Honey 101 for CPG Brands: Trends, Formulation Tips & Resources with Keith Seiz of The National Honey Board

0:09Hello, my friends. Welcome to a mini episode all about honey. There is so much buzz about honey and natural sweeteners these days. We wanted to invite our partners at the National Honey Board to tell us what's up. This is a great chance for food and beverage brands to learn all about the benefits and uses of honey and honey products. Our guest today, Keith Seiz, spends most of his year traveling the country talking to food manufacturers, distillers, brewers, bakers, about how to make better products with honey. So today we're talking about the consumer shift towards natural sweeteners, what kind of products are using more honey these days, considerations for brands and formulators, and also what resources the National Honey Board has for all the brands out there.

0:47It's really cool stuff. I am sure by the end of today's episode, a lot of you are going to want to learn more. You can check out their website at honey.com. You can also follow them on Instagram. Their handle is honey4prose. That's the number four. It's in our show notes. They have very cool videos for CPG brands all about the latest in honey. All right, here we go.

1:11Keith, my friend, welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here because there are not a lot of people who go as deep on honey as you do. And for me, it's really timely because we recently ran a webinar that was all about sweeteners and ran a live poll. And what we found is, at least with our audience, people, when asked about what are their preferred sweeteners, are really heavily talking about traditional and natural sweeteners over even a lot of the zero sugar alternatives that are out there. And a lot of people are looking for sources like honey, especially. Can you tell me more about that?

1:45I know you hear a lot about these trends. Yeah, no, honey is something that right now is about the hottest ingredient out there. And it's something that it kind of makes sense whenever you look at the trends, the more movement towards natural. But I feel it's even more than that, where consumers are looking into what natural means. So they're looking at everything from processing to how an ingredient is made, where it's sourced from. And whenever you think about honey, everybody knows it's made in a beehive. It's collected by bees from flowers and made in a beehive. Whenever you look at the human involvement, it's really just the extraction.

2:21So we're not changing or manipulating that process whatsoever. We're taking what the bees make it and using it. And right now, that's what consumers want. It's funny, I always say that honeybees have somehow become the rock stars of the food industry. And it's true. Whenever I started working with the honey board 17 years ago, it was all questions about honey. Now it's about 50-50 questions between honeybees and honey. So it's really something that goes hand in hand. And I think that's why it's so popular. All right. Well, that's cool to hear. And I mean, I think speaking of hot, we all know about hot honey, I think, having a huge surge.

3:00But what generally kind of products are you seeing incorporating more honey these days? Yeah, it's really across the board. And hot honey has been a great vehicle for that expansion. whenever we look at Inova new product data, we had a 16.7 % increase in new products with honey launched in 2025. The year before that, it was 15%. So we're talking about an ingredient that's been around for millions of years, and it's still seeing this massive increase of use. And what I think is unique about honey now in the food industry, as opposed to say 15 years ago, is it was mainly focused back then on baked goods.

3:41Really kind of started making huge inroads into the commercial food industry whenever there was this shift from white bread to more large format whole grain breads. But now we see it in everything from beverages to snack foods to frozen dinners. It really touches every food category. So we're excited about hunting really everywhere, especially in certain unique categories that we never had a strong foothold in, like dairy and confections, where we're seeing probably the most honey usage. And I wonder where that's coming from. If it's increasing in so many new product launches, I wonder, like it always comes at the expense of something else, or it's just all net new.

4:22But my guess is that it's gonna be some coming from traditional sweeteners, like, hey, what if instead of sugar, we used honey because it has this really positive connotation for consumers these days, and maybe some coming from that zero sugar world of like, okay, maybe instead of especially some of the like sugar alcohols, artificial sweeteners, what if we just had it be with a natural sweetener like honey? Yeah, no, I think the data has proven over and over that consumers want sweet foods. They say they're turning away from these sweetener, this sweetener. They want sweet foods. Our pollard has grown accustomed to having sweet foods.

