Douglas Raggio founded his company Pass the Honey in 2018 after learning about fraud in the honey industry.

Around that time, he’d been regularly making himself lemon-ginger tea to help support his immune system—and he didn’t want to continue sweetening it with honey that was likely fake. (From research he’d read, he’d learned that as much as 70 percent of honey is adulterated.)

Douglas Raggio, Founder, Pass the Honey

“It was ironic that I was knowingly using adulterated honey while simultaneously attempting to heal myself from illness,” he says.

So he switched from consuming honey to raw honeycomb—which he says is impossible to fake—but he found that the way it was packaged was extremely inconvenient: “It was after a few failed attempts to use honeycomb in the existing 7-oz. or 14-oz. formats (waste, ants, etc.) that I began to develop packaged, individual portions for daily use.”

“It was ironic that I was knowingly using adulterated honey while simultaneously attempting to heal myself from illness." - Douglas Raggio

Pass the Honey currently offers single-unit portions of honeycomb that are available in two case formats, one for retail and another for foodservice.

Pass the Honey individual retail packs

“Honeycomb is the origin/source of liquid honey and contains all the benefits of honey but in its natural form, thus avoiding the highly fraudulent liquid honeys on the market,” Raggio says. “We sell trust and integrity of honey. Sadly, with the sheer amount of fraud in liquid honey, it’s highly plausible that the average consumer has never tasted real honey. This is what we seek to change.”

Raggio chose not to pursue organic certification for his honeycomb because the US National Organic Program (NOP) has no specific standards for apiculture. Instead, honey producers are certified under the NOP guidelines for livestock.

Pass the Honey's Turkish beekeepers' hives

“The [NOP’s] lack of official apiculture-specific rules makes certification of apiculture difficult, and current certification approaches inconsistent,” says Raggio.

“We sell trust and integrity of honey. Sadly, with the sheer amount of fraud in liquid honey, it’s highly plausible that the average consumer has never tasted real honey. This is what we seek to change.” - Douglas Raggio

Pass the Honey's Turkish beekeepers

So instead of going the organic certification route, Raggio decided to develop his own “Regenerative Beekeeping Production Standards” for Pass the Honey. These standards include (but are not limited to) the following: 

• Hives must be kept in areas with access to high-quality and abundant year-round forage that is absent of applications of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and industrial contamination.
• At the end of a production season, the hives must be left with reserves of honey and pollen sufficiently abundant to survive the period without nectar/honeydew.
• If beekeepers deem it is necessary to supplementally feed bees to maintain their health or due to a disturbance in local forage resources, honey bees may be fed supplemental feed after honey harvest. Permitted feeds include: Honey, sugar water, sucrose, fructose, and glucose. ... The producer must not provide supplemental feed less than 15 days prior to placement of bee product collection equipment.
• Beekeepers must use Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and have a preventative pest control plan.
• Prohibited substances include: Coumaphos (CheckMite+), Fluvalinate (Apistan, Mavrik), Flumethrin, Amitraz (Miticur, TakTic, Mitac), Fenpyroximate (Hivastan).
• Hives should be constructed of natural materials such as wood, straw, or clay.

To develop its standards, Pass the Honey consulted Naturland Standards for Organic Beekeeping, Certified Naturally Grown Apiary Standards, and the 2010 National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) Apiculture Recommendation.

Instead of going the organic certification route, Raggio decided to develop his own “Regenerative Beekeeping Production Standards” for Pass the Honey.

When looking to source honeycomb for his company, Raggio says he quickly discovered that buying from US producers was not an option.

“I was unable to find a domestic beekeeper who would sell us comb at any meaningful volumes. Every beekeeper we spoke to indicated an awareness of pesticide bioaccumulation in the wax that would impede a sale,” he says. “I later learned that this is a result of beekeepers’ dependence on pollination services and not honey sales. Fraud had driven down honey pricing so far that honey production was no longer a viable business.”

As a result, Raggio and his team began studying the global honey supply system in order to “identify production regions that did not participate in pollination services and had ample non-industrial forage zone and generational beekeepers.”

They eventually learned that Turkey is a country with “a long history of beekeeping. Honey is a part of their culture, and they take pride in it,” Raggio says. “We began our work with a US-based company to import our honeycomb, and they’ve been working with third-generation Turkish beekeepers for more than 50 years.”

Douglas Raggio, Founder, Pass the Honey

Pass the Honey is also in the process of developing new relationships with beekeepers in other countries. “We aim to expand and offer a number of honey varieties that come from around the world and support smallholder, regenerative beekeepers in different social and ecological contexts,” Raggio says.

Pass the Honey uses a third-party lab to test all its honeycomb lots for antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other industrial contaminants.

“Currently, we are using the EPA’s maximum residue limits (MRLs) as the threshold for residues,” says Raggio. “However, all our products are way below the thresholds IF they have residues at all.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only has MRLs (known as “tolerances”) for three substances for honey—Tau-Fluvalinate, Coumaphos, and Amitraz. So when testing for other chemicals, Pass the Honey’s lab generally relies on “EPA standards for similar food matrices (such as eggs),” Raggio explains. And in the case of glyphosate, he says the lab uses its own extremely low threshold of 0.5 ppb.

Pass the Honey uses a third-party lab to test all its honeycomb lots for antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other industrial contaminants.

In addition to founding and running Pass the Honey, Raggio is also chair of the Regenerative Apiculture Working Group (RAWG) and founder of the Regenerative Honey Initiative (RHI).

RAWG is a group of beekeepers, landowners, researchers, honey buyers, consumer educators, ecologists, and regenerative designers working to “organize the honey industry and its stakeholders around regenerative practices, focusing on standards, testing, and education in order to create a value-retentive beekeeping model,” Raggio says.

Pass the Honey's beekeepers' hives in Turkey

RHI, on the other hand, is an effort by Pass the Honey to support domestic honeycomb production for research purposes. “RHI encompasses our domestic research acreage for developing Regenerative Apiculture standards in partnership with RAWG,” Raggio explains. “Pass the Honey currently has 1.1M acres committed and will be placing hives in early 2023 across five climates zones in the US for research and qualification of regenerative apiculture. The majority of the acreage is privately held timberland and adjacent to both BLM and US Forest Service holdings.”

In terms of his future plans for Pass the Honey, Raggio is very clear about his mission—and doesn’t mince words. “I have zero intention to sell this company, have shunned VC funding, and know there are decades of work ahead to bring trust back to the honey industry,” he says. “We’re up for it and welcome others to join us in gaining clarity and bringing knowledge to buyers and consumers alike.”