Growing Destinations

Bee Business: Chris Schad on Conservation, Beekeeping, and Entrepreneurship

• Experience Rochester • Episode 68

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Chris Schad is the founder and owner of Rochester, Minnesota-based The Bee Shed, where his passion for bees, science, and the environment come together to make a meaningful impact. Through his story, you'll learn how a hobby can grow into a legacy business, all while championing environmental stewardship and the vital role bees play in our ecosystem. 

Bill Von Bank:

The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.

Chris Schad:

Most people. If you sat down and looked at what you ate throughout the course of the day and took what is there because of pollinators, you'd be missing a lot of food, and so the work that we do to support honeybees is also aimed towards helping all of the native pollinators that are out there.

Bill Von Bank:

Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Von Bank. Today, we delve into the world of beekeeping, conservation and sustainable entrepreneurship with a very special guest, chris Schad. Chris is the founder and owner of Rochester, minnesota-based the Bee Shed, where his passion for bees, science and the environment come together to make a meaningful impact. Chris Schad, welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast. Thank you, bill. It's great to be here. Chris, before we take a deep dive into the beehive, share with us your background and career journey.

Chris Schad:

So, first of all, I resist the urge to use too many puns, because it tends to happen in the world that I live in.

Bill Von Bank:

You can have at least three here, three puns.

Chris Schad:

We have a pun jar at home Every time I use a bee pun, I have to put a dollar in the jar.

Chris Schad:

I started my career at Mayo Clinic working in genetic laboratories doing a lot of laboratory testing, worked my way through a variety of leadership roles over the years that transitioned into some administrative roles in the research world of Mayo Clinic and ultimately led me to the work that I'm doing now, which is more outside of Mayo Clinic around business and economic development activities. As a biologist, by training, my favorite place is to be outside and my career hasn't given me a lot of opportunities to be out in the natural world. So when we got into the prairie restoration and we got into the beekeeping, it sort of brought me back to where I really wanted to be ultimately.

Bill Von Bank:

So a side hustle, a business called the Bee Shed. Tell us more about that. I took up beekeeping.

Chris Schad:

Gee, what was that? Probably 12, 13 years ago now. It was sort of on a lark. We had some friends that were taking care of some bees. They said this is something you should try. I put it off for a couple of years, took a class, put it off for another year or so and finally jumped in with a couple of colonies of bees in our backyard and I was smitten from the beginning. It was a lot of fun. We had done some prairie restoration on our property.

Bill Von Bank:

A couple of years before that, with an aim of supporting pollinators, and I thought, well, what better way to sort of go to the next step and keep some bees here? You keep bees, but also you create honey and you go to market with that. So walk us through that journey.

Chris Schad:

You know, I had the bees for a couple of years. Since I was young, I'd always wanted to own a business and run a business. I had no idea what to do. We launched the business probably within two years of keeping the bees. I had no idea what I was doing keeping the bees. I was still learning the trade, if you will, or the craft of keeping bees. So I opened a business and I had no idea what I was doing running a business as well, but that process was fascinating to me.

Chris Schad:

You know, when we're keeping bees, some people are keeping bees because they just want the enjoyment of the activity. Some are doing it to produce a little bit of honey for their own use. That's how I started, but ultimately I wanted to turn it into a business. That process, though. There's a lot of steps along the way just to get the product before you even take it to a store or take it to your kitchen table, the bees are going out pollinating flowers and they're bringing nectar back to the hive. Nectar is a mixture of water and sugar, if you will, and it's got a lot of chemicals in there that are from the plant, and the bees are turning that honey into honey from the nectar and ultimately it gets dried down to a point where it can be stored indefinitely in the hive and that's what we take. So they produce far more than they need. We take the extra and we harvest that every year and ultimately we put it into bottles and take it out to stores.

Bill Von Bank:

Chris, when you started the bee shed, did you realize that you wanted to ultimately start selling honey?

Chris Schad:

Yeah, eventually, I knew I wanted to do that. That was always one of the goals. Ultimately, I didn't think it would get to the size that it is now. It was going to be a small hobby business, if you will, and in fact, the original business my original business partner, ed, was a woodworker and a beekeeper and he was making beekeeping equipment and the original idea, or his original idea, was we're going to make equipment and sell it to beekeepers. My original idea going into it was that's great, but it's a small market. Let's also produce honey and sell honey, and so we started out doing both and it wasn't very long before we stopped making the equipment and focused on the honey production.