4:56And honey is one of the few sweeteners that they look at and go, okay, well, this is okay for me to have. So we've seen food brands jump on that bandwagon and say, well, consumers want to sweet food, but they're going to be discerning about the type of sweetener used in it. And honey not only looks great on the back on the ingredient deck, but I mean, most brands, whenever they use honey, are putting it on the front packaging to splash in the word honey all over it. And you just don't see that with other sweeteners. It's kind of unique that you would put a honeybee on your product where you wouldn't put the source of your ingredient for any other ingredient on the front, really, especially sweeteners.

5:33Yeah. And I mean, I totally agree just as a consumer. If I see that on the front of pack, I'm like, oh, that's nice. OK, I'm into that. What about any considerations that brands or formulators should have in mind when they're thinking about making products with honey? Yeah, I think the big thing now especially is with all the trends, with people looking at ultra processed foods, clean labels, product developers are being tasked to do more with fewer ingredients. You used to be able, if you wanted the smallest functional improvement in your product, you would find a ingredient, sometimes artificially made synthetic, put it in your product.

6:11And it didn't matter if you had 50 ingredients in your product. Now that's changed. And this is where we're seeing, I think the most increase in honey is everybody knows it's a sweetener and it provides a great flavor. But what we're really seeing it now is functional uses. So we're seeing it used in products like food bars, where it's not only providing the sweetness, but it's binding together all the nuts and seeds in the bar. Or it's used in a solid dressing as an emulsification to where you don't have to add in all these other synthetic emulsifiers to make that product kind of stable. So the functional uses of honey, I think, is one of the main reasons why we're seeing such an increased usage is you're not just getting the flavor, you're getting the functional benefits of it too.

6:57And one of the biggest one is flavor masking, especially as the kind of industry is moving towards adding more nutrients and products and even some supplements, products like magnesium, things like that. Honey is an unbelievable flavor masker. It's made up of 24 different carbohydrates. So it's something that is coding your entire eating experience, not just providing that temporary sweet spike. So interesting. Okay, and lastly, to end on, the National Honeyboard does a lot for brands. A lot of these boards out there, if you're a brand making a product that has one of the ingredients from these boards, it's really good to reach out to them because you guys have so many resources for the brands.

7:36That is your job is to really support the brands who are obviously driving use of the product. So can you just tell us of all the cool stuff that the National Honeyboard can do for emerging brands out there? Definitely. It's something where they should definitely reach out to us. We can help in a couple different ways. A, troubleshoot if you're already using honey or thinking about using honey and you're having issues. We've been around in the industry long enough to where we can pretty much help you troubleshoot how to kind of make honey work in a product or if it's impacting something, how to work around it.

8:08But then I think the biggest help we can provide to emerging brands is we do tons of innovation work. So we're constantly working with product developers and formulators around the country to develop products that then we bring to emerging brands. We also work with a lot of emerging brands to where we give their team a complete honey education, not only from a product development standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint. And then we will bring in anywhere from three to five new products that our team has developed that we want to sort of give to them or say, hey, this is your jumping off point.

8:46So we can do everything from technical assistant to innovation support to if you're already using honey, just really are you taking advantage of honey's popularity? Do you have the latest data on what consumers want honey? So really, we provide everything for brands to help them use more honey. And don't sleep on that data for hands out there because yes, me, if I were using a brand that was heavily reliant on honey, I would ask for that data report and just be combing through it. See what I did there? Honeycomb, thank you. I'm looking for some slides that I would want to put into my pitch deck because there's going to be data in there that you haven't seen that really helps build the case for retailers, for investors, what have you.

9:29So that all sounds really good. Definitely. All right. Well, Keith, thank you so much. I think this is, again, really timely to have this kind of info out there for brands. And can you just remind everybody the best way to get in touch or follow along with the National Honey Board. Yep. Go to honey.com. Easy to remember. Or if you want to contact me directly, email me at Keith at honey.com. That's such a good email address. It's easy to remember. All right. See you later, honey. Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in CPG.

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10:35Thank you.