The 2018 Good Food Awards were wonderful!  We loved meeting so many amazing food crafters, tasting their winning entries and hearing wisdom-filled speeches by Alice Waters, Madhur Jaffrey, Good Food Foundation Director Sarah Weiner, Bi-Rite owner Sam Mogannam and various GFA winners. Christina Joy Neumann, Apoidea’s owner and beekeeper, was honored to give a speech on behalf of the Honey Category winners.   Apoidea received the 2018 Award for its Allegheny Fall Fallopia Wildflower Honey, three years after being recognized as a 2015 Good Food Award winner for its Allegheny Knotweed Rosemary-Infused honey.  Apoidea was a 2017 Good Food Award Finalist for its Allegheny Spring Tree Blossom Honey.

Honoring products that embody both culinary excellence and environmental responsibility, Good Food Award judges select by blind-tasting samples from thousands of entrants in an effort to recognize superior craftsmanship in 15 categories ranging from cheeses to spirits to honey ( www.goodfoodawards.org). Winning honey must be 100% transparently sourced from the apiary named on the label and made without the use of antibiotics, high fructose corn syrup feed or prophylactic disease treatments administered without proper testing. In addition, the hives of Good Food Award-winning honey cannot be located within a five-mile radius of crops that receive heavy usage of agrochemicals to prevent excessive pesticide exposure.

As a two-time Good Food Award winner and passionate advocate for change in the honey industry, Christina Neumann was chosen to deliver acceptance remarks at the award ceremony in San Francisco.  Her comments can be read at this link: 2018 Honey Category. You can listen to all the speeches during the evening at this link: 2018 Good Food Awards Recording.   The Honey Category starts at around the 1 h.:23 m.:00 s. point in the ceremony.   Eleanor Gease for Each Peach Market in Washington, DC announced the category winners.  Christina used her speech as an opportunity to thank the Good Food Foundation for setting high quality standards in the honey industry where wholesomeness is often taken for granted and words such as “local” and “sustainable” are thrown around with little accountability. Christina also reiterated the importance of treating bees humanely and making their best interest a priority when growing a honey business.

Apoidea is an urban apiary ranging seasonally from 50-80 hives and located within a 10 mile radius of downtown Pittsburgh. The ecological mission of the apiary is grounded in a recognition of the intimate and amazing symbiosis between hard-working bees and Western Pennsylvania’s diversity of flowering plants. Both the 2015 and 2018 Good Food award-winning honeys were crafted by Apoidea’s bees working the late-season blooms along the banks of the Allegheny River between Etna and Millvale, Pennsylvania. Apoidea’s founder, Christina Joy Neumann, regards both Good Food Award winning honeys as “validation of the unique flavors created by the mix of fall wildflowers that bloom along the banks of our three rivers which help create a distinctly Western Pennsylvania terroir.”