Bill Von Bank:

Fast forward to today, right, and tell us how your business has grown and where people can actually find your honey the business has grown significantly, I would say until 2020.

Chris Schad:

I did not treat the business as seriously as I could have up until 2019, really In 2019, not knowing that COVID was coming. We had made a decision that we were going to get really serious about the business in 2019. So we sort of floated along or drifted along up until 2019. We had the idea in 2019 then to come up with these specialty seasonal honey products that we ultimately now have, where we take the honey off the bees every month rather than at the end of the summer, and so we get different even though the bees are in one place, they don't move, but different things are blooming throughout the summertime, and so we get different kinds of honey month by month, and that's become our specialty niche sort of thing. We figured that out in 2019 that we could do that Entering into 2020, we started a rebranding process, redid the website, redid our sort of mental energy towards the business.

Chris Schad:

When I say we, I mean my business partner at the time, john Shanyo, and really rededicated to building the business significantly. So we started experiencing growth even in spite of all of the pandemic-related stressors that we were going through. Beekeeping lends itself naturally to social distancing. People don't really want to hang out with me when I'm with the bees so I could get out in the yards and I wasn't didn't really slow down from that perspective. And since then the business has really taken off.

Chris Schad:

We sort of hit some milestones in 21 and 22. And then in 23, we we always wanted to break into the Twin Cities market. We're, we're, we've done a decent job of getting some brand recognition here in Rochester and this will always be our home base. But we wanted to get into the Twin Cities market and we managed to do that. We're now in all of the Kowalski stores up in the Twin Cities and that was kind of the start of breaking more into the Twin Cities market. And now we have 71 different retail partners throughout the state of Minnesota and we're shipping product all over the country every week. So it's been really fun to watch it evolve and grow. It's been a lot of work, some sleepless nights now and then.

Bill Von Bank:

I know, when I first experienced your honey, you were, I think, at a farmer's market or some pop-up, and is that still part of the business plan?

Chris Schad:

It is, although eventually we want to get to the point where we do less of that right, because it's very time intensive, it's very labor intensive. You get a better margin on your product. But we tend to look at those events Many people who are having a side hustle business they look at those events as a way to how much money do I make at that event? We look at it through that lens, but we also look at those events through two other lens event. We look at it through that lens, but we also look at those events through two other lens.

Chris Schad:

Second one is what kind of brand exposure and market exposure are we getting for our product? How many people are we going to be able to see when we are there? And then the third one is how many business opportunities are going to come out of that event? So if the sales aren't great but I can pick up a couple of new stores because they happen to stop by the booth, or I pick up a new staffer in the Twin Cities because she happened to be in the booth next door, that's a great place for us to be. If I get in front of 15,000 people but I don't sell a lot of product. I still got in front of 15,000 people and I learned a lot from talking with those people. So the goal, ultimately, is always to do fewer events and be on more stores and more ways to reach more people with less effort.

Bill Von Bank:

Tell us about the evolution of your products, because I was at an event and purchased some of your hot honey as well as some candles. So you've obviously expanded your product line.

Chris Schad:

Yeah, we started out with the kind of honey that everybody produces. We call it all summer long honey, right, the bees fill up boxes, you stack on boxes throughout the summer and you harvest it at the end of the year. As I mentioned earlier, we do this, this thing now with our bees. It's a lot more work, but we're pulling honey off every month, so we have honey from May and June and August and September. We then added buckwheat honey, so we move our bees to an acreage of organic buckwheat and we get buckwheat honey off of that super rich, bold flavor.

Chris Schad:

Beekeepers don't tend to like it. I don't know why, but I love the flavor and it's our best seller. Then this hot honey became a thing and we had people asking us hey, could you make a hot honey? So we spent a decent amount of time diving into the best way to make honey. We've tasted a lot of it. A lot of it is sweet and hot, but not necessarily honey and hot. So we really worked hard on that recipe. I think we found a good balance. We worked with a local Rochester branding firm, neighborly Group. Shout out to the Neighborly Group. They did all of our branding and they did a great job on the branding for the hot honey. We call it hot shed honey and that is really starting to get some traction. That product is starting to get some traction. Now. The candles will always be probably a small part of the business. Beeswax processing is pretty fussy.

