A honey farm is set to ramp up production to meet demand thanks to funding from the Development Bank of Wales.
A £40,000 fast track loan is helping Gwenyn Gruffydd to expand production with a new purpose-built operations facility that will provide additional storage and work space.
With honey farms throughout Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Cardigan, Gwenyn Gruffydd was first established in 2010 by Gruffydd Williams-Rees after he was gifted a hive of bees by a local farmer. He enrolled onto a beekeeping course in Carmarthenshire that year and the hive at the back of his parents’ garden has since multiplied to more than 400 honey producing colonies and nucs.
Gruffydd now employs a team of four who produce a range of Welsh honey, hampers, gifts, and beeswax candles. They also sell peat free compost and bee friendly wildflower seeds. The 100% pure, minimally filtered, raw Welsh honey won two stars in the Great Taste Awards in 2017 and 2018 then one star in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Gwenyn Gruffydd also offers beekeeping training and supplies as well as selling honeybees.
Gruffydd said:
“We applied for a fast-track loan through the Development Bank to help us to keep up with the growth of the business. It has been a really quick and simple process which is great because we really didn’t have the time or the resource to spend weeks on complicated paperwork. We can now use the loan to develop a new purpose-built storage and production facility that will give us the space that we need to ramp up production and meet demand for our award-winning products.”
Charlotte Price is an Investment Executive with the Development Bank of Wales. She said:
“The bee is a symbol of community, hard work and productivity. That’s certainly the ethos of Gruffydd and his wife Angharad who have worked tirelessly to build Gwenyn Gruffydd as an internationally renowned brand. They are on a mission to sell more high quality single origin honey, reverse the decline of honeybees and promote the benefits of sowing wildflower seeds. We wish them every success as the business continues to blossom.”
Fast-track loans from the Development Bank of Wales are available for businesses that have been trading for two years or more and come with less paperwork and faster decision making, with some decisions being made in 48 hours. The loan for Gwenyn Gruffydd came from the Wales Flexible Investment Fund. The £500 million fund is financed by the Welsh Government and offers loans, mezzanine finance and equity investments between £25,000 and £10 million for Welsh businesses with terms of up to 15 years.
