Geraldton entrepreneur Australian Honey Ventures CEO Jay Curtin on her business buzz

What is sweeter than honey? One would imagine it could be the gratifying sugar-high of achieving success through pure hard work and resilience, no matter where your starting point in life was. Geraldton-born-and-raised entrepreneur Jay Curtin is one such business success story. She has built her business — simply put, making money from honey — from the ground up. Her latest milestone will see her WA honey range, Real Good Honey, on the shelves of more than 100 Woolworths stores across WA. The company already secured landmark deals with distribution organisations in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for their medicinal honey range. But it’s not the stock on the shelves that makes this business special, it’s the commitment to fair and ethical work with Australian beekeepers who put in the hard work to supply the product. Ms Curtin, the company’s CEO, grew up in a low-income family home in Geraldton, which was part of her inspiration to build AHV. The 39-year-old moved to Perth when she was 21, but her parents still live in the house she was raised in. Describing herself as the girl from the bush, she believes just because you come from a poor background, doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful in life. Ms Curtin said she saw herself as someone who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Living between Cue and Meekatharra on a mine site, Ms Curtin said she studied at School of the Air for a year. Ms Curtin believed she was born an entrepreneur, but bloomed late because she didn’t have any role models with the desire to embrace entrepreneurship. “I had nobody to nurture me back then, I was self-taught,” she said. “The older I got, the more I’d look at a problem and think how I wish I could fix it.” Other than seeing the table honey at your local supermarket, Ms Curtin said the company pioneered a new buy structure for medicinal honey. She said the structure paid beekeepers based on total activity (TA) of antimicrobial properties, rather than what flora or fauna it derived from. “I could see a huge disconnect between what honey was selling for in the market versus what the beekeepers were getting for it and I thought that was wrong,” she said. Her burning desire to create solutions led Ms Curtin to become an aggregator for Australian honey, with a trajectory of brokering at least one third of Australia’s total commercial honey production by 2027. “We found some lucrative markets where we sell our honey for their TA levels,” she said. “We’ve taken these once very unloved and isolated honeys — just because their dark — and said there’s so much money to be made in these honeys.” Ms Curtin said rather than turning her back on the beekeepers who supply cheaper honeys such as blackbutt, she would offer a higher price dependent on TA levels. “It’s absolutely game-changing for beekeepers who do produce that medicinal honey,” she said. The honey hunter said she wanted to encourage children to show an entrepreneurial spirit early on, and urged parents to give their children the opportunity to thrive. The mother-of-three said her 13-year-old son was a self-starter with an entrepreneurial spirit. He recently raised $250,000 in a small private capital raise for a tech business, which Ms Curtin said would be highly successful. “While (my parents) were loving and supportive, I didn’t have those people around me to help me be this amazing business person, so I thought, ‘what could I do’,” she said. Ms Curtin said the business was about sustainability, and driving more profit back to beekeepers to upgrade machinery and increase operation. “If we can put more money in the pocket of beekeepers, it might mean that these older beekeepers can afford to bring on another worker,” she said. Ms Curtin said premium WA honey superseded its offshore counterfeits, and partnering with Woolworths was an exciting way for everyday Aussies to taste the difference. “As a business that has its eyes set on giving beekeepers the best return on their honey, having support from one of Australia’s biggest supermarket chains is an exciting step in the right direction,” she said.