MeliBio, a company from California, has developed honey in the laboratory. The objective is to no longer deprive the bees of the fruits of their labor. And apparently the taste is very close to the natural product.
You may not have guessed it, but honey is not vegan. Vegans indeed consider that beekeeping exploits the work of bees and that it is therefore animal cruelty, even if, originally, honey is produced by bees for bees. This is what provides them with energy, vitamins, proteins like water and food for human beings.
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Throughout its life, a bee will produce the equivalent of one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. She fetches nectar from flowers, up to 1,500 flowers per day, stores it in one of her stomachs where it begins to be transformed and brings it back to the hive to feed other bees. However, beekeepers take this honey and replace it with syrup which does not have the same nutritional capacity at all.
Mimicking honey at the molecular level
Darko Mandich from Serbia worked in this industry for years in Europe. And so as not to deprive the bees of the fruits of their labor, he decided to settle in California and found MeliBio there. Protecting bees means protecting the best pollinator on the planet and therefore, at the end of the chain, human beings. To create his vegan honey, he somehow reproduced the work of bees.
He explains that he has, thanks to technology, imitated honey at the molecular level, all from the same type of plants, hibiscus for example, which the bees will forage, by adding fructose, glucose, from fruits and vegetables and a fermentation process in a laboratory in Oakland, near San Francisco. MeliBio even calls on honey sommeliers to test its taste and control its quality. The current version of Mellody – the name of this vegan honey – would have taken 300 tries.
Those who have tested it say that it is almost impossible to tell the difference with real honey, and that above all, the taste is much closer than the current alternatives, which are very sweet, such as maple syrup in particular. MeliBio has raised more than nine million dollars. Knowing that honey would represent a global market of nine billion dollars, investors are listening. To popularize Mellody, MeliBio had the idea of giving it a taste to the chef of a starred restaurant, Eleven Madison Park in New York in this case, thinking that this would be the way to attract attention if a chef deemed to appreciate it. Bingo!
Mellody is selling today at Eleven Madison Park, a vegan restaurant. It is still expensive, twice as much as traditional honey, but as often, with economies of scale, the price should come down. But will MeliBio save the bees, that’s another question. Beekeepers have little to do with the global warming that threatens them. Pesticides are another problem.