BeeAttitudes Honey Farm & Coffee Roastery

Some coffee businesses start with a lease, a build-out, and a mountain of debt. Rich Larimer started with bees.

In the replay below, Jonathan Bass from Bellwether sits down with Richard Larimer, founder of BeeAttitudes Honey Farm and Coffee Roastery in Westerville, Ohio. After a career as a sales leader at Microsoft, Rich retired in January, moved a roaster into his basement, and started building a modern coffee business that looks nothing like a traditional café. Today he roasts on demand, runs a coffee truck out of a converted horse trailer, supplies local retailers, and just launched an online subscription.

If you've ever wondered whether you can build something real without a storefront and a fortune, Rich's story is worth your time. He's proof you can start small, stay debt-free, and let your customers show you where to go next.

From the tech world to the beehive

BeeAttitudes didn't begin as a business plan. It began as a hobby that got out of hand in the best way.

"My wife and I started beekeeping as a hobby a few years ago," Rich said. "We got involved in some classes, and every Thursday we'd go and we get immersed in the bee world with other pros and learned a lot and loved it, and then created our own apiary here on the farm."

The honey came fast, and there was a lot of it. So they built a little farm stand at the front of the property and recruited neighborhood kids to make candies and trinkets to sell alongside it. It worked. Coffee felt like a natural add-on, but Rich assumed he'd have to buy pre-roasted beans and build a brand around someone else's product.

"I was an executive sales leader for Microsoft. She owns a large staffing business. So our worlds were way far away from where we are today," he said.

Then he found a different path. "I discovered Bellwether and I thought, oh my gosh, this is really the answer to what I was looking for."

Why he roasts in his own basement

Rich deliberately chose not to open a café. He didn't want to compete with the very people he hoped to sell to. Instead, he set up his roaster in a basement storage room and started supplying restaurants, a home goods store, a butcher shop, and a general store around the Columbus area.

The machine's design is what made a basement operation possible. Because it's all-electric and ventless, there was no gas line, no ductwork, no permit fight.

"I plugged it in, it came to life, and I had coffee," Rich said. His first batch didn't go well because he overloaded it. "The second batch, I read the instructions, only put the 3.1 pounds in, and it just made beautiful coffee right out of the box, and I am a complete amateur."

He leaned hard on Bellwether's coffee team from day one, because hiring that expertise was never an option for a one-person shop.

"I couldn't hire that kind of staff. I couldn't afford it," he said. "So what I did was I sought partners that could bring value to me and to my customers and community ultimately."

“I discovered Bellwether and I thought, oh my gosh, this is really the answer to what I was looking for.”

Rich Larimer

That partnership stretched from roast profiles and sourcing all the way to his packaging. When he needed bags and labels, it was one more introduction and one more phone call. He uses two labels on every bag: one to introduce the coffee, one to tell the story of where it came from and how it was processed.

The community model: sell coffee together

Rich doesn't want box stores buying thousands of pounds. He wants relationships. His whole growth strategy is built on helping other small businesses win.

"I want these personal relationships with these small business owners where we're trying to figure out how to sell coffee together in their space, and I just really love that," he said.

When he approaches a café already buying from another vendor, he doesn't lead with price. He leads with a problem to solve.

"If you're going to sell somebody something, you have to solve a problem for them," he said. "They're experiencing something unpleasant or something that's broken. Those are the place where you have the opportunity to go in and maybe build a better mousetrap."

He goes arm in arm with his wholesale partners: building displays, running product launches, and even parking his coffee truck in their lot for a couple of days to make an event out of a new roast. For his resellers, he built a simple affiliate structure using Bellwether's suggested wholesale margins, so his partners make money every time they move a bag.

Small menu, deep knowledge

With 25 coffees on the Marketplace, it would be easy to over-order and overwhelm customers. Rich's advice is the opposite.

His first session with the coffee team started with a blunt question. "I have no idea where to start," he told them. The recommendation: run one blend for both everyday drip and espresso to keep things simple in the beginning. He built around the Meridian blend, and it's still the cornerstone of everything he does.

From there, his customers drove the menu. Neighbors who loved Guatemalan coffee. A local Ghanaian community, connected through a former Columbus Crew captain who lives nearby, that loves the Ethiopian. A small-batch roaster lets him follow that demand without committing to giant orders.

"I would keep it small and that just makes your operations so much easier too," he said. His guidance for newcomers: pick three or four coffees, go deep, know the differentiators cold, and know exactly why a customer should buy that coffee from you.

He also insists on talking about quality like it matters, because it does. "You're selling really good food," Rich said. "You should talk like that to your customers about what they're putting in their bodies and why it's important to take care of themselves that way."

The economics that make it work

Here's where a self-described amateur turns into a sharp businessman. Rich buys green coffee from the Marketplace for roughly 6 to 7 dollars a pound. Add a bag and two labels, and he's all in around 7.50 dollars. He sells it for 20 dollars.

"But the margins in coffee are huge," he said. He'd already learned that lesson with honey, and coffee surprised even him.

“But the margins in coffee are huge.”

Rich Larimer

Do the simple math. At about a 12-dollar margin per pound, roasting 100 pounds a week works out to roughly 1,200 dollars a week, or close to 5,000 dollars a month. Even if you knock the margin down to 10 dollars a pound to account for waste and the coffee he gives away to win business, that's still about 1,000 dollars a month, and the roaster pays for itself in as little as five to six months.

Rich is already at roughly 100 pounds a week, which is close to the max for the countertop roaster, so he's eyeing the continuous roasting upgrade that pushes 400 to 500 pounds a week. And because he owns his farm stand and his trailer outright, he's growing with almost no overhead and no debt.

Where BeeAttitudes goes next

Rich has ideas percolating. A wellness retreat with mini-houses and trails on his wooded acreage. A white-label deal with a larger farm stand that wants BeeAttitudes coffee under its own name. And a brand-new e-commerce site with subscriptions, launched just a week before the webinar, already driving traffic back to the farm.

He also floated the ventless machine's best hidden feature: putting it right in front of customers.

"That whole idea of ventless is super, it's just, it's understated," he said. "You could put this in your lobby of your cafe. It's an entertainment factor. You've got a family with some little kids there and you're carting out 3 pounds of coffee and you can let them pour it in."

Watch the full replay

The conversation above goes deeper than we can capture here, including a lively Q&A on startup costs, maintenance, electrical requirements, and how Rich converted a rusty horse trailer into a working coffee truck. If you're dreaming about a coffee business that doesn't look like everyone else's, press play and let Rich walk you through it.