BeeAttitudes Honey Farm & Coffee Roastery

Rich Larimer spent years as an executive sales leader at Microsoft. His wife runs a large staffing company. Neither of them had any reason to think that bees would change the direction of their lives — until they signed up for a beekeeping class on a whim, started going every Thursday, and found themselves completely immersed in the world of hives, honey, and apiary management.

The hobby became a production operation. The production operation needed somewhere to sell. They built a farm stand at the entrance to their 10-acre property in Westerville, a northwest suburb of Columbus, Ohio, recruited neighborhood kids to make trinkets and candies to fill it out, and started selling raw honey to their community. Coffee, Rich figured, was a natural add-on. He just didn't know yet how to make it work — until he found Bellwether.

That was January. By the time he joined this webinar, Rich had been roasting for just a few months — running about 100 pounds a week out of his basement, selling through a farm stand, a converted horse trailer at a local equestrian center, a growing list of retail accounts, and a brand-new website. He is, as he puts it, very new to this. It doesn't show.

The horse trailer with 200,000 miles on it.

Rich's daughter was an equestrian for nine years. The family traveled across the country with two horses in a trailer that accumulated 200,000 miles. When his daughter moved on, the trailer sat on the side of the bull barn going nowhere. "I'm gonna do something with this thing," Rich decided. He started knocking rust off it and converting the interior. Horses out, espresso in.

The conversion cost around $40,000 in renovation on top of the $2,500 he'd paid for the trailer originally. Inside: two Gozney S1 propane pizza ovens mounted in the back, a Simonelli Nuova two-head espresso machine, a grinder, and everything else that comes with running a full mobile service setup. All-in, the trailer came to about $50,000 — and Rich owns it outright. No debt on any of it.

The trailer now lives at Brave Horse Equestrian Center, about five miles from the farm — the same facility where his daughter spent most of her time as a young rider. The community there already knew the family, already trusted them, and has embraced the coffee and pizza operation with the kind of loyalty you can only get from a genuine existing relationship. "That community appreciates the quality of what we're putting out, even from the back of a horse trailer."

Coffee in the basement. Beautiful from the second batch.

The roaster lives in the basement — what used to be Rich's wife's storage room. Ohio weather rules out the garage, and the kitchen countertop wasn't wide enough (his wife vetoed that location anyway). The basement works: shelving units, a heavy-duty table, scales, 5-gallon buckets as storage bins, a shop vac, bags, and labels. The roaster sits on a 30-amp, 240-volt outlet — the same draw as a commercial washing machine. No ductwork, no fan, no ventilation. The machine captures everything internally, and the only aroma that escapes is when the roasted beans hit the open air of the bucket. Rich describes it as a baked chocolate smell. He finds it pleasant.

His first batch, he overfilled it. Didn't read the instructions carefully enough, put in too much coffee, and the results weren't what he was hoping for. The second batch — 3.3 pounds, correct weight, instructions followed — came out beautifully. "I am a complete amateur," he said, "but I can honestly say the second batch was just gorgeous coffee right out of the box." He's been roasting consistently every Tuesday since.

“I am a complete amateur. The second batch was just gorgeous coffee.”

Rich Larimer

A menu shaped by neighbors — including a Columbus Crew captain.

Rich's coffee menu started with one piece of advice from Zoe, Bellwether's head roaster: begin with a blend that works for both everyday drip and espresso, so you're managing fewer coffees while you find your footing. He took that advice and built around the Meridian blend, which remains the cornerstone of the operation — roasted medium for drip, pulled darker for espresso. From there, he followed his own palate: he tried the Guatemalan, loved it, put it on the farm stand, and discovered that two or three neighbors immediately became regular buyers. The Guatemala stayed.

