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About Lionberry Regenerative

From Farm to Sports Drink

Lionberry was born from the vision of Bevin Brooks, a Kansas City entrepreneur who started with a small elderberry farm and a bold idea: create a refreshing, restorative drink powered by natural farm-grown ingredients. What began as a single-farm venture quickly grew into a thriving business fueled by collaboration, innovation, and a commitment to local food systems.

Growing Through Connection

Bevin credits much of Lionberry’s growth to the Heartland Regional Food Business Center and her business coach, Jenny Doty at K-State Research and Extension. With their guidance, Lionberry gained access to vital resources like the KSU Food Innovation Accelerator, the Kansas Value Added Foods Lab, and statewide directories such as From the Land of Kansas.

These resources provided the foundation for recipe development, food safety, commercial kitchen space, and the all-important network of connections that help small farm and food businesses thrive.

Powered by Local Farmers

Lionberry is more than just a drink—it’s a hub of collaboration among small farms across the Heartland:

  • Elderberries sourced from two dozen growers in Missouri through Buehler Organics

  • Lion’s Mane mushrooms from Myers Mushrooms in Wichita, KS

  • Honey from SHoney Farm in Wamego, KS

Together, these partnerships not only fuel  Lionberry’s signature Regenerative Hydration, but also strengthen local farm economies. Today, Lionberry is one of the largest customers for these small businesses—helping them grow as Lionberry grows.

The Road Ahead

Lionberry is preparing for the next big leap—moving into wholesale distribution with the help of co-packers and continued support from the Heartland Center network. While the journey has had challenges, including the competitive grant process that first sparked the idea, each step has strengthened the business and Bevin’s resolve.

As Bevin puts it:

“Through Heartland Center technical assistance for a grant, a business was born, and a thriving one.”

“Lionberry is more than a drink—it’s a movement, rooted in local farms, built through community partnerships, and crafted to fuel healthy, active lives.”

Meet the Team

Presentation at the Great Plains Growers Conference

Lionberry 's Weekly Delusion and Re-illusion Update.

Heartland Elderberry Collaborative (Heartland ECo)


“Instead of asking each farm to grow bigger, we're building shared capacity so farms can stay viable at their current scale while accessing value-added markets.”

An AgriCluster Pilot for Shared Infrastructure and Value-Added Market Access
Eastern Kansas / Western Missouri


PROBLEM CONTEXT

Small and mid-sized farms face persistent structural barriers to entering value-added markets, including:

• Limited access to processing infrastructure
• Limited cold storage capacity
• Transportation constraints
• Fragmented, uncoordinated distribution
• High costs from duplicating equipment and logistics across individual farms

These constraints restrict grower profitability, inhibit vertical integration, and reduce the viability of diversified regional food systems.


WHAT HEARTLAND ECo IS

The Heartland Elderberry Collaborative (Heartland ECo) is an active, facilitated, place-based AgriCluster pilot organizing elderberry growers and processors in eastern Kansas and western Missouri.

• Facilitated through ACRE (AgriCluster Resilience and Expansion)
• Emphasizes collective capacity-building and shared infrastructure
• Designed to enable farm-level vertical integration (grow, process, and take products to market)
• Structured to share infrastructure, governance, and market access


WHAT HEARTLAND ECo IS NOT

• Not a single-farm expansion program
• Not a commodity-scale production model
• Not a vertically integrated corporate system


WHY ELDERBERRY

• Performs well on marginal soils
• Integrates with soil-health and regenerative practices
• Supports perennial hedgerows and diversified systems
• Enables multiple value-added pathways (destemming, juicing, beverage and supplement production)
• Aligns with growing consumer demand for regionally produced products

The pilot is explicitly designed to test repeatability across additional non–Big Ag crops, including tomatoes, fruit crops, and legumes.


CURRENT PILOT STATUS

• Core grower group established
• Regular coordination underway
• Shared infrastructure priorities identified
• Grower recruitment initiated
• Early coordination with grocery buyers in progress


SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE HUB CONCEPT

The Heartland ECo model proposes a centralized hub facility located south of Kansas City to support participating farms and processors.

• Aggregation and intake
• Cold storage
• Destemming
• Juicing
• Bottling
• Short-haul regional distribution

The hub is intended to reduce duplicated equipment costs, logistical inefficiencies, and fragmented distribution efforts that commonly limit small-farm participation in value-added markets.


PILOT OBJECTIVES

Establish a functioning elderberry AgriCluster
Create shared access to processing, storage, and distribution infrastructure
Build collective grant-writing and fundraising capacity
Coordinate educational outreach related to elderberry and soil-health practices
Evaluate feasibility of scaling the model across additional crops and regions


FORTHCOMING PILOT STUDY

This poster outlines a proposal for a forthcoming pilot study to formally evaluate the effectiveness of the Heartland ECo model.

• Economic impact
• Grower profitability
• Infrastructure utilization
• Soil-health indicators
• Logistical efficiency
• Replicability across crops and regions

DOWNLOAD POSTER HERE