Mikaila Ulmer is the successful young entrepreneur who founded her own lemonade company, Me and the Bees Lemonade. The business started when Mikaila was just 4 years old and got stung by a bee twice in one week. At first, Mikaila feared the bees, but she soon became fascinated by them after learning about all their hard work and what they do for humans and our ecosystem. Around the same time, Mikaila’s family was encouraging her to enter various children’s business competitions. Mikaila began thinking, and decided she wanted to make a version of her Great Granny Helen’s lemonade recipe that would help honeybees by using their honey in the recipe rather than just sugar.
Me and the Bees Lemonade has ended up growing for more than ten years, and with each sale Mikaila donates a percentage of the profits to local and international organizations fighting to save the honeybees. This is where Mikaila’s saying, “Buy a Bottle, Save a Bee”, comes from. Today, Me and the Bees Lemonade comes in five different delicious flavors and is being sold at Whole Foods Market, The Fresh Market, World Market, and H-E-B stores across Texas and Kroger stores in Houston. It is also available at a growing number of restaurants, food trailers and natural food delivery companies.
Mikaila now spends much of her time traveling for speaking events to share her stories and experiences being a young social entrepreneur. She even leads workshops and entrepreneurship panels, advocating for her business and for the Healthy Hive Foundation, a nonprofit to further help the mission of saving the honeybees. Mikaila has Facebook and Instagram pages that display interesting facts about bees and her business for former and potential customers to follow along with. Today, Mikaila Ulmer is 19 and has recently released her first book, “Bee Fearless, Dream like a Kid” in August of 2020 about her adventures in being a social entrepreneur and selling all-natural lemonades in a way that helps save the bees.
I think Mikaila is a great example of how entrepreneurs can take a product that already exists on the market and make it unique and different in a way that stands out and appeals to consumers. It’s a great way to get ideas flowing and establish a new way of thinking for entrepreneurs, and so I found her story especially fascinating and inspiring.
This is so cool! I think it’s so funny how the older someone gets the less able they are to see solutions in a whole new way. For example, in this story, if someone (no less a child) suggested to me that I use honey instead of sugar in my lemonade, I think I would think they were crazy and probably wouldn’t give it much thought past that. But this little girl had an idea and went with it, and it worked! I think that we (young adults) need to make sure that as we get older and as we’re coming up with ideas, we never close off our minds just because it seems impossible at first. To have a true entrepreneurial mind, I think we need to remain open-minded in order to generate and come up with the best ideas.