Scott Davies: the builder‑turned‑beekeeper disrupting the UK honey market

The housing market crash of 2008 had wide-reaching repercussions. One of the least likely, but most positive, occurred in a small town in mid-Wales. There, it was the catalyst for what would become the UK’s largest independent honey brand.

After “failing” school, attaining three GCSEs, Scott Davies had decided on a career as a builder. “Then the crash happened, and no one wanted bricklayers – especially bad ones,” he laughs. A back injury around the same time was the final nail in Davies’ plans. His parents bought him a beehive to help keep him busy, in what would be a defining move.

Davies founded Hilltop Honey in 2011, starting out selling honey door to door in his hometown of Newtown. He now owns the UK’s second-largest honey brand after Rowse, turning over £45m last year.

The first breakthrough came with a listing in Holland & Barrett – at the end of his third year of trading, when Davies was considering giving up. A year later, his second big moment came in Tesco. Davies went to a meeting, put two jars on the table and said: “Why don’t you sell more British honey?” The buyers agreed and asked if Hilltop could do 500 stores. “I had no chance!” he laughs. “But I said yes, went home and everyone rallied round to help me get it out the door.”

“We want people thinking about honey as an option to put on their chips, sausages, cheese”

Home is very much where the heart is for Davies. Hilltop has stayed proudly in Newtown, where he started the Hilltop Community Fund, providing funds for local initiatives and projects.

“It’s just doing the right thing, really,” he says. “When you live and breathe it, you know your impact on the community. And I think you get the backing from the area, too. When people come to work for us, I do think they’ve got that extra fight to make it work, because it’s not some faceless American-owned corporate.”

That ethos seems to be working. Hilltop secured a package worth £10m from Santander UK in August 2024. That performed two functions, Davies says: “It helped our sourcing ability massively and doubled the size of our factory to set us up for the next step, which is to become the number one honey brand in the UK.”

The new multimillion-pound factory opened in November. Not only does it offer greater manufacturing capabilities, but it coincides with the launch of Hilltop Food Group, which will branch out into “much more” than just honey.

“Condiments is definitely our next biggest play. Hot honey mayonnaise, ketchups, things like that. We’re potentially looking at cereal bars,” Davies reveals. The November launch of Smoky Chipotle and Peri-Peri hot honeys into Tesco marked “the first time we’ve been in the condiments aisle, which is huge”.

“Cross-category is massive for us,” he adds. “We want people thinking about honey as an option to put on their chips, sausages, cheese. Have you ever tried hot honey on sausages? It’s phenomenal. All the use cases for honey are out there, but they don’t happen by chance. You have to have brands that do it. And my rallying cry to retailers is: let us have that chance.”

Indeed, Davies voices frustration with the unrealistic expectations placed on certain products. The brand launched Hilltoppers, a quintet of honey-based spreads in flavours including Chai Spiced and Sweet & Salty, in March.

“Is it going well? Not really. It’s going OK. Honey is frustrating at the moment, because it’s the biggest sweet spread by a mile – bigger than jam and peanut butter in value [Circana 52 w/e 21 December 2025] – but it still gets less space than both on shelf. So it’s forced to trade really hard on the high-volume stuff and has no room left for innovation.

“If you’re doing something truly new in a category, how are people going to find it, taste it, use it, think about repeating, all within a 12-week window? And then you’re going: It’s not worked. It was never going to be the next 340g squeezy bottle of honey, because there isn’t one. Actually, the key target was dragging new customers in. And it’s done that.”

Own-label success

One unqualified success is Hilltop’s own-label operation, which now makes up about 60% of the business and supplies honey to three major supermarkets. Davies says he decided to go into own label because of “the scale it brought with it”.

He “loves working with the supermarkets because they’re very pragmatic businesses”. It’s when brands think it’s going to be “a lovey-dovey partnership” that “the wheels fall off a bit”, Davies says.

“You have to enjoy doing business together, but you’re there to do the job they need you to do,” he adds. “If you kid yourself, and you think there’s going to be some honour in that, there isn’t. It has to stack up for you, and it has to stack up for them.”

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The income from own label has helped Hilltop become a major player, sourcing honey from all over the world to supplement its UK production, from South America to Asia. The brand imports honey for two reasons. “One: we keep sticking British honey on the shelf and it doesn’t sell. That’s really frustrating, but there’s a price point people are willing to go to for honey. Two: the UK produces probably 3,000 tonnes of honey per year and consumes about 40,000.”

Still, imported honey comes with certain trust issues. Last year, numerous headlines warned of fake honey being sold in British supermarkets. Davies says Hilltop is “trying desperately to bring as much light on to that as possible”, initially by rolling out its QR code traceability scheme across all of its SKUs.

“That’s a big thing. And easily accessed traceability is not happening in honey, which is unbelievable considering technology now,” he adds. “It’s a journey, but I think there are some big changes coming up in honey in the next three to five years, which will be helpful.”

Speaking of journeys, Davies reveals exclusively to The Grocer that his time running Hilltop on a day-to-day basis will soon be over. He will step down as CEO in February to become executive chair, while sales director Tom Delaney will step up.

Davies will remain the face of the business as founder and still be heavily involved in top-level strategy. But between his young family and a recently acquired business in Manchester, Waterfields Bakery, he says he can no longer give Hilltop the full-time attention it needs “to take it on its next journey from £50m to £100m”.

That five-year ambition will be partly driven by moves into the US market with its Scott’s Honey brand, Davies says. That’s already been launched on Amazon and Walmart Marketplace, and meetings are lined up with “a couple of decent-sized retailers over there” in the coming weeks.

“Don’t get me wrong, we’re well aware the US is the graveyard of British brands,” Davies says. “But America imports almost 10 times the amount of honey as the UK. It’s a massive opportunity for a brand that can properly land there, and we only need crumbs of the pie. So, there’s method in the madness.”