Stu & Jan Ferguson
Question everything and never, ever accept anyone saying …”We’ve always done it this way”
Stu’s lifelong commitment to learning and development began soon after graduating with a certificate in Mechanical Engineering and a Bachelor of Technology. Jan is a third-generation beekeeper, living and breathing honey her whole life.
Stu started his career working at one of New Zealand’s most progressive manufacturing companies - Interlock/Assa Abloy. The huge range of engineering design and development tasks he undertook provided him with the perfect foundation to approach any industry with a can-do attitude.
Jan did a Bachelor of Health Science, majoring in Occupation Therapy. She has seen the medicinal opportunities and potential health and wellbeing benefits that speciality honey can provide.
Together they make a great team.
Stu’s approach of finding industry gaps and looking for new and innovative ways of improving things is a natural fit with New Zealand’s honey-making industry.
His stated aim is to assist New Zealand beekeepers and to leave the industry in a better place, whilst looking being a role model for what education and hard work can achieve.
Beekeeping naturally grabbed Stu’s attention and turned out to be both the perfect career to express engineering product development, but also an opportunity to make changes in what was an antiquated industry at the time.
Hive Doctor was created to initiate innovation in the industry. The timing was perfect and his non-conformist ideas were eagerly consumed by a new wave of beekeepers entering the industry to gather Mānuka.
After successfully selling the Hive Doctor business, Stu’s boundless energy was refocused on to Hunter-Reilly’s honey operation. He observed that nothing had greatly changed in the honey processing space in years and the high profile of Mānuka was attracting scrutiny from overseas markets wanting to justify the high price of this uniquely special and prized honey.
The very high prices demanded for quality Mānuka ensured that consumers were expecting food of the highest possible quality. As such Stu connected with Callaghan Innovation and a research project was initiated to understand how honey processing could be improved upon.