Independence and funding
What independence means here, and what it does not
We do not claim to have no connection to the honey industry, because that would be false, and a false independence claim is worse than a declared interest. What we claim is narrower and testable.
Disclosures last re-confirmed in writing on 14 July 2026.
The claim, stated narrowly
Independence on this site is a statement about editorial conduct, not about having no relationship with the trade. Every part of it is something you could catch us breaking.
What we promise
- Nobody pays to be covered. No one can pay to be featured, mentioned, linked, quoted, framed favourably or excluded.
- We name and recommend no sellers, shops or marketplaces, in either direction. Not to praise and not to warn.
- No sponsored posts and no affiliate links. No outbound link on this site earns us a commission. We hold no affiliate accounts.
- No commercial party sees an article before it publishes.
- No commercial relationship influences a grading decision.
The ties we declare
Some people on this team have professional ties to honey production and trading companies. That is stated at the top level of the site rather than at the bottom of a policy page, because it is the first thing a sceptical reader deserves to know.
Specifically
- One of our reporters spent five years as a quality-control officer for a honey exporting company and still belongs to a regional beekeepers' association.
- One contributor takes occasional paid consulting work on food-safety documentation for producers, including one in the honey sector.
- The site's hosting costs in its first year were covered by a founder whose income comes from the wider honey trade.
The individual details, with dates, sit on each person's page and are repeated in the byline block of every article that person touches.
Why we publish anyway
We publish the detail rather than hiding the person, and we think that is the right call rather than a compromise. The people who actually know how this honey is harvested, graded, stored and shipped are people who have worked in it. A site staffed entirely by outsiders with no industry contact would be cleaner on paper and considerably worse informed. Those ties are also why we could get access to harvests, apiaries and lab results that a purely outside newsroom could not.
What a tie buys in access it costs in independence on certain subjects, so those subjects are closed to the person holding it. Anyone with a current commercial interest in a subject cannot write, edit or review that subject, and the recusal is recorded in the article's revision history where a reader can see it.
Where the money comes from
This is a reader-supported information site. Nothing here is for sale: no products, no prices, no cart, no checkout, and no commerce component anywhere in the design because there is no commerce.
Income we take
- Reader support.
- Founder funding for first-year hosting, declared above.
Income we do not take
- Advertising of any kind.
- Sponsorship or paid placement.
- Affiliate or commission revenue.
- Payment from any producer, exporter or seller.
We have logged and refused eleven paid-placement offers since launch.
What we refuse
Not on this site, at any price
- No gifts. Product sent to us unsolicited is not opened, not photographed and not written about. It is disposed of and the sender is told once.
- No seller names. We do not name, rank, review or recommend any shop, marketplace or brand. Best-of product roundups do not exist here.
- No dosing figures. No quantity, spoon count, gram figure or "how much" answer, anywhere, and we say so in the places a reader would look for one.
- No images from a commercial party, free or paid, credited or not.
How to check us
If you think a specific article reads as though it were shaped by one of those ties, tell us and say which paragraph. That is a fair challenge and we would rather answer it than have it sit unspoken. Challenges are handled on a defined track with published turnaround times.
One email a month, when there is something worth saying.
New articles, changes to any of the nine legal-status pages, and a short note on any study worth reading. If a month passes with nothing substantial, you get nothing: we would rather skip than pad. No sponsors, no seller mentions, no third-party sharing.