T/A Hunt and Gather Bee Co.

T/A Hunt and Gather Bee Co.

Kia ora,

Thanks for taking the time to check out our PledgeMe share offer; whether you’ve been following our journey for a while, or you’re discovering us and our business for the first time. We’re excited to be opening this opportunity up to our customers and supporters. Initial registration of interest has been overwhelming, and we are very grateful and humbled.

As you read through our offer, and learn about our company we want to build your confidence in us as founders, your confidence in our products and your confidence in our plans for growth.

As founders, we are not fly-by-nighters. From the day that we spent our life savings on 16 beehives and a ute and started this family business in 2016, we have been completely invested both financially and emotionally in Hunt and Gather Bee Co. The growth and feedback that we have continued to get from our customers year upon year has inspired us to keep working just as hard as when we first began, despite the many challenges of being a start-up. The reason that we are using crowdfunding to raise this equity is so that as we can offer the opportunity to become shareholders to those who have supported us from the start, our crowd.

We know that our products are outstanding. Not just because of the numerous awards that they’ve won or the pages and pages of glowing reviews that they’ve had over the years. We have this confidence because we know that we treat our bees, our environment and our people in the right way. We go above and beyond to make sure our bees are cared for with kindness and respect. The result is a product that stands out in the crowd. Our commitment to sustainability is stronger than ever, and our intention is to commit a percentage of our profits post-raise to continuing our community, conservation and regeneration projects each year. We’ve put over 3,000 trees in the ground already; we’re excited to see how much more we can achieve as our company grows.

We are proud of how much we have grown Hunt and Gather Bee Co. so far. Revenue has increased almost 340% since 2018 and our production has increased almost 2000% since we began in 2016. We have been welcomed as suppliers of some of the best known gourmet food retailers in New Zealand, like Farro Fresh, Commonsense Organics, Moore Wilson’s and New World. We’ve featured on Country Calendar and in TV and print ad campaigns for Xero. Our customers are extremely loyal and we continue to be surprised by the opportunities that come from doing business in the right way.

But we’re not done yet. Our crowning jewel, our Kanuka honey has been attracting significant attention from the international market in the past year. We have had interest from the UK, Japan, China, Germany, and Singapore. We have been working closely with NZ Trade and Enterprise and developing relationships and negotiations with two of our preferred potential partners overseas. We have built a solid plan for manageable, sustainable growth as we look to start sending our honey overseas. This plan is measured, realistic and will allow us to continue doing business in the right way, holding strong to our ethics. Most importantly, our plan for growth is capped. We plan to approach the export market in a unique way. By capping the amount of honey we will send to export each year we are planning to set our product aside as a high-end niche product which will position it at the top end of the market and create some hype and demand for it. It’s all about being realistic about the offering that we have, and positioning it in the right place in the market to get the best return. We have a clear vision of the direction we want this company to go in and that does not include open-ended infinite growth. Our original goals remain unchanged. We want Hunt and Gather Bee Co. to be able to employ us, and a small team of people and we want to sell all of our honey as a fully value added retail product ourselves while holding strong to our ethical and environmental values. We believe the plan that we have developed will help us achieve this.

We will use the money that we raise in this campaign to achieve a few key things. We will complete our extraction and packing facility. This will allow us to ‘close the loop’ in our value chain and bring the entire production process in house. This gives us better biosecurity control, more traceability, better control over timeframes, significantly reduces costs and reduces our carbon mileage. It also provides potential for employment within our community and gives us an opportunity to support other beekeepers in our area by contracting our services to them during harvest time; a service that is not currently being offered in Raglan. We will invest money in making sure our product is ready for export. There are a number of steps in our plan to get through to get our honey to the port. We need to redevelop our packaging, get all the right certification in place, invest in marketing, research and building relationships and contracts with our chosen export partners. We want to do it once and do it right. Finally, we want to grow our team. Post-raise we want to put money aside so that we can provide stable job contracts for two new employees. We intend to hire a sales and marketing manager to take the day-to-day management of domestic sales off Hannah’s hands, and continue to grow the domestic revenue. This will also allow Hannah to focus her full attention on export and business development. We also want to offer reorientation into employment for someone as a beekeeping apprentice. We believe in providing an opportunity to someone who needs a change in career, a way back into employment or an opportunity to get their first job.

