For several years, professional beekeeping has faced significant challenges: parasites, pesticides, climate change... Beekeepers demonstrate admirable resilience in overcoming these obstacles. However, one persistent issue remains: the chronically low price of honey, exacerbated by massive low-cost imports, often accompanied by fraudulent practices.
Seeing our clients and partners struggle deeply affects us. Without beekeepers, there would be no crop pollination, no advancement in techniques, no breeding programs, and no beekeeping equipment industry. The stakes are simply too high to remain inactive in the face of this ongoing situation.
At BroodMinder, we are neither politicians nor union representatives, but if there is one thing we know how to do, it's work with data. So, how could we support the sector?
This is how our project Honey Trade Minder (HTM) was born. Its goal? To make the international flow of honey visible and understandable. We believe it is essential to grasp the environment in which your profession operates. As W. Edwards Deming once said:
"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion."
We have therefore developed an interactive, precise, and accessible tool to explore and analyze import/export and production flows on a global scale. In this first version, we have focused on the European market, which is bearing the full brunt of these challenges.
The tool relies exclusively on official data from FAO and Eurostat. It updates automatically to remain reliable and current as new data becomes available.
Warning: Production data from 2023 to now are not available for all countries, FAO database is not yet updated.
Furthermore, we have designed an innovative algorithm capable of tracing not only the primary origin of honey but also its upstream origins when a flow transits through several countries. This engineering challenge, based on complex matrix logic, gave us a few sleepless nights, but the result is here, and we are proud to share it with you.
We hope that Honey Trade Minder will be a valuable resource for beekeepers to better understand the market, anticipate its trends, and act with greater precision. Feel free to explore it, test it, and share your feedback with us at support@broodminder.com.
Know that we are, and will remain, by your side. The BroodMinder Team