to running a successful supplement business is repeat-orders. Bee products have the capacity to make people feel better in themselves in a variety of ways, not least of which is the perception of a more energized state. But this only really happens if they’re nutritionally active. Supply people with poor quality bee products and they won’t feel the difference and eventually they’ll stop buying from you. And yes, people do pay more for quality, it’s often necessary to point out the differences, but once they understand they’re sold on it.

So buy all means shop around in your quest to include bee products into your retail lines, but be certain to compare apples with apples and undertake some meaningful research before deciding on your supplier.