Manawa Honey NZ Wins In World Honey Tasting Contest

Manawa Honey NZ’s Tāwari Honey has taken out the Creamed Category at the 2025 Black Jar International Honey Tasting Contest – the world’s prestigious blind honey tasting competition held in Asheville, North Carolina, the 'Honey Capital' of the USA.

The Black Jar Honey Tasting Contest attracts hundreds of entries from beekeepers and honey producers across the world. Multiple preliminary taste-offs are held to whittle down the entries to the Top 30 that enter the final taste-off held in June each year.

Brenda Tahi, CEO of Manawa Honey NZ, explains “This contest is unique for a couple of reasons. It focuses solely on taste and uses a ‘blind’ tasting process with black silk jar covers, so that colour, appearance or brand cannot affect judging. It also celebrates the beekeepers at the heart of the process for producing honey. So it is our Chief Beekeeper Taawi Te Kurapa that is named as the winner of this award."

This win elevates Manawa’s Tāwari Honey to the Top 10 Best Tasting Honeys globally, up from its Top 30 finalist position in 2021. It also adds to a winning streak for Manawa Honey NZ in this contest, which started with Rewarewa as the Grand First Prize Winner in 2021. Then Kānuka Honey won Creamed Category in 2022, and Rewarewa and Pua-ā-Tāne Wild Forest Honey were Finalists in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Brenda adds: “Tāwari is a unique tree that we find in great groves high up on the mountains that surround us here in Ruatāhuna. The tree has been described as one of the most beautiful native plants and it produces a stunning light honey that is quite rare in New Zealand’s honey landscape. As for the taste, well it’s beautifully sweet with complex underpinning hints of butterscotch, or even liquorice – otherworldly delicious.”

Manawa Honey NZ is renowned for producing exquisite native honeys from their homeland forests of Te Urewera, including Rewarewa, Kānuka, Mānuka, Tāwari, and Pua-ā-Tāne.

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