Carolyn Fath
Would you like your spicy honey medium or hot?
Vanessa Jambois can relate to the notorious productivity of bees.
The Madison resident launched her business, Hivecraft, in just two months. The company produces Brave Bee Spicy Honey, which is infused with a blend of chili peppers.
Jambois, an associate business analyst at American Family Insurance, began thinking about starting a food business only recently, though she cooked with her family from an early age, and has been making sauces and desserts at home for fun over the past several years.
Her mother had long encouraged her to consider cooking as a potential career rather than a hobby, and after experimenting with a spicy honey infusion that earned rave reviews at a friend’s party, Jambois felt she was on to something.
She attended Madison’s Edible Startup Summit in August. Seeing the number of successful speakers and businesses there motivated her to make the dream a reality.
“Having a food startup would be a lot more difficult in a lot of other places, but people here are so willing to help share information,” Jambois says, adding that the FEED Kitchens, the commercial kitchen facility where she produces her honey, has been especially helpful in providing “a roadmap of all the things you need to do” before officially launching a food business.
Just weeks after fine-tuning her recipe for spicy honey, made with raw, unfiltered honey from Gentle Breeze Honey in Mount. Horeb, Jambois launched her business. Brave Bee Spicy Honey is now on shelves at both Metcalfe’s locations and will be available shortly at both Willy St. Co-op locations.
Jambois offers two versions, medium and hot. They’re made with different pepper blends, which changes the heat level.
While the bold pairing of sweet and spicy can be foreign to a lot of consumers, Jambois says a few tips on how to use the honey on some of their favorite foods can serve as an easy introduction.
“It’s really good [drizzled] on top of pizza, on fries...in chili, on ribs,” Jambois says. Those who try her honey at product demonstrations often pitch their own recipe ideas to her, she says, like adding it to homemade jerky or incorporating it into craft cocktails.
Her goal is to expand into more Madison-area grocery stores and restaurants, and eventually to Milwaukee. She hopes that additional flavors, like her homemade vanilla bean and ginger honey infusion, will be coming as well.
Jambois typically spends her days off cooking and bottling batches of more than 100 pounds of honey at a time. She conducts all of Hivecraft’s sales, marketing and accounting in her spare time. Her passion for the product and her family’s support are crucial to keeping the business on track, she says. That’s true even from a distance — Jambois’ mother has been in Puerto Rico for the past six months caring for her own mother and has yet to even try the honey.
“She can’t wait to help me with demos, and it’ll be fun to have her cook with me,” Jambois says. She’d even like to encourage her mom to finally start her own food business now that she has some of her own wisdom to share. “I can’t wait until she’s here and she can see it all. I know she’s going to go crazy just to see it on the store shelf!”
For more on Brave Bee Spicy Honey or to place an order online, see hivecrafthoney.com.