Five-year-old Egmont Honey nears $40m revenue and dips into the supplement market. Egmont Honey co-founder and chief executive James Annabell knows the value of a good story. There’s Egmont’s story of origin: the South Taranaki-based honey company was founded by father Tony and son James in 2015 after James gave Tony, a Hawera farmer, a beehive for Christmas. (He bought it off TradeMe: “but people shouldn’t do that”, he says.) Then there’s the growth story: today Egmont Honey operates about 3500 beehives in Taranaki and gathers honey from many other hives around New Zealand. It trades about 1000-1200 tonnes of honey a year (all floral types), of which about 80% is exported