What Makes Honey Baked Ham® the World’s Best? (2024)

May 6, 2021 • Franchise News

Part of the beauty of a Honey Baked Ham is that you don’t need to know how it’s made to know it’s the perfect feature dish of a delicious dinner. That said, if you knew every step of the process that takes our products from the source to the serving, you’d know exactly how Honey Baked Ham—and our growing menu of traditional soups, salads, sauces, sandwiches and sides—has earned the title of World’s Best.

To learn more about the premium products you could offer your customers as a HoneyBaked® food retail franchise business owner, read on!

An Opportunity Wrapped In Gleaming Gold Foil

We’ve spent decades honing the inspection, cooking and distribution processes behind every dish we serve at HoneyBaked. We carefully and rigorously control every aspect of the process to ensure safety, quality and consistency without fail. That means franchisees can be sure their customers will love the products they’re served every time.How We Make Our Signature, Sweet & Crunchy-Glazed Ham

• Each Honey Baked ham is hand-selected according to the most stringent standards in the industry from the highest quality American, grain-fed stock before being trimmed and prepared by expert manufacturers.
• Every ham undergoes a 16-point inspection that results in only about 10% of hams being selected to be Honey Baked Hams.
• Once we’ve identified the top 10% of hams, each of them is cured for up to 48 hours using a signature process that enhances the flavor of the meat without adding any water or additional juices.
• After curing, our hams spend up to 24 hours smoking—at least twice as long as the industry standard—over a select blend of hardwood chips. The long smoking process gives Honey Baked Ham its rich, smoky flavor our customers love.
• After the smoking process, the hams are carefully loaded one-by-one onto our powered spiral slicers—a machine originally invented specifically for our product by our founder Mr. Hoenselaar himself. This process gives our ham the single, continuous spiral slice we’re famous for. This way, everyone at dinner can enjoy the perfect slice of delicious Honey Baked Ham.
• Each ham goes through an additional multi-point quality inspection to ensure only the most pristine hams make it to the glazing process – the best part!
• In-store, our master glazers are carefully trained to apply our secret recipe glaze to ensure every product has a nearly identical layer of our signature sweet and crunchy glaze. Glazing each ham by hand in-store means that our franchisees offer their customers the freshest, highest-quality product every time.

The High Quality Doesn’t Stop There

The comforting, mouthwatering flavor in all of our high-quality products is what makes HoneyBaked such a beloved national retail food franchise with an intensely loyal following. We support our franchisees’ businesses with a top-notch, cross-functional product development team that includes representatives from marketing, operations, supply chain and food safety to ensure each product tastes as fantastic as our customers expect it to while keeping our franchisees retail food business operations as simple as possible.

Just like our flagship hams, any new HoneyBaked menu item goes through a disciplined, multi-stage development process. Only when an item has undergone discovery, briefing, development and testing can it be launched to the system and join the other legendary products on our menu. The testing phase includes franchisees wherever possible to give us the most accurate picture possible of how a systemwide product launch will go.

Want to learn more about what else comes with the HoneyBaked franchise opportunity? Let us know you’re interested!

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