How Nate’s Honey grew by taking on energy gels

As a recipe staple, there’s a good reason honey is typically shelved in the baking aisle. But a few years ago, the worker bees at Nate’s Honey began noticing honey was increasingly being used by athletes, gym rats, and hikers as a one-ingredient energy gel.

To ride the trend and fuel it, the brand redesigned its single-serve mini packages, which were originally intended for honey lovers to be able to drizzle on food and beverages on the go, in 2024. The new packages, as the brand explained at the time, were “created with the modern athlete in mind because they are portion-controlled and easy to open and squeeze.”

To learn more about how the brand used innovative packaging to respond to a consumer trend and boost its business, we sat down with Michael Carle, CEO of Harvest Foods, which owns the Nate’s Honey brand, at Retail Brew’s Clicks, Bricks & Everything In Between event in New York on June 3.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did Nate’s notice that customers were using honey like a performance gel as opposed to in recipes and such?

As we were watching on Instagram or—way back in the day, Facebook—you’d see pictures and videos where people were out at the gym and they’re working out and they’ve got this giant bottle of honey, and they’re literally taking shots. Or we even had videos where people were out running and they had taken honey, put it into a Ziploc baggie, and then they’d go and tear the bottom corner out and they’re squirting it into their mouth, because they were using it as a source of fuel for their exercise routine. That was the aha [moment] of…we need to give someone the type of package that delivers on the usage occasion they wanted, and that’s where that mini was born.

How did you let everybody know that you had this new packaging that was for energy boosts?

We embarked on an intentional campaign. We did it in the Northeast two years ago in Philadelphia and Boston, [and] we did it in Dallas last year, where we were out at marathons, at athletic events, and at other places where this usage occasion makes sense for this form factor, and we were just handing out these packets.

We probably gave away 25,000 or 50,000…and then it just took off.

You could actually see it in our Amazon data: You can trace it right back to these regions where we’re doing these micro campaigns, and you see this massive adoption of minis, where people are buying them left and right. You can see that conversion of, “Oh, trial is actually driving usage.” And then you can follow it through, where you can see the repeat purchase, and it actually drives the business forward.

The honey aisle is almost uniformly yellow packaging. Why is Nate’s orange?

What we realized in that sea of sameness, if you want to stand out, if you don’t want to be treated like a commodity, you need to not look like a commodity. It’s very basic Branding 101: How do you stand out? How do you separate yourself? And that orange pops.

You want to give people visual cues, so they can see that, “Oh, this isn’t the same as everything else.”

Honey’s in the baking aisle, which seems like it could be a limitation when Nate’s is trying to say, “This isn’t just a recipe ingredient; it’s also an energy gel.” So are you trying to get it in different parts of the store to emphasize its other usages?

One of our major missions is to get people to not think of honey as just for tea and biscuits and toast and the like.

When you were younger, your parents probably gave you a teaspoon of honey if you had a sore throat…We launched a line of lozenges this past winter, and as opposed to what’s out on the market right now, which is generally honey’s like, the fifth ingredient in the ingredient deck, ours are made with 100% honey, and that’s it.

But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put lozenges into the baking aisle; who’s looking for those there? And so you’ve got to go introduce yourself to a new buyer in a store. You’re going to see these lozenges show up in the health and wellness section at Target sometime this fall, and I think overall you’re going to see honey much more in the health and wellness space than you do currently.