Bill Von Bank:

I'd rather sell the bulk wax to someone else and let them make the candles. At this point, Chris, I'm curious in the wintertime, what do you do with your bees Most?

Chris Schad:

beekeepers most hobby beekeepers keep their bees around here in the wintertime. They're perfectly suited to make it through a Minnesota winter. They collect enough honey. They're able to make it through the winter. They don't die because it's too cold. They have plenty of food. They'll make it through winter. We cold, they have plenty of food. They'll make it through winter.

Chris Schad:

We have chosen to do something different with our bees and we ship our bees out. So we only have, you know, 100 to 150 colonies of bees. That sounds like a lot, but from a commercial beekeeper perspective that's pretty tiny. Commercial beekeepers are running 15 to 50,000 colonies of bees and they're hauling their bees someplace warm for the winter. Many of them head out to California and that's what we do. So we take our bees, we put them on a flatbed truck, we haul them over to a commercial beekeeper over in Wisconsin who's taking 15,000 colonies of bees out in the fall to California Central Valley to do almond pollination. So that's 30 flatbed semi-loads that he's taking out and I've got a tiny drop of bees in his ocean of bees that he's taking out there. So they will spend October, november, december into early January just sort of hanging out in the Central Valley getting a tan not doing any work, taking a break, and then in January they get moved out into the almond groves.

Chris Schad:

roughly 70 75 percent of all of the bees in the us are in california for almond pollination wow, that's fascinating, it's it's an enormous industry, absolutely enormous industry, and it's probably saved the commercial beekeeping industry because the price of honey has not risen nearly with the cost of producing honey. But they make it work, the big commercial operations they make it work with the pollination fees that they're getting from the almond industry.

Chris Schad:

So they spend January, february, march into early April out in California. They come back here in early April, I pick them up and we start the whole thing over again next April.

Bill Von Bank:

As a science guy, how does your background as a biologist and Minnesota master naturalist shape the way you manage bees at the bee shed?

Chris Schad:

Oh, absolutely. In a lot of ways. That's the inspiration for, for example, the different kinds of honey that we have, the reason, I know, we get different kinds of honey throughout the summertime is that. I know what's going on in the natural world.

Chris Schad:

I know the bloom cycles, I know you know from the prairie restoration that we've done, just understanding what's going on out there in the natural world, these pulses of nectar that happen when new things are blooming. So my biology background, my master naturalist background, sort of plays into that and monitoring the health of the hive. It's understanding what's going on inside the hive but it's also understanding what's going on outside in the natural world around them. The bees need a lot of pollen in order to produce new bees, young bees, if you will and if we have an extended period of time of rain and the bees can't get out and fly a lot, they're not going to be bringing much pollen in it. So we're going to have to supplement with some pollen that we put in the hive ourselves in order to keep the colony growing. Well, if you're not tuned into what's going on in the natural world around where the hives are, you're not going to notice those sorts of things.

Bill Von Bank:

And the overall importance of bees are really important to the natural environment.

Chris Schad:

They are. There are some estimates that as much as 30% of our food comes from pollinators, and not just the European honeybees that we are curating or managing, if you will, but all of the native pollinators that are out there, the bumblebees and all the other bees and, frankly, wasps too that most people don't think of as pollinators. They're all important, I think most people. If you sat down and looked at what you ate throughout the course of the day and took what is there because of pollinators, you'd be missing a lot of food, and so the work that we do to support honeybees is also aimed towards helping all of the native pollinators that are out there. So prairie restoration, reduction of pesticides and fungicides and herbicides out there that helps our honeybees, but it also helps all of the other native pollinators.

Bill Von Bank:

What have been some of the biggest challenges you've encountered as an entrepreneur in the beekeeping world?

Chris Schad:

The first challenge was learning the craft of my business of being a beekeeper. That has been a real challenge. I think the other one, but from a business perspective I really didn't. I'd worked in retail stores but I didn't really have an understanding of what was important to them. I'm good with Excel, but I'm not great on the finance and budgeting side of things, so that's a skill set that I had to learn. I'm a fairly creative problem solver and that's to my benefit in terms of figuring out how to make things work that otherwise weren't working, how to brand and advertise and market things. It works well for me, but certain logistics are beyond me. I'm no good at fixing stuff. If a machine breaks down, I can't fix it myself. So I spend more money on getting stuff fixed because I can't do it myself.