The Ethiopian found its way onto the menu through a different path. Jonathan Mensah — the captain of Major League Soccer's Columbus Crew, who happens to live in Rich's neighborhood — stopped by the farm, bought a bunch of honey, and in the course of that conversation connected Rich to the local Ghanaian community in Columbus. That community, it turned out, had a strong affinity for Ethiopian coffee. Rich started stocking it, roasted light to bring out its floral and citrusy character, and now has a loyal customer base for it. He's already eyeing Rwandan varietals as the next addition.

“I use those stories as sales tools.”

Rich Larimer

The most recent addition is the Honduran Mercedes Anaerobic Natural — a coffee Rich got excited about after watching it perform well in Bellwether's World Cupping competition. He's using it as a rotating featured coffee, pushing it through web channels and asking retail partners for extra signage to spotlight it. The origin story and process details from the Bellwether Marketplace go straight onto the back label of his bags. "I use those stories as sales tools when I walk into a retail account," he said. "They really work."

Selling without a cafe — and why that's intentional.

Rich made a deliberate decision not to open a traditional cafe — at least not yet, and not primarily for cost reasons. He didn't want to compete with the local cafes and shops he was hoping to sell to. "I'm trying to be their partner, not their competitor." That philosophy shapes how he approaches every wholesale account: he's not just dropping off bags. He's helping them build displays, supporting product launch announcements, and when a new coffee comes in, he'll park the trailer in their parking lot for a couple of days to make an event of it.

Current accounts include restaurants, a home goods and antiques store with a dedicated shelf for BeeAttitudes honey and coffee, a butcher shop, and several cafes that have converted away from their previous vendors. The same relationship instinct that served him selling multi-million-dollar computer systems to hospitals now drives his coffee sales — find the need, solve it, stay close. The coffees themselves become the differentiator only after the relationship is already there.

The unit economics, and when they flip.

Rich ran the numbers live and they're straightforward: green coffee at $6–7 per pound from the Bellwether Marketplace, bag and two labels at $1.50, all-in cost around $7.50 per pound. Selling price: $20 per pound (12-ounce bags). That's roughly a $12 margin per pound before accounting for waste, sampling, and giveaways — which Rich freely admits he's doing a lot of, as a new business trying to build awareness. At 100 pounds a week and a conservative $10 net margin, that's about $1,000 per week. The roaster pays for itself in five to six months at that pace.

“All in at $7.50, selling at $20. Look at that margin.”

Rich Larimer

He's approaching the comfortable ceiling of the countertop machine — around 100 pounds per week — and is already thinking about upgrading to the continuous roasting option, which can handle 400 to 500 pounds a week. The countertop can be upgraded in the field, so the path forward is already there when the volume justifies it.

Maintenance has stayed simple: every five roasts or so, he pulls two small metal filters and runs a shop vac over them — about seven minutes of work. A preventive maintenance filter kit runs around $400 per year at his current volume. He hasn't needed a service call yet, but the knowledge that regional third-party technicians are now trained on Bellwether machines gives him confidence when he does.

What's next: wellness, white label, and scale.

Rich has six additional wooded acres on the property that he and his wife are planning to develop into some kind of wellness center — six to eight small houses, trails, hiking, farm-based services, and a healthy food menu. His wife already practices apitherapy by appointment, which involves the deliberate application of bee venom as a treatment. ("It hurts," Rich confirmed. "But apparently bee venom has been medicine for 3,000 years.") A small café could emerge from that wellness concept as a natural fit — but it would grow from the space rather than be built as a standalone.

A white label opportunity surfaced the morning of the webinar: a larger nearby farm stand expressed interest in carrying locally roasted coffee under their own branding. Rich would handle sourcing, roasting, bag design, and labels. The coffee would carry the farm stand's name. That kind of arrangement multiplies reach without multiplying overhead — and fits exactly the partnership model he's built the whole business around.

Online is the newest channel — the website launched just last week, a social media firm is four days into building out the digital presence, and traffic is already flowing back to the farm stand. For a 10-acre operation in a suburb of Columbus, the internet is how you scale. Rich knows it, and he's moving toward it the same way he's moved toward everything else in this business: carefully, with purpose, debt-free.