Hoby's Honey & General Store

There's a family-owned shop in Mandarin area that will take you back in time. Our associate producer Abby headed to Hopi's Honey & General Store on San Jose Boulevard, and basically she wanted to get the story on how one family is bringing back the concept of the old Southern General Store by selling one honey jar at a time. Well we started our business about three years ago. We started Roadside very with h We started underneath a single tent with tomatoes and honey, selling Roadside right here in the Mandarin area. Our goal was to eventually become the General Store that we've become, but we started right down the street, sold there for about two years, and then moved into the General Store, what you see here now, about two years ago. From there we started growing our products, offering more local vendors into our establishment. We also expanded our own line of products from local honey into Amish jams and jellies, condiments, relishes, barbecue sauces. We brought in a lot of other local vendors who make soaps, candles, We sell local raw honey, w Raw honey is honey that's unfiltered, unheated, and unpasteurized. That's important for medicinal purposes, things We have a lot of pines and oaks and flowers that drop a lot of pollen, so people treat that with local honey. The other products that we sell are things Honeycomb is the raw format of the A lot of local restaurants here in town, Moxie, Ovinte, Bee, some of those names, use our honeycomb on their cheese plates. We also sell bee pollen, w A lot of athletes, runners, swimmers, enthusiasts take that to boost their energy, keep their endurance up. It's a very natural item comprised of just proteins and amino acids that the bee collects from various flowers. About half of our business is partnering with local vendors here in town. It's other small businesses that make unique and interesting products that fit into what we do here at a general store. In that case, it's a lot of products because a general store sells a wide range of t Some of those vendors are Shushu Boxer and Jane, w She's a master gardener at the Mandarin Garden Club, local company. Riverside Company, Five Points Candles, soy wax company. Husband and wife team makes very good clean burning products. We sell those. Augustine. Gourmet, all-natural popsicle company made with very cool things Then we have some small barbecue sauce makers. They make Datto Pepper barbecue sauces, Datto Pepper hot sauces. T Augustine area. We have a toffee maker, Topsy Toffee, located right here in Jacksonville. Soft toffee, very good quality. We really try and bring in very small entrepreneurial based businesses that have a synergy with what we do and that bode well with our customers. We also focus primarily on vine ripe tomatoes. We serve a lot of restaurants in town tomatoes, so it's important to have vine ripe dirt grown tomatoes that actually when you cut into them are read all the way through. Very simple t And then farm fresh eggs, non-GMO grains, no antibiotics, no hormones, don't have to be refrigerated for four weeks. We get them once a week from local farms, pasture c Very important for us to work with local farms W Our goal would be for everyone to leave here just with a smile on their face. Our store kind of evokes a little bit of Americana, w They come in, we've tried to set up the environment to look So we want to welcome you in. We hope when you're leaving you feel Now I pass up that place every day on my commute and it looks amazing because all those Now that I have an inside scoop on it, I want to definitely go check it out. Now I got to stop. Definitely stop in there. It almost is com. Click on the As Seen on RCL TABL.