Andrew Wyszynski is proof that passion is always at the heart of any good business – no matter how long it takes to get there. His lifelong love of bees and beekeeping led him from his family apiarist farm in Poland to Australia and eventually to start his family business, Maya Sunny Honey.

Of course, as anyone who has ever started their own business knows, the path wasn’t nearly as smooth as that. Instead, after migrating in 1988, Andrew worked for many years in queen bee production to support his young family. Throughout this time, the bees he kept as a hobby were an inspiring constant.

“He always kept bees and had hives wherever we were, but his main role was working as a painter,” recalls his daughter Joanna Wyszynski, who runs the operations side of Maya Sunny Honey. His second daughter Maya – named for the famous cartoon bee character who is huge in Poland – takes care of the marketing.

While he might have been working elsewhere, Andrew continued to tinker and experiment with his hives in order to produce the purest possible form of honey and honey products.

“He had an idea that he started working on back in Poland on how to showcase the pureness of bees and what bees do,” explains Joanna. “It was a way to capture the pure beauty of bees in the wild.”

A patented system that bottles purity

Andrew painstakingly developed a system that allowed bees to create their honeycomb directly into empty glass jars. Each jar is its own beehive, sculpted by up to 500 worker bees and untouched by human hands. It’s as beautiful and pure a product as that sounds.

For Andrew, getting the bees into each jar was difficult, but getting them all out was even harder. It took him over 35 years to create this system, which he patented in 2009. It was only then that he devoted himself to fulltime beekeeping, starting Maya Sunny Honey with his daughters to sell raw honey products directly to consumers from his property in Mudgee, NSW.

Today the patent-protected 100 per cent raw honeycomb jars form the backbone of Maya Honey Sunny’s product range.  “There’s a difference and you can tell between raw honey compared to artificial honey,” notes Joanna. “There are different flavoured honeys and the flavours come from the different flowers that the bees collect the nectar from.” Raw honey and honeycomb also contains a wide variety of nutrients, bioactive plant compounds and bee pollen, which the German Federal Board of Health recognises as a medicine.  So it’s as good for you as it’s pretty appearance suggests.

Beekeeper Andrew with daughters and business partners Joanna and Maya

Beekeeper Andrew with daughters and Maya Sunny Honey business partners Joanna and Maya. Image: Supplied

Product packed in glass jars needs extra-special care

To keep up with demand, Maya Sunny Honey sells both direct from their website and wholesale through major stockists like David Jones and boutique retailers. The company has also sold in both Dubai and the US and plans to expand into Japan in the future.

Of course, when you’re selling a precious product like raw honey and honeycomb in glass jars, distribution can be very problematic.

“Our product is fragile glass and it can break easily,” says Joanna. “It’s also honey, which can be affected by how hot the weather is. The honey can be destroyed by the sun, so we are really reliant on having a trustworthy distributor that handles our products with care.”

That courier company is Aramex, who Joanna says have the highest possible standards. “We’ve been using them for quite a while now and we have a lovely driver who picks up our parcels, John, who we’ve developed a great relationship with. He understands our business and that really helps us have trust that our parcels will be delivered with care. He goes above and beyond to make certain we’re satisfied and happy.”

The delicate nature of Maya Sunny Honey's 100% raw honeycomb product makes distribution tricky

The delicate nature of Maya Sunny Honey’s beautiful products makes distribution tricky. Image: Supplied.

A sweet distribution system that’s scalable

Joanna uses the Aramex online portal to book and track jobs and considers the courier company to be “an extension of our business”.

When it comes time to move Maya Sunny Honey back into overseas markets, Joanna is confident that Aramex will make exporting a smooth process. “We trust them and they’re reliable, so we’ll definitely be using Aramex to assist with exporting our goods,” she says.

So the future definitely looks bright for this proud family business. Both Joanna and Maya are an integral part of the business their father started, spreading the word further about the important work of bees. “Bees are critical in our ecosystem,” Andrew has said. “We rely on bees to pollinate the flowers and without bees we wouldn’t be able to survive. No bees, no life.”

Just like the structure of a hive, each family member has a different role to play at Maya Sunny Honey, but all are working towards the same goal.

“We love what we do and hope that our products translate that passion and love,” Joanna says. “We would love for every household to enjoy our honey as much as we do.”

Visit Maya Sunny Honey for more. Find out how Aramex can help your business with their delivery solutions here.


This article is brought to you by Kochie’s Business Builders in partnership with Aramex.





Source link

Success for family-owned Maya Sunny Honey is very sweet indeed