Fruit from Arilje and honey from Vojvodina make for unique products – Happy Honey plans export to EU and USA

Raw honey mixed with raspberries, apricots, plums or organic cocoa and gingerbread is the recipe of new products in the local market – Happy Honey. The product is moderately sweet and can be combined with pancakes, cookies, donuts, tea...

Happy Honey was established this March by Nina Petrovic with partners Marko Mijajlovic and Darko Mandic, and, as she says in her interview for eKapija, the special feature of these products is the unchanged texture before and after the production process. Raw honey is not heated and thereby preserves all its characteristics, whereas the fruit provides authentic color and an unusual taste.

– The most important thing is that we don't heat up honey in the production process and that it therefore stays as it was when it was extracted from the honeycomb. As such, the honey contains only the natural sugars which the human organism needs, whereas heating makes it lose its natural qualities and turn into sugar. That's exactly what we wanted to change. The fullness of taste and vibrant colors make our product unique in the market, and all the natural, good characteristics of raw honey in the form of enzymes, proteins, antioxidants and vitamins are preserved, making it fit perfectly into modern, balanced types of food – Nina Petrovic says.

The idea for this startup came by accident.

– I met Marko Mijajlovic, a beekeeper from Razanj, at one of the fairs. He had made a recipe looking to give honey another dimension. Together with his wife, he had been developing this idea for over five years, and, with the help of Darko Mandic, who has years of experience in the export of Serbian honey, and other partners, we started realizing the idea – Nina explains.

Happy Honey is now produced using a special recipe in the partner facility of the company Sanum per Fructus in Kragujevac.

(Nina Petrovic) The product quality analysis was performed in the laboratories Intertek and QSI in Bremen, Germany, whereas, as our interviewee points out, all the raw materials originate in Serbia – the fruit is from Arilje, and the sunflower honey is from Vojvodina. The product has 300 calories in 100 grams.

As is the case with all new companies, this startup has limited resources which they have gathered using the funds of the co-owners, several people with years of experience in business, finance and production and sale of honey. The products can only be bought online for now, and they will soon be made available in markets in the country and abroad.

– Our plan is for “happy tastes” to be available in markets, both in the country and in Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Spain and the USA, for a start. We are especially delighted with the great interest in the online store in Serbia and, even though people in our country are not used to purchasing products online, our products are already consumed in Nis, Vrsac, Belgrade, Novi Sad and other towns – Nina adds.

Happy Honey also advocated the development of beekeeping in Serbia, and they have given their contribution to the formation of an urban apiary in the center of Belgrade, where their premises are also located, within the Nova Iskra design incubator.

Sanja Sojic