Sweet As Can BEE Honey Farm

This is an e-mail I received from Angela, an awsome, hard-working lady and my former manager. What a scandal.

To whom it may concern:

I am Angela Graham, former business partner and employee of Isaac Frerichs and manager of Sweet As Can BEE Honey Farm. I am writing because I feel a personal responsibility to honor the markets, to help maintain integrity and to ensure that customers truly can trust their farmers.
I staffed a consistent 13 people through the spring and summer, 10 sales team and 3 production staff. We did 26 markets per week, regularly, plus special events, wholesale orders and online sales. I was the active boss and manager, working all the numbers, training, hiring, scheduling and checking in and out all the product Monday through Friday. I was incredibly busy and didn't notice the honey for months while I was trying to balance such a big operation.

In August I stopped and inspected the honey, all of our different varietals seemed to look the same. We carry Wildflower, Wildberry and Fireweed of which we charge an extra dollar for. I tasted them all and was appalled and disgusted to find they were exactly the same. I spoke with my production staff, my bottler broke down in tears and said Isaac had told her to just pour all the same honey into all the jars, he told her to pretend they were all different. He made up an elaborate story about having 200 buckets of mixed honey that needed to be gone through first. My bottler told me she'd asked him many times when the 200 were through and he kept saying "almost".
She is not at fault, she did what her boss told her to do. She needed work and trusted him that it was ok and was temporary.
I confronted Isaac and pulled the honey from all sales venues. I only sold Wildflower for two weeks until he produced something resembling Fireweed. The Wildberry he brought me tasted exactly the same as the Wildflower so I refused to sell it. From April 2010 until August 2010 Sweet As Can BEE Honey Farm lied about the varietal honey claiming they were different but were indeed all the same honey. Countless customers were ripped off from being charged a dollar extra for the Fireweed.

I had been feeling uneasy anyway because Isaac had started talking about selling the business in July. I, of course, was going to take it over but he kept changing the circumstances and steadily raising the price. I had a strong feeling he wanted to sell the business while it was profitable and cash out. Within his sale agreement he is not selling the bees, just the name, clients, equipment and spaces in the market. Isaac would then remain the supplier of honey, pollen and wax for the new owners. I know to be in the farmers markets you can not be a reseller, he encouraged me that if we covered our bases no one would ever know. I was sick to my stomach and couldn't sleep.

I also found a receipt around that time with our pollen that had just come in. The receipt said 60 pounds of pollen had been purchased for 6 dollars per pound, totally $360 and it came out of Iowa. I had noticed the pollen was very different and very dirty. I asked Isaac, he told me that we ship all of our pollen out to this guy in Iowa and he cleans it for us then ships it back. I pointed out that the receipts said nothing of cleaning but was for pollen purchase. He became very defensive and said it was very hard to clean and that you needed an expensive machine to do it, that it was cheaper to have someone else do it than invest in the machine. I mentioned the pollen being dirty, filled with bees, he said it is not cleaned for bees but for pebbles.
I manage the business. It does not make financial sense to ship 100's of pounds of pollen across the country and back, I have also not come across any such expensive machine to clean pollen with, in addition, an abundance of pebbles in pollen is just ridiculous. He was adamant that this was the truth and that I needed to trust him, I asked for the shipping receipts from the months past showing that we had indeed shipped out our pollen. He said that would be no problem, he'd get them for me from his accountant in Texas. He never produced the receipts.

Another factor is that the amount of hives Isaac claimed to have could not possibly have produced enough honey to supply the amount of business we were doing. Especially being that last year was a very low production year for beekeepers across the state. I spoke to him about this fact. He denied it at first then admitted that his friend Dean, who is a commercial beekeeper in Redmond was running all the hives. He uses Italian bees and regularly uses antibiotics and chemicals on his hives, something Sweet As Can BEE claims never to do. I myself have written numerous articles supporting this fact in the business and based my entire skin care line off of this claim. I have seen Deans operation, it is very large and his honey production could support our activity.
Essentially, Isaac has been buying out or straight purchasing honey from Dean. The honey may or may not be raw. It was not representative to the varietals and was contaminated with chemicals and antibiotics. The pollen is highly suspect, most assuredly coming from Iowa.

After finding out the truth and putting pressure on Isaac to admit it and to make things better, I was fired with no notice. I arrived at work as always and he was there claiming he had sold the business and that the new owner no longer needed my services. Our signed summer season contract was broken and I was given no thank you for anything, I was just asked to leave. My entire sales team but one young girl quit because they refused to lie now that they knew what was going on. Isaac, later in the day, fired all three of my production staff, two of which were salaried employees. He thanked them all and told them the new owner no longer needed them. They were fired without notice. This was a bit over two weeks ago.
I was told by the owner of the kitchen we rented that Isaac had told him the sale fell through and that he'd be staying after all. He never sold the business, he made it all up so he could fire us all without having to take the blame. He wants to sell the business and has adds posted for it, he had to get rid of me as well as everyone else who knows the truth so that he can sell the business under false pretense and not have to deal with a whistleblower messing up his plan. My major moral objection to Isaac, was the farmers market arena, this was why I was such a threat because the sale of his business relies on the massive amount of profit generated from working markets. Without the secure spaces in the markets his business would be worth very little.

I have felt furious, shocked, hurt, disappointed and disgusted. These are my personal feelings and I take full responsibility for them. I am writing to you not from an emotional space but from a space of honor and ethics. I personally apologize to your market and the market establishment for my part in any and all of this unfortunate scam. I realize that I was unaware and I did the best I could when I found out but I am truly sorry as I feel passionately supportive to all farmers markets. I feel it would be contributing to dishonesty and the downfall of a beautiful movement if I did not report what I know to be true.
I would highly recommend an investigation be done into Sweet As Can BEE Honey Farm. Please feel free to contact me with any further questions or for more in depth information. I have samples of honey, pollen and wax which could be tested for proof if needed. The production and sales team have all offered their assistance as well and feel strongly about the truth being known. The whole team has a wealth of integrity and I am very proud of them. Thank you, I only intend good to come from this.

Sincerely, Angela Graham