HiveMind AI

Pricing honey for farmers' markets: cost it, compare it, then raise it

By HiveMind AI ·

The first year we sold honey we priced it by looking at the table next to ours and knocking a dollar off. We sold out by eleven, drove home pleased, and worked out that evening that we had paid for the privilege. This is the arithmetic we should have done first, with the published figures we now check against each spring.

Start with what a jar costs you

Not what the honey is worth. What the jar costs to put on the table. Write down, per one-pound jar:

  • Jar and lid. Glass or plastic, with the lid, at the case price you actually paid including shipping, divided by the count.
  • Label. Printed labels are cheap per sheet and expensive per jar when you print forty and use twenty. Count the ones you threw away.
  • Extraction and bottling. Filters, buckets, the extractor's share of its purchase price over the years you will use it, the propane or electricity to warm a crystallised pail, and the one jar in thirty that leaks or breaks.
  • The hive's share. Sugar, treatments, replacement queens or packages, woodenware. Divide the season's hive costs by the pounds you harvested. In a poor year this number alone can be a dollar or two a pound.
  • The stall. Market fee, insurance if the market requires it, table, canopy, signage, divided by the jars you sell on a normal Saturday, not your best one.
  • The drive. Miles there and back, at whatever your tax authority lets you deduct per mile, divided by the jars sold.
  • Your hours. Extracting, bottling, labelling, loading, four hours at the stall, unloading. Put a wage on it. Any wage. Zero is the number that makes the business look like it works when it does not.

Add it up. For a small yard with a bought extractor, a paid stall and an honest hourly rate, the total is often a surprise, and it is the floor. A price below it is a hobby subsidising strangers, which is a fine choice as long as it is a choice.

Then compare to what the market is paying

Two public series are worth knowing. They measure different things, and the gap between them is where your price lives.

The USDA's annual honey report measures what producers were paid, blended across bulk, co-op and retail channels. For 2025 it reports: "United States honey prices increased 27 percent during 2025 to $3.05 per pound, compared to $2.41 per pound in 2024", on production of 116 million pounds, down 14 percent (USDA NASS, Honey, March 2026). The same report notes those prices "reflect the portions of honey sold through cooperatives, private, and retail channels", so the average is pulled down hard by drum sales. It tells you the floor of the whole industry, not the price at your table.

Bee Culture's monthly regional price report measures the other end: what jars sell for on the shelf, collected from beekeepers in seven US regions. The February 2026 report, covering November and December 2025 sales, lists retail shelf prices with a national average and the range reported:

  • One-pound glass or plastic: regional averages from $10.45 to $15.40, national average $12.14, reported range $5.87 to $21.00.
  • Half-pound: national average $6.93, so about $13.85 a pound.
  • Twelve-ounce plastic (the squeeze bear): average $8.94, about $11.91 a pound.
  • Pint: average $15.97, range $8.00 to $60.00.
  • Quart: average $26.46.
  • Two-pound: average $20.58, about $10.29 a pound.
  • Bulk, for contrast: a 55-gallon drum of light honey averaged $2.83 a pound.

Read the range as well as the average. Someone in that survey is selling a pound jar for under six dollars and someone is selling one for twenty-one, and both of them think they are right. The average is where the middle of the country sits; your market's position in the range depends on who shops there and what else is on the table.

A caution on both series. The USDA figure is national and annual, and Bee Culture's regions are large; the report's own methodology notes gaps where "no information was sent to us" for an item in a region. Neither is a price list for your town. They are the frame you hang your own figure in.

The premiums that are real

Size. Bee Culture's own averages show it: honey in a half-pound jar sells for about $13.85 a pound, in a one-pound jar for $12.14, in a two-pound jar for $10.29. Small jars carry more price per pound and cost more per pound to fill, so they are not free money. But a shopper who will not spend fourteen dollars will spend seven, and a half-pound jar is also how a new customer tries you before they commit to the quart.

Varietal. A honey you can name (what bloomed, what month, which yard) sells against grocery honey rather than against the keeper two tables down. The retail range above is where varietal premiums live: the $21 jar is almost never "wildflower". The requirement is that the name is true. If the bees had access to three things, say so; "late summer, mostly goldenrod and aster" is a varietal description and it is honest.

Comb, creamed and chunk. The same report lists one-pound creamed honey averaging $15.55 and one-pound cut comb $17.72, against $12.14 for liquid. Comb costs you foundation and yield; creamed costs you time and a seed batch. Both are a premium for work the customer can see.

