One of the things that really sets Sunny Honey Company apart from other honey brands is our commitment to producing and sourcing from close personal beekeeper peers and carefully vetted honey operations. We will not ever, and I mean never, go to a large distributor or commercial packing house to source honey if we run out. We will just stop doing business. Period. No exceptions!
One of the best things about our little business of bees and honey being busier than expected is that we get to grow and become a larger employer and supplier and producer than ever before. One of the bad things about our little business of bees and honey is that we are always facing shortages of certain honey varieties that people have come to love and trust. Many of the honey varieties that we produce and source from small producers have an absolute finite amount and when it's gone, it's gone until the next year.
After the christmas holiday season, we found ourselves on the brink of running out of at least 3-4 favorite small crop honeys and we decided that instead of sell it all over the winter and face the possibility of having only 1-2 varieties of honey over the spring and early summer until 2017 crops are ready (honey harvest season in the pacific northwest is primarily in the late summer / early fall with the exception of some spring flows), that we would pull back and be reserved and play it safe. So we shut down the website sales and probably made a bunch of people upset. We also stopped accepting special orders and additional wholesale.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what most businesses (especially in amazon's seattle!) would do but we are not most businesses. We do not have everything in all sizes, all the time, for everyone, everywhere.
In all honestly, when we decided to agree to take over the location inside Pike Place Market where we currently reside, it was our choice to add an addendum to our lease agreement with the historic commission that stated if we had a crop failure and couldn't find honey from an actual local beekeeper to sell that we would be able to close the store and break our lease! For the traditional business model of supply and demand that would be insane to do, but we don't have a traditional model of business. As a business We enjoy growing larger and supplying more but we have boundaries because we are farmers and we produce and sell seasonal food.
So thank you for being patient while we weathered the winter months. Spring has sprung all around us and our bees are fat and happy and ready to produce! Fingers crossed that this year will be the best yet!!!!!