About Us

Our great grandmother, Lottie Zeldner, opened Zeldner’s Wild Game Center in 1929 in Buffalo, NY, the only certified wild game dealer East of the Mississippi. Her son and our grandfather, Bernie Zeldner, worked in the store while his grandfather continued his career as a potter at the renowned Buffalo Pottery.

From the age of eight, our dad, Ishai Zeldner, worked in the family store.

For over 50 years, Zeldner’s Wild Game Center served the people of Buffalo with a classic grocery selection, fresh produce, meats, and a growing selection of soul food and wild game.

“You name it, we sold it,” said Ishai.

After graduating from college, Ishai decided to pursue adventure by living on Kibbutz Beit Hashita in Northern Israel. He immediately felt at home in the community, and split his time between learning Hebrew and supporting the Kibbutz in a wide variety of ways, including picking cotton, canning olives, harvesting citrus, working in the fish ponds, and…beekeeping!

Ishai recalls, “harvesting fish from frigid cold fish ponds, stomping cotton using our bodies to cram down the voluminous spongy cotton balls, picking olives all day long on tall ladders, picking grapefruits early on a winter’s cool morning, the rain dripping from the leaves, soaking whatever we wore, and moving bees in the wee hours of the night.”

Although beekeeping was brand new to him, Ishai became absolutely fascinated with it, finding a mentor in the Kibbutz’s head beekeeper, Yosef Gidron. While Ishai may not have known it at the time, his future career path had begun. Ishai worked with and learned from Yosef throughout four bee seasons. When asked about his half century love of honey bees, Ishai says, “My mentor kept bees ’til he was 90. That’s my role model.”

When Ishai left Israel, and returned to the US, he saw his path clearly. After overseeing the sale of Zeldner’s Wild Game Center, Ishai packed up the Zeldner’s Market van and drove across the country to study bees at one of the most highly regarded honey bee research facilities in the country, the University of California, Davis.

Over the next few years, Ishai worked as a commercial beekeeper for the legendary master beekeeper and queen breeder Clarence Wenner, studied bees at UC Davis, and discovered a newfound fascination with varietal honey when he first tasted California Yellow Star Thistle Honey.

Yellow Star Thistle Honey is a quintessential Northern California Honey, and the first honey that led Ishai to realize just how different honeys can taste, purely based on the type of nectar the bees are collecting. He loved it so much that he began gifting the liquid gold to all of his friends and acquaintances. He wanted everyone to share in his joy around this perfect gift of nature, and he took considerable pride in educating people about varietal honey. Thus, in 1979, Moon Shine Trading Company was born! A true community effort, Ishai’s friends pitched in to bottle and label the first batch of 180 pounds of pure Yellow Star Thistle Honey in his front yard.

In 1981, our mom, Amina Harris, made the cross country move from Buffalo to Winters to join Ishai, build a family, and help shape the future of Moon Shine Trading Company.

Amina brought her own entrepreneurial and creative experience – both managing her own soft sculpture business, Loopieland, and work in the natural and specialty food industry through her involvement with the Lexington Food Coop in Buffalo, NY. These experiences allowed her to build the Moon Shine Trading brand. She developed a beautiful illustrated newsletter, created strategy to position Moon Shine Trading Co. as a premier gourmet food business and hand-cut the fabric that decorated the lids of Moon Shine Trading’s first pint, quart and half gallon jars of glistening honey.

The next generation . . .

In 1982, our parents were married, and the next generation was soon to follow. Shoshana was born in 1983, the same year our parents rented Moon Shine Trading Company’s first warehouse space, a 1500-square-foot barn in downtown Winters, CA. In 1986, their second child, Joshua Zeldner, was born.

In the decades that followed, the company expanded from offering just one honey, to a collection that includes over 30 varietal honeys from across the US. They introduced unique and award-winning honey fruit spreads, natural nut butters, comb honey products, honey in the straw, and a full line of beehive products like pollen, propolis, beeswax and royal jelly.

Amina played a national role in the gourmet food industry, serving as a board member and show chair for the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (now Specialty Food Association) for 8 years.

It became clear that we had outgrown our initial warehouse space. After much searching, we eventually settled in a much larger 4,000-square foot space in Woodland, CA.

“We never thought we’d outgrow that space! It seemed so cavernous at the time,” remarks Amina Harris about the move to Woodland.

In 2001, friends of the family, and fellow local honey company Island of the Moon Honey, were ready to get out of the honey business. Amina and Ishai decided to acquire the brand, now heavily distributed throughout California.

In 2010, Joshua Zeldner, who had graduated from the University of Colorado, decided to move back to Davis, CA to learn the family business.

“I tried a few other career paths, and eventually realized that nothing would bring me as much fulfillment as continuing the legacy that my parents built.”

Having grown up around it, Joshua had always been involved in the business in smaller ways but working full time in the business with his fresh perspective out of college, led to a period of rapid growth for the company, expanding within their existing space to a total of 9,000 square feet. Joshua manages operations of the wholesale and production side of the business as Z Specialty Food’s Nectar Director.

In 2012, UC Davis visited our office to discuss their intention to open a ‘Honey Center,’ specifically requesting our involvement as industry experts. Amina soon realized that this center was aligned with her educational vision and became the founding Director of the Honey & Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at UC Davis. She would lead the center for the next decade, objectively putting mead (the fermented beverage made with honey) on the map by creating and hosting high level workshops for the analysis and betterment of mead and varietal honey. Boasting 40+ years of a wide variety of experiences related to honey, Amina is an industry icon around the education and promotion of honey and mead. She provides educational content that informs our promotional materials, staff training, and engagement with the public.

Several years later, it became clear that Z Specialty Food needed more space. Joshua had eyes on something bigger, something that the community of Woodland could rally around as a real cultural gem. The search began for the perfect location.

On the day of the eclipse in August 2017, Ishai was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He passed away just ten months later, in June 2018. We look for ways daily to celebrate his kind and generous energy, what he contributed to the honey industry at large, and what Moon Shine Trading Co has grown into.

In August 2019, we broke ground on the 2.77 acre site where The HIVE now sits. Joshua managed the design and build of The HIVE’s new 20,000 square foot Zero Net Energy production facility and event space, finally moving operations to the new site in November 2020.

By 2022 The HIVE Tasting Room & Kitchen became fully operational, hosting community events, offering complimentary honey tasting and a seasonal farm-to-fork menu.

The HIVE is so much more than all of this. With a 2-acre pollinator habitat, it is an industrial oasis.

The HIVE is also a living legacy to Ishai and a testament to the business he built in partnership with Amina. Shoshana designed and installed a memorial to Ishai behind our honey tasting counter, built entirely out of Ishai’s old beekeeping equipment; an ode to Ishai’s love for beekeeping and his appreciation for our natural resources.

We welcome you to visit The HIVE, our family business dream come true.

In the Fall of 2023, Shoshana moved back to Woodland to join the business full time. Like Joshua, she had always been involved in the family business, her entire life. With more than 15 years of experience in the nonprofit arts and culture industries, she decided that she was ready to contribute to her family legacy at Z Specialty Food. Shoshana oversees marketing, branding and The HIVE Tasting Room & Kitchen as Director of Brand Strategy.

Together this brother sister duo is honored to build upon the legacy their parents started and envision a future for the next generation.