The story is not a premium on its own. A card that says "raw, local, unfiltered" is on every table at the market. What is not on every table is a jar the customer can trace: which yard, which month, what was in bloom. That is the record you already keep if you keep records at all.

Labels: the rules you must check yourself

Federal labelling is the easy half. The FDA's guidance on honey labelling says a jar of pure honey needs its name, and because "honey is a single-ingredient food, you do not need to include an ingredient statement on the label". It is equally clear about the one thing you may not do: "A product consisting of honey and a sweetener cannot be labeled with the common or usual name 'honey'", and a flavoured honey must say so and list its ingredients (FDA, Proper Labeling of Honey and Honey Products). Net weight and your name and address are standard food-label requirements and your state will expect them too.

The hard half is state law, and it genuinely varies, so nothing in this paragraph is advice for your state. Most US states let small producers sell honey under a cottage-food exemption with a sales cap, a list of permitted venues, and a required disclaimer in a minimum type size. Florida's rules are a worked example of the shape: honey producers may "sell honey directly to the consumer from the home, a roadside stand, a farmers' market, or a flea market", must "not exceed $250,000 in annual gross sales", and must print "Made in a cottage food operation that is not subject to Florida's food safety regulations" in at least 10-point type, with the operation's name and full street address and no fictitious names (UF/IFAS, Bottling, Labeling, and Selling Honey in Florida). Your state's cap, wording, venues and whether a kitchen inspection is needed will differ. Ask your state's department of agriculture or your extension office, and ask again when the law changes, because cottage-food laws have changed in many states in the last five years.

Two more things a market manager will ask about: whether you carry product liability insurance, and whether your scale, if you sell by weight at the table, is certified. Both are local questions. Ask before the season, not at the gate.

Cash or card

Card readers cost a percentage of each sale plus a few cents a tap; check your processor's current rate rather than a number from a blog post. Against that, a shopper who did not bring cash is a shopper who did not buy a quart, and the card buyers in our experience spend more per visit than the cash buyers. Take both.

What matters more than the fee is the record. Every card sale leaves a trail with a date and an amount; cash does not unless you write it down, and at the end of a market day you will not remember whether the fourth customer bought two pints or three. Tally cash sales as they happen, by jar size, on paper or on your phone. Tax time and next year's pricing both depend on that tally, and so does knowing which size actually sells.

When to raise the price

Raise it when any of these is true.

You sell out before the market closes, more than occasionally. Selling out at eleven is not success. It means the last three hours of customers paid nothing and the ones who came early got a discount you did not mean to give.

Your costs moved. Jars, sugar and stall fees all rose in the last few years, and the USDA's own producer price moved 27 percent in one year. If your shelf price has not moved since 2022, your margin has been quietly repriced for you.

The market's range moved. Look at Bee Culture's report each spring. If the regional average for a pound jar has passed your price, you have become the cheap table without deciding to.

Your product changed. The year you can name a varietal, or you add comb, or you start putting the yard and the month on the label, the jar is a different product.

Raise by a round amount, once a season, and say so plainly on a card if you like: "Jars cost more this year. So does sugar." Customers who buy honey at a farmers' market are not comparing you to the grocery aisle, or they would be in the grocery aisle. They are paying for the fact that you know what is in the jar. Charge for knowing.

What we write down, so the sum can be done

The cost side: every expense, with a category, the date and what it was for, including the mileage and the stall. The sale side: every market day's sales by jar size and payment method, and which batch each jar came from. From those two columns the cost per jar, the price per pound by size, and the sell-out time are all arithmetic, and the decision to raise becomes a thing you read off rather than a thing you argue about in the car.

HiveMind AI records each sale with its items and payment method and each expense by category with its receipt, and ties a bottling run back to the harvest it came from, so a jar on the table can be traced to a yard and a month. A spreadsheet with the same columns works. The point is that the columns exist before the season, because you cannot reconstruct a Saturday in July from memory in January.

Sources

  • USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Honey (March 2026): https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/795818/hony0326.pdf
  • Bee Culture, February 2026 Regional Honey Price Report (data collected November and December 2025): https://beeculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2026-Feb-Honey-Report.pdf, from the report index at https://www.beeculture.com/monthly-regional-honey-price-report/
  • US Food and Drug Administration, Guidance for Industry: Proper Labeling of Honey and Honey Products: https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-proper-labeling-honey-and-honey-products
  • University of Florida IFAS Extension, ENY-159/IN918, Bottling, Labeling, and Selling Honey in Florida: https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/IN918

These are general notes from one family's selling, not legal, tax or food-safety advice. Cottage-food law, labelling rules and sales tax differ by state and change; check yours.