Bill Von Bank:

Little things like that. How do you balance your love for teaching about bees and prairie restoration with the demands of entrepreneurship?

Chris Schad:

I wish I could do more of that. I find that teaching part of it a lot of fun. It's energizing to me. I'm a member of the University of Minnesota Bee Squad and I was running a mentoring apiary for the University of Minnesota down here for a couple of years. I really enjoyed that. It became a function of time more than anything else, that I didn't have time to do that between my day job and the business and I wish I could do more of that and I find it very rewarding.

Bill Von Bank:

How does the Bee Shed contribute to the broader conversation about environmental stewardship and conservation?

Chris Schad:

We have a platform. I know that's a that's a term that's probably overused a bit, but we've got people that follow us and so when we can get messages out, we can use that to get the message out about why it's important to reduce your use of herbicides Now herbicides that only kills weeds and grasses. Why would we care about that? Well, it's still a chemical that ends up on a flower, that ends up being brought back into the hive and it still impacts the health of the bees. So we can advocate and we can use our voice and we can use our followers on social media to say this is really important and this is why it should matter to you. That's probably the biggest way.

Chris Schad:

I think that we can use our voice.

Bill Von Bank:

What advice would you give to someone who is passionate about nature and sustainability but unsure how to turn that into a viable business? Because you've done it.

Chris Schad:

Yeah, I think it requires some creative thinking, because you have to. It has to be something turning it into a business. It has to be something that you want to do, even when you don't want to do it right. Like sometimes turning a hobby into a business can can kill your passion for the hobby, and in my case it certainly hasn't, and I wish I could spend more time on the beekeeping side of it and less time on the business. But you have to be a creative thinker in order to find ways to turn a passion for conservation and a passion for the natural world into business opportunities or advocacy opportunities, like I see what some people are doing, for example, with the Driftless Trail. Right, it's an analog to the Superior Hiking Trail and there's a group of people that have taken this passion for outdoors and hiking and they're turning it into developing the Driftless Trail here in southeastern Minnesota. That's some creative ways to take a passion for the outdoors and turn it into a thing that they are advocating for it's often said that being an entrepreneur can be lonely.

Bill Von Bank:

Do you have networking groups or collaborations that you're part of to kind of keep you energized and know that there are other people out there maybe facing some of the same challenges or wins that you have?

Chris Schad:

There are some groups out there. We have Collider Foundation here in town. I plug into them now and again, not as much as I'd like to, mainly because of function of my time. There's a group called Renewing the Countryside that hosts the feast event here at the Mayo Civic Center later here in November. They've got a network of food entrepreneurs that I'm able to plug into. They're super supportive of people that are doing the kind of thing that I'm doing.

Chris Schad:

There are other network groups that I'm frankly I'd like to plug into but I'm not able to, mainly because of the dual nature of my life, which is day job, side hustle. It doesn't leave a lot of margin for plugging into those groups, so I tend to focus on the renewing, the countryside people that are supporting that feast event. That's probably the biggest group that I plug into.

Bill Von Bank:

What's the future look like for the B-Shed?

Chris Schad:

Good question. I think you might get a different answer from my wife, sandy, than you would get from me. But continue to grow it. I've been in the workforce for a long time. I've got far less time in front of me than I have behind me in terms of full-time employment. I don't know when that happens, but the transition into quote-unquote retirement will be running the business. I'll have an opportunity to plug into some of these other organizations. I'll have an opportunity to grow the business. Ultimately, I'll exit the business and I have no intention of just dissolving it. I want to build it to a point where somebody wants to acquire it, and so my exit will look something like that. But that's quite a few years down the road.

Bill Von Bank:

Chris Schad, you've done a great job with the business. I can attest to that as a customer. It's a sweet topic, of course, sweet in your mind for sure, and we really appreciate you being our guest on the Growing Destinations podcast.

Chris Schad:

Thank you, Bill, great to be here. Thank you.

Bill Von Bank:

Thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester Minnesota and its growing arts and culture scene. Its

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