My Big Idea: Just Bee Honey

Hi Joe! What's your elevator pitch?

Just Bee is a wellness company built around honey. Founded in 2015 and inspired by generations of family beekeeping heritage, we create delicious wellness honey blends that support everyday health needs such as immunity, sleep, energy and gut health. By combining premium acacia honey with vitamins and botanicals, we offer a simple, natural alternative to complicated wellness routines. Today, Just Bee serves more than 450,000 customers, employs over 30 people and has grown into a £9.5 million business with a mission to make daily wellness feel simple and delicious.

On top of that, we have a mission to Save the Bees. Since 2015, we have been handing out free packets of bee-friendly flower seeds to our customers and have helped plant over 200 million wildflowers across the UK.

Why does the market need it?

We believe modern wellness has become too complicated. Consumers are overwhelmed by pills, powders, supplements, hacks and routines that can feel clinical and difficult to maintain. At the same time, traditional honey brands tend to focus on provenance or price rather than wellbeing.

We realised nobody was combining natural wellness benefits with something people genuinely enjoy consuming every day. Just Bee sits between wellness and food, combining vitamins and botanicals with premium acacia honey to support health needs such as sleep, immunity, energy and gut health. Our belief is simple: wellness works better when people actually look forward to it.

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Where is the business today? 

Today Just Bee is a £10 million wellness business with more than 30 employees and over 450,000 customers. Since pivoting into wellness honey blends during the first COVID lockdown in 2020, the company has experienced significant growth, earning a place in The Sunday Times 100 Fastest Growing Companies 2026.

The business now operates from dedicated warehouses and production facilities in Manchester and continues to expand its range of wellness products. Alongside commercial growth, Just Bee has helped plant more than 200 million wildflowers since launching and continues to support bee and pollinator populations through its environmental initiatives.

What made you think there was money in this?‍

Our original business was actually a honey sweetened drinks company which launched in 2015, using honey from my father's hives. While the business gained retail listings, media attention and even appeared on Dragons' Den, it struggled commercially.

When COVID hit in 2020, around 80% of our revenue disappeared almost overnight as hospitality and retail shut down. Faced with the prospect of closing the business, Andy, my Co-Founder, and I, began blending wellness honey products at home during lockdown.

We saw consumers were actively seeking natural ways to support immunity and wellbeing at the time, so we developed a lemon, ginger, vitamins and echinacea honey blend. The response was immediate and demand grew rapidly. What had been five years of struggling suddenly became a period of explosive growth, validating the market opportunity for wellness products built around honey.

What's your biggest strength?‍

Our biggest strength is that we've created a brand new category that didn’t exist! It sits between traditional food and wellness. Most wellness products come in the form of pills, powders and capsules, while honey brands focus on provenance and price.

We combine premium acacia honey with vitamins and botanicals to support specific wellbeing needs while ensuring the products remain genuinely enjoyable to consume regularly. We believe we've built a wellness brand in a category nobody previously thought of as wellness.

Our business also benefits from an authentic founder story, deep family beekeeping heritage and a clear mission centred around both wellbeing and supporting pollinators.

What is the secret to making the business work?

Persistence, dynamism and understanding what a customer wants. Also: a lot of luck!

We understand the need to ensure that our product fits the market. Our original drinks business generated attention and sold over a million drinks, but ultimately it wasn't commercially working. 2020 forced us to reassess everything and focus on what customers actually wanted.

Rather than persisting with the original idea, we reinvented the business around a product that solved a genuine consumer need. We accepted that the original plan wasn’t working and had the courage to pivot.

For many years, we were close to throwing in the towel, but eventually it paid off!

How do you market the company?

A significant amount of our growth has come via authentic founder led content rather than heavily polished advertising.

We create reactive social content, film content on smartphones and show customers the real story behind the business. Customers connect with authenticity, particularly when it comes to wellness products, and also excitement around new flavours we release every month as limited editions.

We also build community around our environmental mission. Since day one, we've included bee-friendly wildflower seeds with orders, helping customers feel part of a wider movement to support pollinators and biodiversity.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

Andy and I initially put £66,000 into the business to get it off the ground. After that, we raised £650,000 through Angel investors, which helped us through the first few years. Since 2021, we have been profitable and not raised any further investment.

In 2017, we also appeared on Dragons' Den and received an offer from Peter Jones, but ultimately decided not to proceed with the investment. But it was a massive PR opportunity for the brand - for raising awareness, winning new customers, and attracting new employees and investors.

Tell us about the business model

Since 2020, 100% of our sales have been online. The majority come through our website, but we have a significant proportion coming through Amazon and Tik Tok Shop too.

Like many D2C brands, we use performance marketing ads (on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tik Tok) as our main driver of new customer acquisition. To make this work, a large volume of new creative is uploaded each week with the aim of keeping our CAC (cost of customer acquisition) below a certain level.

About 50% of our revenue comes from new customers and 50% from repeat customer revenue. Repeat customer revenue is much more profitable, so we have a number of tactics which maximise this as much as possible - e.g. email flows, campaigns, limited editions, gifting and new products. We rarely do large discounting.

In 2027, we plan to launch into Retail and feel this is a very exciting growth opportunity for the brand.

What were you doing before?

Andy and I met in graduate roles at PwC in 2006. We trained as accountants and worked in Finance for the first 8 years of our careers. After advising so many other companies, we always knew that one day we would do our own thing and had a shared ambition to build a business around health and wellbeing. In 2014, with some honey from my dad’s beehives, we took the plunge and left our corporate careers to pursue that vision.

Are there any technologies you've found useful?

AI has transformed our business and we have been using it to streamline our customer services and marketing operations for a couple of years now. But it can do so much more and we are looking to build our our brand’s digital brain with AI agents as a next step.

What is the future vision?

Our ambition is to build Just Bee into a leading wellness brand.

By 2029 we want to reach £25 million in revenue. But the number that matters more to me is how many people's daily routines we're part of.

We've proven direct-to-consumer that hundreds of thousands of customers will come back for this, month after month.

The next chapter is getting Just Bee onto the shelves where millions more people shop, through major retail, while developing new products that support a wider range of everyday health needs. We will also explore international expansion.

The bigger ambition is cultural. Right now, wellness feels complicated and expensive for most people. We want to be the brand that changes that, the one that makes a healthy daily habit feel as natural as making a cup of tea.

Throughout that growth, our focus remains the same: making wellness feel simple, natural and delicious.