The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2009–2025
Me & the Bees: bee-stung 4-year-old's honey lemonade — $60k Shark Tank deal, 1,500 stores
After two bee stings, four-year-old Mikaila Ulmer sweetened her great-grandmother's lemonade with local honey and gave a share to bees — now a national brand.
Me & the Bees Lemonade
What it had to solve
In 2009, four-year-old Mikaila Ulmer of Austin, Texas, was stung twice by honeybees in one week. When her family encouraged her to enter a local youth business competition, she needed a product — and, instead of staying scared of bees, she decided to help them.
How it works
In 2009, four-year-old Mikaila Ulmer of Austin, Texas, was stung twice by honeybees in one week. Instead of staying scared, she learned about bees at the library — including how essential they are to food and how they are in trouble. When her family encouraged her to enter a children's business competition, she chose a product that could help: lemonade, sweetened with local honey and made from her great-grandmother Helen's 1940s flaxseed recipe, with part of the profits pledged to bee conservation.
The front-yard stand did so well that she took it to local fairs, and two years later a pizza-shop owner told her that if she could bottle the lemonade, he would stock it. With her parents' help she found a commercial kitchen, began delivering cases to local shops, and got picked up by Whole Foods for Pollinator Week — the placement did so well it became permanent.
In 2015, at age 11, she pitched on Shark Tank and won a $60,000 investment from Daymond John. By 2020 the brand was in more than 1,500 stores including Whole Foods, Wegmans and The Fresh Market, and had expanded into lip balm. Emory's 2025 profile counted more than 600 stores nationwide and described a business built on purpose: protecting bees.
Why it lands
- The cause and the ingredient were the same thing: honey was both the sweetener and the reason to exist, so the product's story never needed explaining.
- It turned a childhood fear into a mission: the bee stings gave the brand a genuine, personal origin that customers remembered and repeated.
- It used a child-scale proof point — a lemonade stand and one local shop's dare — to validate demand before any real investment.
- The kid-founder framing made earned media do the marketing: competitions, Shark Tank and Whole Foods all amplified a story people wanted to share.
What it did
By 2020 the brand was in more than 1,500 stores including Whole Foods, Wegmans and The Fresh Market; Emory's 2025 profile counted 600+ stores nationwide, plus a bee-conservation foundation, a Time 'Most Influential Teens' honor and a book.
What you can take
A kid-sized cause can anchor a company: honey worked as both sweetener and mission, so every bottle told the same story — which is how a lemonade stand held shelf space next to national brands.
Since then
Ulmer founded the Healthy Hive Foundation in 2016, introduced President Obama at the United State of Women Summit the same year, made Time's 30 Most Influential Teens in 2017 and published her memoir 'Bee Fearless: Dream Like a Kid' in 2020. By 2025 Me & the Bees was stocked in more than 600 stores including Target and H-E-B, and Ulmer was studying economics at Emory as a Woodruff Scholar while running the family business.
Sources
- Me & the Bees Lemonade founder started her empire at 4 years old. Her motto: 'Dream like a kid'
- Bee the Change
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