Brand profile · Leeston, Canterbury · founded 1910
Airborne Honey
Airborne Honey is a family-owned Canterbury honey packer in Leeston, founded on Banks Peninsula in 1910. Its range, listed prices, TraceMe batch tracing and factory shop, from its own site.
Who makes Airborne Honey, and where is it from?
Airborne Honey Ltd is a family-owned honey company based in Leeston on the Canterbury Plains. Its own history page says William Bray and his partner Alfred Barrett began commercial beekeeping on Banks Peninsula in 1910, registered the Airborne brand (then a white clover honey) in 1926, and moved the business to Leeston in the late 1920s. The company says three generations of the Bray family have run it since.
From Banks Peninsula to Leeston
Airborne's own story starts in 1910 on Banks Peninsula, where William Bray and Alfred Barrett ran apiaries of 30 to 50 hives in the bays and inlets, taking their first hives over by bullock wagon. In 1926 they registered two brands, Meadow (a light amber honey) and Airborne (a white clover honey). The company says Airborne is now the oldest surviving honey brand in New Zealand; that is its own claim, but the dates on its history page are consistent with it.
Around the same time the business moved to its present site at Leeston, on the Canterbury Plains, and built a two-storey packing plant designed so that gravity, rather than pumps, moved the honey down through warmers and strainers. The partnership became W.B. Bray & Son, then Bray & Gosset Ltd in 1957, and Airborne Honey Ltd in 1982. The history page says the company ran about 6,000 hives at its peak in 1990, sold its hive operation in 1997 to concentrate on processing and marketing, and now has exports making up around a quarter of its business.
What Airborne is known for: testing and tracing
Most honey brands talk about flowers. Airborne talks about its laboratory. Its our standard page frames everything around three words, honest, undamaged and traceable, and each one is backed by a measurement rather than an adjective.
- Honest: Airborne measures pollen. For a single floral source it uses pollen analysis to back the name on the jar, and for its blended Classic range it publishes the total pollen per 10 g as evidence the honey has not been fine-filtered. Its flavours page says the pollen count is printed on the back of the jar.
- Undamaged: it measures HMF (hydroxymethylfurfural), a compound that rises when honey is heated or stored for a long time, and says a patented liquefying process keeps its heat damage among the lowest in the New Zealand market. It also says it chooses slow-crystallising honeys for its liquid jars so they don't need heavy heating or ultra-filtering to stay runny.
- Traceable: every jar carries a six-digit batch number, and the TraceMe system links that batch back to the apiaries that contributed to it.
That last point is the one to try. Airborne's tracing page explains the batch number format, YYWWDB: two digits for the year, two for the week of the year, one for the day of the week (Monday is 1) and one for the batch of the day. So 192321 is the first batch on the Tuesday of week 23 in 2019. Scan the QR code on the back of the jar, or type the number into TraceMe on its site, and it shows every apiary that contributed, every drum in the batch and the test results for each. The company says that if you email the batch number it can send map references for each apiary.
It is worth knowing what this does and doesn't tell you. A batch trace shows where the honey came from and how it tested; it doesn't make a honey better on toast. But it is a useful counterweight to undefined words like “raw” and “pure”, which our label guide explains carry no legal definition here. Airborne makes the same point itself: its standard page calls raw a subjective term that says nothing about heat damage. Our raw honey guide lists the questions worth asking any producer instead.
How Airborne gets different flavours
The company says it sells nine different honeys, and explains how it separates them in three steps: place hives where only one plant is flowering, harvest just before and just after that plant's flowering so the flow isn't mixed with another, and then confirm each honey in the lab by colour and pollen count. That is the same logic behind every single-source NZ honey, described by a packer that tests for it.
The Airborne range, and what it costs
These are the prices listed in Airborne's own online shop, read on 25 October 2026. Supermarket prices differ, and all prices change.
- Classic range (the blends): Classic Pure Honey, Classic Creamed Clover and Classic Bush Honey at $12.00 for 500 g, and the Classic Pure Squeeze bottle at $12.50 for 500 g. Two multifloral mānuka blends in the same range are listed at $13.50.
- Floral range (single source): clover, kāmahi, rātā, creamed rewarewa, thyme, viper's bugloss (the same plant sold elsewhere as blue borage) and a multifloral, each at $14.99 for 500 g.
- Mānuka: MGO-graded jars and squeezy bottles, plus lozenges. Grades and what they mean belong on our sister site, nz-manuka-honey.co.nz.
The gap between the blends and the single-source jars is about three dollars on 500 g, close to the gap on Arataki's range. Airborne's own floral list also includes honeydew and tāwari, which weren't in its online shop on the day we read it.
Creamed honey, a Canterbury habit
Airborne's creamed honey page says the company was one of the early pioneers of creaming, which it dates to the 1930s, and describes the result as crystals under 25 microns, small enough that the honey feels smooth and shows a pearly swirl. It also says most honey sold in New Zealand is sold creamed. Creamed vs runny honey covers the difference, and why honey crystallises explains how to bring a hard jar back.
Where to buy Airborne honey
- In supermarkets: Airborne's stockist page lists Woolworths, New World, Pak'nSave, FreshChoice, Four Square and SuperValue. Not every store carries the full floral range.
- Direct, from the online shop at airborne.co.nz.
- At the factory shop in Leeston, which the stockist page lists as open 8am to 3pm, Monday to Friday.
We have no relationship with Airborne Honey, take no commission on anything you buy, and the company has not reviewed this page. Everything above comes from its own website on the date shown.
Common questions
- Is Airborne Honey a New Zealand company?
- Yes. It is family owned and based in Leeston, Canterbury. Its history page says it began on Banks Peninsula in 1910 and registered the Airborne brand in 1926.
- How do I trace my jar of Airborne honey?
- Find the six-digit batch number on the label (format YYWWDB: year, week, day, batch). Scan the TraceMe QR code on the back of the jar or enter the number into TraceMe on airborne.co.nz to see the apiaries and test results behind that batch.
- Is Airborne honey raw?
- Airborne doesn't lean on the word. Its standard page calls “raw” a subjective term and instead publishes HMF (a heat-damage indicator) and pollen figures, and says it only strains through a coarse mesh so the pollen stays in.
- How much is Airborne honey?
- In its own online shop on 25 October 2026, the Classic 500 g jars were listed at $12.00 and the single-source floral 500 g jars at $14.99. Supermarket prices vary.