Honey is Hot and Still Heating Up with UGI Natural Gas

Honey is everywhere. Walk down the aisles of a grocery store and you see it in beverages, yogurt, salad dressings, and snack foods.

Consumption is at record levels. And the hottest time of the year for honey is the holiday season.

“People are baking more this time of year. It is cold, and people want hot beverages with honey in them,” says Jill Clark, Dutch Gold Honey’s President.

Dutch Gold Honey, a longtime UGI customer, is keeping up with growing honey demand by firing up a new boiler and upgrading a second one. Both boilers are fueled by clean and affordable natural gas.

The Lancaster County company processes and distributes more than 100 million pounds of honey each year.

Inside its 200,000-square-foot facility there are several tempering rooms that reach temperatures up to 160 degrees. What happens inside them is at the heart of the honey business.

“Once honey is removed from the beehive, it naturally crystallizes into a solid. We have to return this solid to a liquid so the honey can be strained before it is packaged. The way we are accomplishing this is via our tempering rooms that are heated by steam created by natural gas,” says Clark.

Dutch Gold Honey started in 1946, in the kitchen of a Lancaster home owned by the Gamber family. It is the originator of the now-famous honey-bear-shaped squeezable plastic bottle. The Gamber family children used to hand-paint the eyes, noses, and mouths on the bear bottles full of honey. One of those children, Nancy Gamber, is now the CEO.

From its origins bottling honey at a kitchen table, Dutch Gold Honey now processes up to 30 container truckloads of honey each day, continuing to see growth and expansion.

“Honey is more popular than ever. And for us to continue to grow we need more capacity for steam and heat,” says Clark.

That will come from UGI natural gas, a heat source to help keep up with honey’s hot demand.

Honey Producers Rely on Natural Gas

From liquefying crystallized honey at controlled temperatures to generating steam and hot water for pasteurization, cleaning, and sanitization, natural gas provides the consistent, efficient heat that keeps honey operations running safely and reliably.