That’s where you come in. We have significant time pressure to get these projects over the line. We’ve just come into our off season and all of our construction work needs to happen before the new season starts in September. Our preferred overseas partners are waiting patiently because they want our products. But they won’t wait forever. We don’t have the time to raise the funds we need through our cashflow alone. So we are opening this opportunity for you to invest in us, and we hope that in time, as we work towards realising our plans, we will be able to provide a return on your, and our, investments in Hunt and Gather Bee Co.

We look forward to growing this family business and taking raw, ethical, sustainable New Zealand honey from our forest to the world!

Nga mihi,

Hannah and Rory O’Brien

The Offer

Our Sustainable Growth Plan

Growth is important to us. But making that growth sustainable, and manageable while holding to our core values is even more important, it’s all part of our commitment to doing business right. So rather than an open-ended plan to conquer the export world, we have developed a plan that we believe we can pull off, without compromising our values.

EXPORT | we have already put a cap on the total amount of Kānuka honey that we will make available for export. This will help us to position our product as an ‘added-value’ niche product in the market and justify the higher premium our international customers will pay for our product. We also believe this approach is more environmentally sustainable and brings a higher profit margin. We’re talking quality, not quantity here. At the two year mark, we hope to understand our target market more and we can make a decision to make a restricted amount of our other products available to the same markets.

DOMESTIC | We plan to hire someone with specific expertise that we don’t have in sales and marketing to build even stronger relationships with our New Zealand retailers and bring more on board. They will also manage and continue to grow our online sales and our direct communication with our loyal customers. Our New Zealand customers know and love our products and the last thing we want to do is forget about them as we look towards the export market.

NEW INCOME STREAMS | This is where adding to our team also comes into play. The addition of a full-time beekeeping apprentice will allow us to manage our own growing beehive numbers, but will also help us manage our new extraction and processing facility. We plan to offer our extraction services to a small number of other beekeepers, so that we can help them out with their workload, as there is a real lack of honey processing in our community. We also plan to take on an orchard pollination contract in the Spring

Use of Funds

The Team

In 2016 we started Hunt and Gather Bee Co. with only $60,000 to our names. We have continued to grow our business and family ever since, now with three lively children to keep us on our toes.

We are ambitious, determined and we believe in doing business right, with ethics, family and sustainability at the core of every decision we make.

Rory is absolutely in charge of the bees and is completely responsible for producing our delicious honey. Hannah is more commonly known as “Hannah from accounts”, “Hannah from sales” “Hannah from distribution” and so on. We are supported by incredibly generous mentors across the country, and while we have a lot more to learn, we can also reflect on how far we’ve come in the past 5 years. In our spare time we share a love of fly fishing, hunting, gathering and adventuring.

We want you to know that we aren't doing this alone. We have a support network of part-time and casual team members, advisors and mentors (you can read the full list of our wider team in our Information Memorandum). Post raise, we intend to offer two new positions in the company; in sales and marketing and for an assistant beekeeper.

You should also read our Dividend Policy and our Constitution 

A note from PledgeMe

We have completed Veda checks on the companies, O'Brien Agriculture Limited, trading as Hunt and Gather Bee Co., and their Directors, as well as Google and Insolvency checks. There were no adverse findings.

Offer Details

Explanation of valuation:

This valuation is based on a 3.5 multiple of the Gold EBITDA in 2024. We believe this is a good reference year to base the valuation on because it is the year in which we anticipate our Kānuka honey exports will be at or close to 100% capacity.

Financial Summary

Company Details

Company Name: O'Brien Agriculture Limited

Company Number: 3705936

Company Documents

Director Details