Hédène
Hédène is a French honey house founded in 2013 by two beekeepers, Cyril Marx and Alexis Ratouis, with one aim: to give French honey back its standing. Instead of blending, it bottles single-flower honeys from named French terroirs, each cold-extracted and unpasteurized, so that a lavender honey from the Luberon and a chestnut honey from the Périgord taste as different as the landscapes they come from.
The house
Both founders come from beekeeping families and trained at the beekeeping school of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Their idea was to treat honey the way France treats wine: as a product of place, with a name, a season and a flavor that can be told apart in a blind tasting. Hédène's range is built as a palette of regional monofloral crus, each drawn from hives placed among the finest patches of wild flowers.
The method follows from the idea. Honeys are extracted cold and left unpasteurized, so the aromas that make an acacia from Burgundy or a fir honey from Lorraine distinctive are not cooked away. Each monofloral jar is one flower, one region and one harvest. Some of these honeys are inherently scarce, because the plant flowers briefly or unpredictably, so a few varieties come and go with the seasons.
That care has earned the house a following among French chefs and pastry chefs, and in the cheese shops of master affineurs such as Michel Fouchereau and Marie Quatrehomme, who pair its honeys with their cheeses.
What they make
The Clipperton range covers the monofloral honeys, honey and fruit preparations, gift sets and a few objects for the table.
- Lavender Honey – creamy and scented, harvested in the Luberon.
- Acacia Honey – liquid and crystal clear, from Burgundy.
- Chestnut Honey – intense and woody, from the Périgord regional park.
- Paris' Honey – a rare urban honey harvested near Longchamp.
- Grand Cru Honey Box – acacia, linden and chestnut in a trio of small jars.
The full Hédène collection also includes rhododendron, hawthorn, buckwheat, carrot and alder buckthorn honeys, honey jams such as strawberry with linden honey, honey with rose or yuzu, a boxwood honey dipper and honey-scented candles.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer, and we look for producers who can tell you exactly where a product comes from. Hédène can: the jar says the flower, the region and the harvest window, and the honey inside tastes like it. We buy directly from the house, which means the range on our shelves follows the seasons in France and includes the rarer harvests when they exist. We took a longer tour of the range in our Journal: Hédène: a Tour de France of single-origin honeys, and wrote more generally about why premium French honey is worth it.
