Even More Variety, Versatility and Honey: A look at the Savannah Bee Company in 2022
Written by Paul Jerome Watson. Photo courtesy of Paul Jerome Watson
In 2008, Ted Dennard opened the first retail store of the Savannah Bee Company, a local shop situated on Broughton Street in downtown Savannah. It soon established itself as a staple of the city. Since then, the company has grown exponentially, offering a wide range of products to fuel everyday life with stores strewn across the country.
District originally wrote about the Savannah Bee Company in 2008 and detailed the honey bar, the play loft and educational screening area. Every service since then has expanded: the honey bar now serves additional flavors over the initial five, including both a “Peace Honey” that lingers along the tongue with a refreshing earthy taste and a “Hot Honey” that coats the throat before the habanero kicks in to clear the sinuses. The educational screening has been incorporated into the play loft with the original location in-store now serving a new product, an alcohol fermented with honey called “Mead.” These expansions don’t even touch upon the variety of products the shop offers like lip balm, body balm, straws, soap, hand cream, biscuit mix, soda, energy drinks and candles among other items, all with honey as a main ingredient. And this is only one store of many.
“We have 14 stores across the country,” said Lexie Browne, assistant manager of the Broughton location. “We’re slated to open a couple per year.”
The newest of these locations is in Sedona, Arizona, and is the farthest western location the company has according to the Savannah Bee Company website. Other stores can be found in Colorado, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. Outside of the established honey bar unique to the store’s identity, some of these locations offer their own experiences such as cafes, observation hives and explorable bee gardens.
The man at the center of this company’s success is Ted Dennard, a Coastal Georgia resident who had a love of beekeeping instilled in him at the age of 13. After joining the Peace Corp and honing his craft on deployment in Jamaica, Dennard returned to Savannah in 1999 and started the Savannah Bee Company in 2002 with a friend and his girlfriend, now wife.
“I don’t know why it took root in me the way it did,” said Dennard on the official company podcast, Speaking of Bees, “but it did.”
This love for bees and beekeeping extends to Dennard’s own charity work and becoming the co-founder of “The Bee Cause Project” in 2013. It is an organization dedicated to educating kids about the importance of bees through curriculums, field trips and book clubs to inspire “the next generation of environmental stewards,” according to the organization’s official site.
It’s that same site Dennard is quoted as saying, “Bees live as people should live: naturally, symbiotically and in a manner that only contributes positively to the world around them.”
20 years after the company was first founded, 14 since its first store was opened and almost 10 since establishing a charity, the work of Ted Dennard has yet to slow down. In all its facets, the Savannah Bee Company aims to provide for a variety of needs, both environmentally and personally, all with the versatility that can be found in honey.
