How we turned honey into something worth talking about.
Most categories don’t suffer from lack of demand, they suffer from lack of imagination. Take honey for example. Nature’s original sweetener, endlessly varied, with millennia of cultural history… and yet on supermarket shelves it was treated with all the excitement of an own-label paperclip.
Rowse had 85% of the market, which sounds impressive until you realise it’s the kind of dominance you only get when no one has been remotely bothered to offer an alternative. Hilltop had 9% and a nagging suspicion that honey could be so much more than something you squeeze on your porridge. They came to us with a challenge: make honey interesting again.
The Hidden Opportunity
The truth is, most people don’t want a product. They want a story they can tell themselves about the product. Wine isn’t fermented grape juice; it’s terroir, vintage, and a whiff of French snobbery. Craft beer isn’t beer; it’s hops, provenance, and a cool can you can Instagram.
Honey, bizarrely, had none of this, despite the fact that every jar is a miniature miracle made by 30,000 flying insects.
So our hunch was simple. If you treat honey like beer or gin, with craft, curiosity, and character, people will start to notice it.
Our Slightly Perverse Approach
Rather than focus on what honey is, we focused on what honey could mean. We borrowed the semiotics of craft categories: bold, distinctive packaging, a language of expertise, and a sense that every jar has its own tale. We made the beekeepers the unseen rockstars and positioned Hilltop as the honey brand that gets it.
At the same time, we didn’t disappear up our own hive. Everyday honey still had to move volume. So, we created a two part strategy. The mass-market range to make Hilltop the default choice, and the premium single-origin range to give it credibility, collectability, and a reason for journalists to write about it!
The Result?
Hilltop is no longer just another jar (or squeezy bottle) on the shelf. It’s a craft honey brand. The first in a category that didn’t know it needed one. Suddenly, shoppers had a reason to switch, to trade up, and to talk about honey again.
We even redesigned the bottle itself and added a ready made drip into the mould for fun!
And here’s the interesting bit. People don’t buy honey because it’s functional. They buy it because it makes their breakfast feel like an occasion. Hilltop now sells not just sweetness but status, story, and the joy of a product that feels as crafted as a flat white in Shoreditch.
Honey, in other words, has finally found its buzz!
