For seven years, Igor Yakovlev made a living as an urban beekeeper selling his honey at local farmer’s markets and independent stores in New York and New Jersey.
“I got into the business because I was always interested in honeybees and helping people and the environment,” he says, noting that, “seventy-percent of our ecosystem is pollinated by honeybees” and touting the health benefits of honey.
In recent years, Yakovlev, like many, began hearing about the medicinal properties of CBD.
“I started doing research,” he says, adding that he was inspired to find a way to up the healing properties of his products by infusing them with cannabidiol oil. “I thought, what if I could make my honey a #supersuperfood”, he says. Here’s how he got the business out of the hive and into the market.
Yakovlev knew he wanted to branch out, but he also knew that he was not a businessperson. So, he sought out childhood friends Sam and Boris Savransky, who both had lucrative backgrounds in e-commerce.
The brothers came on board bringing the funds needed to get the company off the ground. In 2018, Beezy Beez was born.
Each partner in the company has a different role. “I do the production, Sam does the marketing, and Boris does all the logistics,” Yakovlev explains
Yakovlev began searching for CBD partners and came across several industry hemp growers in Colorado, Oregon, and New York. “I ordered samples of different oils to play around with, to see what tasted better, what looked better, what was the best type of oil for the honey,” he recalls.
The founders started with a CBD isolate, generally accepted as the easiest to blend with a food product, but they quickly realized the formulation wouldn’t offer the benefits they were going for. “We wanted people to experience the full entourage effect so we started doing a full CBD full spectrum, a whole plant,” Yakovlev explains.
This is a combination of liquid and crystalized honey placed into a machine and spun for two days before the extract is added. This process, according to Boris, also helps to ensure that consumers are getting an even distribution of CBD with each serving.
In addition to its cinnamon-flavored Creamed Honey, Beezy Beez also offers a CBD honeycomb “straight from the hive,” as well as pain-relieving Hemp Balm.
“We use our own harvested honey for those. They are our staple,” Yakovlev says, the latter of which has been popular among athletes and UFC fighters.
Floyd Mayweather’s personal bodyguards, for instance, have written in to rave about reduced joint pain and deeper sleep as a result of the products. Beezy Beez catalog also includes full spectrum lip balm, and water-soluble full spectrum oil tinctures.
Live Better.
Feel Better.
Bee Better.
Beezy Beez is currently sold online. Going forward, the company hopes to broaden its reach and land in retailers like Whole Foods, CVS, and Walgreens but right now, the main goal is to educate the community on the benefits of their CBD products.
“We offer a free dosing guide on our website to help clear up any confusion about this,” says Yakovlev. And new and improved products are always on the docket. Yakovlev, for instance, is currently experimenting with an ultrasonic homogenizer, which he says hopes will double the absorb-ability of topical CBD products.