Main Street Honey Shoppe offers a wide variety of local honey as well as specialty honeys from Europe, Africa, New Zealand and beyond. When you enter our Honey Shoppe, the first thing you will notice is the sweet aroma of honey and beeswax that permeates throughout. Your stress level from the outside world immediately lowers a couple of notches. Our friendly and knowledgeable staff will introduce you to the health benefits of our wide selection of natural bee products. Finally, the honey tasting… how sweet it is!
We are dedicated to bringing quality honey and healthy honeybee products from the farm to the city. As part of us adapting to the needs of the city, we now keep our own bees as our “Bees in the City” program and produce local Vancouver urban honey. Our Zero Waste alternatives include “Honey On Tap” where customers can have their honey containers refilled thus eliminating packaging waste.
We continuously search for, and build relationships with, well respected producers of quality honeybee products so we can provide a wide variety of top quality honeybee products for our customers.
Question: How are you supporting other local businesses?
Answer: We work with local suppliers for our product and service needs wherever practical. The vast majority of our honey comes from BC beekeepers in Cloverdale, Creston, Armstrong, Grand Forks, Princeton, and the Skeena Valley. These include Honeybee Centre, Wild Antho, Terry’s Honey Farm, and Swan Valley Apiaries. We also work with a number of local companies producing pure beeswax candles, locally roasted coffee, loose leaf tea blends, natural skincare products, beeswax polishes and wraps, and local artisans producing honey pots and honey drippers. These include Republica Coffee Roasters, West Holme, Chado Tea, Healing Bees, and Claphams Beeswax Products.
For the most part we use small to medium sized local service providers for our IT needs, maintenance trades (plumbing, electrical, fire & safety), equipment maintenance, and even a neighborhood vehicle service business. Our financial services are provided by Vancity and our accounting by Fernandez Young.
Question: What social and environmental practices are you proud of?
Answer: When we first started our business in Vancouver, our customers were outspoken about how they wished our beehives would be “really local” from their neighbourhoods. Because of this, we connected with different parks around the Vancouver area, and now you can find our hives in VanDusen Botanical Gardens, Queen Elizabeth Park, and Sunset Nursery. The beautiful thing about this is that our bees help pollinate Vancouver’s parks and gardens keeping our urban areas vibrant. We practice small-scale sustainable beekeeping in the city and since we do not move our colonies, our ecological footprint is small. We use minimal to no packaging for our products. Our very popular “Honey on Tap” program allows our customers to bring in their own empty jars for refills. Most of our pure beeswax candles have zero packaging including an option for our customers to purchase tea light candles with no plastic or metal cup.
All of our staff are local and come from a variety of backgrounds. They provide very friendly, knowledgeable, and engaging service to our customers. Our staff have the opportunity to visit our beehives with some of them actively taking care of our city hives. We take opportunities to introduce our live observation honeybee hive to the thousands of visitors each year at education events including Pollinator Days at VanDusen Gardens and during large street festivals such as Italian Day on the Drive. Staff also have the opportunity to take advantage of our healthy (and delicious) products themselves with generous staff discounts.
We provide a variety of natural healthy products for our customers beyond our specialty honeys. These include pure beeswax candles which help clean the air, bee propolis which provides immune system support, bee pollen (natures multivitamin and protein source), to medical grade manuka honey for wound care.
We generally like to target our social support to smaller local fundraising activities. We provide this support by donating gift baskets for auction at events and the ability for school groups to purchase some of our core products at a discount for fundraising events.
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