the cafe sits now and the original apiary site. You sort of get to feel a bit of those touch points of what we’ve done through the years and how we are and how we look now is completely different to when we started. “I suppose we’re early adopters in a number of things as well, particularly around the area of research and pushing to learn the value of the product that we have. Honey intrinsically hasn’t changed in thousands of years. What we do, though, is specialise in a local honey.” Their flagship Leatherwood honey – unique to Tasmania’s wild west coast – has become the cornerstone of their brand and accounts for around 60-70 per cent of the annual harvest. Revered for its distinctive flavour and rare floral source, Leatherwood has also become the subject of extensive research by institutions such as the University of the Sunshine Coast and the University of Tasmania. “That just recently had a lot of research released... identifying what we call a nutraceutical honey with lots of bioactives in it. So, I suppose you could say it is a functional food,” says Nicola. This elevated
understanding of the product’s benefits and has opened up new markets. Blue Hills Honey now supplies not just retailers and households, but also cosmetic manufacturers and nutraceutical companies globally. In Japan, one customer uses their honey as the base for a food-grade throat spray – an idea Nicola admits she never imagined in her nursing days. “There’s a lot behind the scenes as far as physical work, it’s a very manually intensive job, it’s a very skilled job and without skilled beekeepers, you just have nice boxes.” - Nicola Charles “Just imagine, spraying something in your mouth for a sore throat, that delivery device that has honey as a base, which is very novel and he’s selling a packet load. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have thought of delivering honey in a spray like that. It would also be absolutely fantastic for sports nutrition, for those in marathons who need a bit of a glucose up and go, natural glucose, which is a sort of a low GI product.”
33 Tasmanian Hospitality Review August/September Edition
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