by Terrie Ellerbee/editor-Southwest
When Me & the Bees Lemonade CEO Mikaila Ulmer was four and a half years old, her family encouraged her to come up with a product for a children’s business competition—the Acton Children’s Business Fair.
It so happened that her great-grandmother Helen had sent her a 1940s cookbook that included her own special flaxseed lemonade recipe. Ulmer also happened to get stung by a bee on two occasions in one week.
All of this was the genesis for her very successful company, which is run by her family. It also was the beginning of Ulmer’s relationship with bees.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been stung by a bee before, but it really, really hurts,” she told The Shelby Report. “My parents encouraged me to do a little bit of research on them and in doing the research, I found out what important pollinators they are, and also that they’re dying at an alarming rate.”
For her business fair project, she created a lemonade sweetened with honey using her great-grandmother’s recipe. She also sold lemonade made with local honey from a lemonade stand a couple of times a year for about four years.
It was her determination to save the bees that ultimately led to the young CEO’s success.
“I decided to start teaching workshops on why the bees are important, how we can save them and why we should all be saving them. I would do them at schools, churches and other organizations until Whole Foods asked me to do a presentation at one of their locations,” Ulmer said.
She brought a tri-fold poster board with her to the first workshop inside the Whole Foods store located about 10 minutes from her home in Austin. She continued to volunteer to spread her enthusiasm about saving the bees, as well as her lemonade, at Whole Foods locations. Then one day, the retailer approached her about ordering a case or two of her lemonade.
Fast forward to her 11th year on this earth, when she made an $11 million deal with Whole Foods to sell what was then called BeeSweet Lemonade.
Ulmer already had been on the television show “Shark Tank” and garnered $60,000 in seed money.
A portion of the profit from the sale of her products has always gone to organizations working to save honeybees. Ulmer now has created a nonprofit, the Healthy Hive Foundation, that is devoted to educating people about the importance of protecting bees.
“We’re working with a lot of different companies for Me & the Bees to teach kids about the bees through VR and holograms. They actually have a really cool interaction where you can put on this glove and look at and pollinate the flowers themselves, but it’s a virtual flower. They can see how the bees do it,” Ulmer said. “We’re also hoping that large corporations can donate their extra land to the bees and we can go plant bee-friendly flowers. One of the reasons they’re dying is a loss of habitat, so I am really excited about the nonprofit.”
Get back up and spread your wings
Ulmer came up with an encouraging phrase that she shares in workshops and educational events where she is a presenter: “Don’t be discouraged by life’s little stings, get back up and spread your wings.”
She used this wisdom when another enterprise that had been using the “Bee Sweet” name longer than Ulmer had been alive filed a lawsuit against her company in 2016 for trademark infringement.
“Initially I was going to fight back, because that was the name I’d come up with when I was 4 years old,” she said. “But we realized it was going to be hard because they started their company before we started ours.”
With the choice of ending the business venture or changing the name and starting again, she and her family decided to move forward. This time, they would not do it on their own but with advisors and investors. Last year, 12 angel investors—10 of them professional football players—contributed $810,000 in funding to the newly-named Me & The Bees Lemonade.
Ulmer, who just turned 14 years old, loves Austin because it is home to business incubators, investors and mentors who believe in entrepreneurship. It is a city that supports local companies.
“Also, often it has great weather for lemonade,” she said. “Most of the time, it’s hot.”
She plans to be an angel investor herself in the future, to use what she has learned to help minority-owned or socially-conscious companies.
That is not all she has planned.
“One of my goals is becoming a serial entrepreneur,” she said. “I want to use the experience I’ve had with this company to potentially start another in the future. I’m always coming up with business ideas because I think it’s fun and interesting.”
Ulmer also soon will write a book to inspire and teach young entrepreneurs how to start and grow a business.
Expanding the product and the movement to save bees
Me & the Bees Lemonade is a honey-sweetened, ready-to-drink premium glass bottled lemonade. Currently there are four flavors: Mint, Ginger, Prickly Pear and half tea, half lemonade.
The young entrepreneur would like to see her products available in all 50 states. Right now, they are in 35 in more than 620 natural grocery retailers and cafeterias in the U.S., including Whole Foods Market, Wegmans, the University of Texas at Austin and the Fairmont Hotel Austin. Recent retail distribution additions include Colorado-based Natural Grocers and Southern California’s Gelson’s. Me & the Bees is distributed nationally by United Natural Foods Inc.
Ulmer said she is eager to get her product into independent grocery stores.
“I really love small, mom-and-pop shops, because they know their customers really well,” she said. “I feel like when we get into those local neighborhood shops, we can educate them about the bees more. They’re passionate and aware about the products that they buy. I definitely do like having my lemonade in small grocery stores, but also Fresh Market and Earth Fare and different companies like that.”
She said that when retailers decide to carry her products, they also join the mission to save the bees.
“I’ve always said that when you buy a bottle, you also save a bee, so they’re joining the movement and becoming the ‘Me’ in Me & the Bees,” Ulmer said.
A presidential handshake
Ulmer has visited the White House on a few occasions and met both of the Obamas. The first time she went was for the Kids’ State Dinner. Young chefs representing each U.S. state, five territories and the District of Columbia were selected to attend the dinner through a contest called the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge. It was part of former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative for children.
“Miss Michelle invited me. She thought that because my lemonade was healthy and used healthy and natural ingredients that I would be an inspiring person to attend there, even though I wasn’t a contestant,” Ulmer said. “That was the first time I was at the White House.”
The second time was at the White House Easter Egg Roll, where she sold about 10,000 cups of lemonade.
The last time she went to the White House was two summers ago, when she introduced former president Barack Obama at the first-ever United State of Women Summit.
She said she and the former president have their own handshake.
“It was more like a fist-bump thing, but I consider it a handshake,” Ulmer said.
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