Here’s Some Sweet News You Can Use from Bloomberg
Charles Carlson
■ May 26, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT
America Can’t Produce Enough Honey
● Honey has emerged as a favorite sweetener of the “clean eating” crowd. The surge in demand could help turn around the US bee industry — if it can keep up.
● By Ilena Peng
Magpie Cafe in Sacramento, California, goes through a 5-gallon bucket of honey about every three weeks, using it to sweeten its crispy pork belly and mix up batches of honey lemonade. It’s not cheap: Co-owner Janel Inouye pays 30% more for honey than she did five or six years ago. “I don’t know that I’ve seen anything that has been a sticker shock the way that we’ve seen honey jump,” she says. But the sweetener, for its flavor and complexity, is unmatched. She says she’d sooner pull the crispy pork belly from her menu than swap out the honey.
Honey is hot these days, with Americans consuming more of it per capita than ever, even as wider sweetener use plateaus. Demand is being fueled by a combination of trends, including a move by consumers away from processed sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup and toward so-called clean eating. Even though honey still spikes blood sugar like any other sweetener, it benefits from a vague health halo — It has antioxidants! It might help with your allergies! Bees make it! — that’s driving both restaurants and home chefs to increasingly swap it in.
Soccer legend David Beckham last year introduced Beeup, a line of honey-sweetened fruit snacks. Colorado-based Local Hive recently introduced single-serve packets of honey for runners to down as a quick energy boost on the go. In the 12 months ended in late March, Americans bought $1.6 billion worth of honey, according to retail data from Circana, up 10% from a year earlier.
Spicy varieties are proliferating as well: McDonald’s earlier this year rolled out a limited-time hot honey menu; the spicy-sweet condiment has also popped in bagel chain Einstein Bros.’ cream cheese and in Smithfield’s hickory-smoked bacon. Hot honey appeared on almost 12% of restaurant menus in the first quarter of 2026, more than triple the share in 2021, according to research firm Datassential.
But as consumers swarm, honey production in America is at an all-time low, according to US Department of Agriculture data dating to 1987. One reason is the parasitic Varroa destructor, which has decimated hives ever since its appearance in the late ’80s. More than 60% of honeybee colonies in the US died from June 2024 to January 2025 — the largest seasonal die-off on record — after being infected by mites resistant to the industry’s most widely used pesticide. For those bees that made it through unscathed, it’s generally more lucrative for beekeepers to put them to work pollinating crops, rather than dedicating the insects to honeymaking, even at today’s elevated prices. Bees that work as pollinators still make honey, but much less of it.
Most beekeepers start their year out West pollinating specialty crops such as almonds in California before splitting the hives to rebuild bee populations. Those divisions will result in more insects for pollination but also in smaller, weaker hives that make less honey. Even though consumers might pay $10 or $20 a pound at their farmers market, beekeepers usually get less than $2 a pound on average for unprocessed honey. With such low payouts, honey and other non-pollination business accounted for less than 20% of bee producers' income last year, according to the USDA.
Making honey in the US just “hasn’t been that lucrative,” says Heidi Heitkamp, a former senator for top honey-producing state North Dakota, who’s now the director of agriculture at management consulting firm AlliantGroup. Focusing more on higher-paying pollination has “led to an inability to take advantage of what looks likely to be a permanent increase in the use of honey going forward in our country.”
Near-record imports are flowing in to fill that widening gap, with India, Argentina, Brazil and Vietnam emerging as some of the top suppliers. In general, consumers don’t seem to mind — more overseas supply keeps prices from rising higher still; they may not even realize their honey isn’t American-made. But the domestic industry does, and it’s been trying to keep imported honey at bay. The American Honey Producers Association and Sioux Honey Association in 2022 successfully petitioned the US Department of Commerce to tariff major foreign honey sources.
Even private-equity-backed Sweet Harvest Foods, which announced in December that it had become the country’s largest beekeeper, still needs foreign shipments to meet demand. (The company declined to say how much honey it imports.) And that’s after building an in-house research team focused on boosting yields — that is, making more honey with the same number of colonies — and adding a new facility in Florida for extracting honey. “You’ve got this tension between this huge demand increase in a large category coupled with some declining domestic production,” says Ken Stickevers, executive chairman of Sweet Harvest Foods, which produces 5 million to 6 million pounds of honey a year. “That — if you can solve that riddle and feed the category — leads to a lot of opportunity for us.”
Mike’s Hot Honey, whose namesake condiment is increasingly found on pizzas and cheese plates in its home borough of Brooklyn as well as across the country, gets its honey from the US and from South American countries including Argentina and Brazil. Scaling up “is one of the harder parts of growing any business,” says Chief Executive Officer Matt Beaton. Costs have risen over the long term, but one unique property of honey — it doesn’t expire — has allowed the company to stock up when costs are lower to keep prices stable for customers.
In Manhattan, Nitasha Uppal and Daniel Salazar, co-owners of West Village cafe Hungry Llama, put a signature drink on their menu when they opened in 2024: an iced whipped honey latte finished with a sprinkle of bee pollen. They were already using honey at home as a quick postworkout carbohydrate boost or consuming it fermented with garlic, ginger and turmeric for immunity, and they were excited to showcase the kinds of specialty honeys they’d buy at farmers markets.
They’re already maximizing the sweetener by whipping less than a tablespoon into a foam that grows about 10 times in volume to cover a whole cup. But given the high honey prices, especially for specialty varieties, they quickly had to forgo their hyperlocal ambitions. Instead they buy 5-pound bottles of wildflower honey from a food distributor, which sources it from Pennsylvania as well as Argentina and Canada. If they’d insisted on using only single-source local honey, Uppal says, the espresso drink — currently $7.50 — “would have to be easily like $15 for it to have worked out.” That price, she acknowledges, would be hard for customers to swallow.
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