The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games: Raising the Bar for Sustainability

A few years ago, John Rowe tripped on a hiking trail and suddenly found himself in a sticky situation.

The jar of honey in his knapsack was a pile of glass shards floating in a pool of amber liquid spreading over his clothes and his tent.

“I had two immediate thoughts,” recalls the Canadian entrepreneur.  “One was that I needed to get better coordinated.  The other was that there had to be a better way to take honey with you.”

It turns out there was.  The engineer and son of a fifth-generation farmer on Prince Edward Island just had to create the technology and the company to do it.

These days, Rowe is busy with what he calls the world’s first line of pure, dehydrated honey products.  They are being produced by his company, Island Abbey Foods, in Charlottetown.

In 2008, Rowe launched the Honey Drop, a beehive version of the sugar cube that is five grams of pure, solid dehydrated honey with all the colour, flavour and nutrition of the original without the stickiness.

A key market was tea drinkers.  Rowe says they’ve responded enthusiastically to the natural sweetener, which dissolves quickly in hot liquid.

He followed up in 2009 with Honey Delights, the “world’s first 100 per cent pure honey candy”.

Both products are generating international interest that is being driven by increasing global tea consumption and by growing evidence of the health benefits of honey.

“People like the idea of a completely natural sweetener that has not been refined or added to.”

And then there is the non-stick appeal.

“Honey has a lot going for it but it has a problem,” says Rowe.  “It can be a gooey and sticky mess. We found a way to get rid of that by completely removing the water.  You can hold our honey in your hand.”

Creating water-free honey turned out to be an engineering marathon.

“It is very difficult to dry honey,” says Rowe.  “It took us several years of trial and error to develop the technology and a process to do it in a way that preserves everything good about honey.”

While other honey candies and beverage sweeteners are on the market, Rowe says they have sugar, corn syrup and other additives in them.

“Our products are 100 per cent pure honey from Prince Edward Island.”

The company is currently selling its products across Canada and is beginning to export into the U.S. and Europe.

It’s just one more example of the innovative thinking that is giving Canadian agriculture a gold medal reputation on the international stage.