Why John Rowe came home to PEI to launch his honey 
of an idea on the world.

It goes this way. When John Rowe was on a hiking expedition several years ago near Whistler, BC—grizzly bear country—he opened up his backpack and discovered the glass bottle of honey therein had smashed, turning the contents of the backpack into a sticky, sodden mess.

At that point, most might utter an epithet or two, and clean up the mess.He did, and then thought: “What about the bears?”

His next thought was to wonder why there wasn’t a way to process and package honey in solid form, to avoid such messy incidents.

And that is what spawned John Rowe’s great idea. He didn’t just ask why, he asked, “Why not?”

Now, it takes an inquiring mind and a certain degree of self-confidence for anyone to take on a quest that no one in the history of civilization has been able to successfully complete….

But let’s start with honey, the product of the furious energy of honeybees. There’s nothing new about honey. Bumblebees have been making it for 150 million years—producing a favourite food for bears and a sweetener and energy boost for humans, evidenced by cave paintings dating back to 10,000 BC.

The wondrous thing is that nobody in all those years, in any civilization the world over, ever discovered a way to dehydrate honey so it could be used pure as a food in solid form. (There have been solid honey products, but they might more accurately be described as honey-flavoured sugar, than pure honey.)

Until John Rowe.

The 37-year old, with the face of a choirboy, a soft voice and a mind like a steel trap, comes from farming and fishing stock in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Both parents were schoolteachers and his father, John Rowe Sr., also messed about in business sidelines. He mentored John, the oldest of five children, in summer businesses—strawberries, landscaping, ice cream sales—from the age of 11.

And so it was that entrepreneurship was part of the Rowe family work ethic, a core value in the upbringing of John and his siblings. It was as natural as, well, as natural as honey, which was on the dining table at every meal. But liquid honey can be messy, as John found out on that memorable hiking adventure in Western Canada.

That story is now company legend at Island Abbey Foods Ltd., in Charlottetown, makers of Honibe (Hon-ey-bee… get it?) products: Honey Lozenges, Honey Drop tea sweeteners, Honey Sprinkles, Honey Delight candies, with more products under development. In short, John is on the cusp of worldwide success, processing and marketing products fashioned from dehydrated honey.

At the time of his “Aha” hike he was working in marketing and sales of technology products. His idea became a passion; drawing on his engineering degree, he researched the properties of honey, and the failed attempts to evolve a process where its complex elements could be preserved in solid form.

He and his wife, Susan, an accountant, met when he moved home to Prince Edward Island from Vancouver in 2004. They turned their basement into their own private research laboratory, pursuing their sweet and sticky Holy Grail at night, after working all day.

John won’t reveal what he and Susan discovered about the properties of honey while working in their basement, or the process and equipment they invented to allow them to dehydrate it and preserve the taste, aroma and colour of the natural product.

“Proprietary information,” he says in answer to the question, and moves on to something else.

By 2008, Honey Drops, individual cubes of golden honey, were being marketed through the Internet. Within a year, they were in national distribution across Canada, winning awards at food competitions and the like at an accelerating pace.

By this time, John’s younger brother Justin was in place to take care of marketing and selling the expanding product list. Sales were booming, and Island Abbey Foods was attracting local and national media attention.

If there’s one thing every small company needs to meet increasing demand, it’s financing. That became John’s next big thing, and he turned to CBC-TV’s Dragon’s Den as a potential source of investment dollars.

Last spring he and brother Justin faced the sometimes brutal and withering inquisition of the panel. For more than an hour, while tape machines rolled, the two lads from Montague, PEI, fired back. They had prepared well, and in the end four of the five members of the panel offered them a deal—one million dollars for a 35 per cent equity share of the company.

The Rowe boys took the deal, and in the telecast that aired on Jan 20, 2011, they shook on it.

The deal has not yet been consummated, however. Just a few weeks after the television taping something unexpected happened—the awards committee at the biggest food show in the world, the SIAL d’Or, in Paris, France, chose Honey Drops the best new product in the world for 2010.

The publicity returns were enormous. Sales jumped. Product went out to 75 countries. Distributors were signed up in four key regions around the world. The final two will be added this year.

That brought greater investor interest. Turns out, the Dragons aren’t the only ones interested in Island Abbey Foods. In John Rowe’s way of thinking, his company was now worth much more than it was at the time of his pitch to the Dragons. He revamped the offer—10 per cent of the company for the one million dollars in new financing. They are still in discussion.

John Rowe is cagey about revealing prospective suitors: “We’re talking to several parties,” he says. But there’s one thing he’s not guarded about: his enthusiasm for his home province as the place to launch his worldwide enterprise.

“When I was young I couldn’t wait to get away from here,” he says. “Islanders tended to look down. 

“There’s a whole different attitude now. The bridge has been responsible for some of that. It has had a dramatic psychological effect on Islanders.”

If attitudes have changed on the Island, so has something else. “We couldn’t do what we are doing if it weren’t for our ability to easily communicate with the entire world right from here,” says John.

“Two months after we launched, in 2008, we had 100,000 hits on our website. Communication now is so effortless.

One other thing—John’s timing was brilliant. It is a truism to say that timing in life is everything. But, like many clichés, this one is true. John readily admits that a generation ago he couldn’t have taken his eureka moment as far as he has.

Several factors came together in that mysterious way that happens when fortune smiles—a brilliant idea, an attitudinal change in a place to nurture and develop the idea, a mastery of modern communications techniques to promote products. 

And while Susan runs the day-to-day operation, and Justin expands the sales of Honibe Products, John looks ahead to the next big thing. “We believe we can use our dried honey to deliver any kind of medication,” he says. “It is an ideal carrier, and it has medical properties which can benefit other ingredients.”

“Honey’s properties are just beginning to be understood by medical science in Canada.”

Clearly, John Rowe wants to expand that understanding. “I love what I do,” says he says with a smile. Which may at least partly explain why he does it so well.