By Cindy Green

Marshall, Minn. — “Nobody’s going to pay that kind of money for a jar of honey.”

So said his beekeeper father eight years ago when Steve Klein started making flavored honey for more than double regular retail prices. Eighteen flavors later, it’s sweet victory for Klein, whose honeys are sold in 46 states. And AURI is helping him design more products — soaps, syrups and preserves — for Klein’s new “Walnut Grove Mercantile” label.

Busy as a bee

A rich, sugary smell permeates the Marshall plant where Klein blends amaretto with crystallized, whipped honey. His honey has won 10 championships at the National Honey Show during the past 16 years.

Amaretto’s a popular flavor, he says, as are blueberry, vanilla nut and apricot. Sold under Klein and Camden Wood (a local state park) labels, his honeys also grace several private labels, including Vintage Rose, Northland Native American Products, Tastefully Simple and P&P Specialties. Companies either bring their own recipes or use Klein’s, “but there’s a few I won’t part with,” he says. He goes through “hundreds of thousands of pounds” of honey a year, most from his own hives.

Small-town flavor

Walnut Grove is a southwest Minnesota town made famous by writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, who spent some of her childhood there. The nationally-recognized name is well-suited to Klein’s marketing strategy for Walnut Grove Mercantile. Fictional merchant Lars Olafson cheerily greets customers from ads and point-of-purchase displays filled with products labeled in 19th century style.

Over the past year, AURI’s Jerry Crawford, an analytical chemist, has helped Klein develop the Walnut Grove line, starting with handmade soaps. “We tore down major competitors’ soaps,” analyzed their composition, then “modified (the formulas) to increase lathering,” Crawford says. “They’re super-fatted for a nice feel.”

Crawford and Klein worked with dozens of substances and scents such as pink clay, oatmeal and oil of rosewood. They settled on blending beeswax with oils of wheat germ, palm, olive, coconut and castor, then added ingredients to make cinnamon-oatmeal, lilac, prairie spice and honeysuckle soaps. The lilac formula, tinted with a rare “ultramarine violet” color, took the most time, Crawford says.

Next they worked with product specialists to develop four flavors of preserves — strawberry, plum, raspberry and apple butter — using the same “beat the competitor” approach. Most recently, they developed red raspberry and blueberry syrups utilizing corn syrup from the nearby Minnesota Corn Processors plant. The new products expand the line of gourmet honeys, marketed under such provocative names as Pecan Pleasure, Exotic Guava, Rum Raisin and Lemon Meringue.

Attacked from all sides

Nationwide, there are 2,000 commercial honey producers. Florida and California, with their citrus orchards, lead the nation in honey production. Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana are generally in the top six.

“The beekeeping business has been under a lot of pressure,” Klein says, especially in the Midwest where “the source of flowers has been drying up or disappearing.” Stronger herbicides combined with herbicide-resistant crop varieties leave less wild clover in fields. “Clover is considered a noxious weed and county governments still spray ditches to get rid of it,” Klein says. Federal CRP program contracts, which pay farmers to keep marginal land out of production and in its wild state, are expiring.

In southwest Minnesota, “Lyon County used to be one of the largest producers of cattle, which need alfalfa, a good source of honey. Now there are few farmers raising any livestock — let alone beef cattle — and not as much alfalfa is being grown. That’s made a big difference. Add all those things up and there’s not much left. ... It’s happening around the country — Iowa has a tenth what it did 10 years ago.”

Pests have compounded the problem. “In the mid-’80s, mites introduced from South America, possibly from illegally imported bees, spread across the country.” Infected hives have to be quarantined, significantly reducing production.

“Within the last year and a half, a hive beetle has been introduced in Florida — we’re not sure where it originated — that can quickly destroy an entire hive.” There’s no FDA approved treatment for this latest infestation. And because bees migrate or are transported by beekeepers to wintering habitat in climates such as Texas and California, southern pests can quickly become a Midwest problem.

Ironically, while U.S. honey supplies deplete, so do prices. “Two or three years ago, the price (paid to producers) was close to one dollar a pound,” Klein says. “Now it’s little more than 50 cents. A lot of that is due to imports from China, Canada and Argentina.”

All the pressure on the honey industry gave Klein the impetus to develop the Walnut Grove line. Value-added means survival, he says.

Survival instinct

Klein knew he had to market aggressively when he left teaching in the early ’80s to take over the bee business his dad started almost a half century earlier. He was pitching honey for fundraising at a 1991 Twin Cities school convention when he met Dan Stewart, a food marketer from Arkansas.

Stewart, whose wife was selling a handwriting program at the convention, peppered Klein with questions, then later met with him in Marshall. “He recommended developing better labels and flavoring. At the time, coffee flavors were just coming out and he thought I could market flavored honey to stir in coffee.”

Trained as a chemist, Klein liked the idea of formulating new products so he hired Stewart as a consultant. “Before you knew it, we were going full speed,” he says.

Stewart has moved on to start his own fundraising food business, and Klein’s business keeps growing. Along with his wife Kay, he’s hoping to make the business successful enough so at least one of his four children will be interested in taking over someday.

And what does Dad think of it all now? “Well, if he’s talking to me, he’s still skeptical. But if he’s talking to someone else, he’s proud.”