Bend, snap and squeeze. That is the instruction of the world-first vitamin infused with Mānuka honey, made by Kiwi company, Honuka.

Originally coming from Zimbabwe, Nicki Peek came to New Zealand missing what she was so used to in Africa: animals.

Back in Zimbabwe, Peek was passionate about caring for animals such as warthogs, badgers and piglets, but New Zealand was quite the opposite.

“I thought, ‘what am I going to do?’” says Peek.

“I wanted to get involved in something to do with conservation here and at that time there was a lot of publicity on the plight of the bees.”

For Peek, her passion of animals led her to the bees. After watching countless documentaries and educating herself about the black and yellow flying creatures, Peek took a beekeeping course and the “rest is history”.

From finding solace in the bees to fill the gap that Zimbabwe left her, Peek wanted to share this passion with the rest of the world, and she wanted to do so through the medicinal properties of Mānuka honey.

She was thinking of a convenient way of taking honey and taking it with yourself.

“The Mānuka industry is incredibly competitive and it’s sort of saturated because nobody’s done anything different really,” says Peek.

Advice that really stuck for Peek was at a conference where an industry leader said that what the Mānuka honey industry needed is innovation.

That was where the idea of Mānuka honey snaps stemmed from, an innovative take on the industry and a world-first.

Collaborating with scientists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, Honuka was born.

Essentially these honey snaps are liposomals, or in layman’s term, a special way of packaging vitamins and delivering it efficiently.

They’re sweet from the get-go, but once the taste settles in, there is no denying that they are delicious.

Read more; New Zealand’s largest honey retailer expands into Asia

Peek’s idea of Honuka, before being available to the public, garnered attention from industries in the US where they told her it would thrive.

But she was insistent on keeping it in New Zealand.

“We were actually under a lot of pressure to take it into the States before getting it into New Zealand,” she reveals.

“We wanted to have New Zealand as I guess a big learning curve, so that we could prove that we could do it in this country and we could learn all the things that we needed to learn.”

Already Chemist Warehouse has taken on the product before it has been placed anywhere else.

Peek says the large pharmacy chain believes that the brand will be loved by Kiwis.

“I always believed it could work, even though there were times when it was incredibly tough. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it didn’t feel like that, but I just knew it was going to work,” she adds.

Despite launching in New Zealand, Peek is still dreaming on bringing the brand into the US.

She says that whatever she learns on her home soil, she’ll be comfortable taking it on when entering the “ginormous market” that is the US.

“I’d love to always stay as a New Zealand product and keep that because I think this country is incredibly special and I think makes products unique that come from here, but we’ve got a little way to go,” Peek says.

“There’s a lot to prepare for the US, but that’ll be the next step once we take a breath.”