Let's just say it out loud: it's November, Black Friday is basically on your doorstep, and your peak season plan is either half-finished, sitting in a "next week" folder, or doesn't exist at all. Maybe your Q3 marketing worked way better than anyone expected and now you're staring at order volumes you've never seen before, or maybe this year was a total shit show and you've been so busy keeping your head above water that peak planning never made it onto the to-do list. Either way, you're not the first company to end up here and you won't be the last, but failing to plan for peak doesn't mean all is lost. Luckily I am here and there is still a lot you can do between now and December to keep your shipping spend under control, still deliver what your customers expect, and retain your sanity (mostly).

Honey always felt like the thing in my pantry I never had to think about, because it comes from bees, and how complicated can a bee be? And like, I knew the basics from 10th grade biology, but it seems my teacher left out some truly crazy details. To make a single pound of honey, bees visit around two million flowers and fly something like 55,000 miles (over 88,000 km), and one worker bee makes about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life, which is a wild amount of effort for something that ends up in a plastic bear next to the peanut butter. And yes, it's always her, because every worker bee is female, while the males, called drones, don't make any honey at all and get kicked out of the hive every fall once food runs low.

What my teacher definitely didn't mention is that bees have a production limit, and the global honey market is selling more than that limit allows. Once you follow honey from the hive to the shelf, the math just isn't mathing, and the gap gets filled with some very creative supply chain work.