Farm grown Recovery for whatever the day took out of you
Myers Mushrooms announced today that their bottling line is fully assembled! In addition to more great mushroom products from Eric and his team, that also means we can make even more LionBerry Restorative Refresher this summer to keep you hydrated. Our founder Bevin Brooks said it best in her comment: “No Sleep till HYDRATION! We […]
What in the world is an AgriCluster? Ultimately, it is a fancy compound word that refers to interconnected agricultural businesses operating within a small radius. Or, as the North American Food Systems Network says: In order to support these AgriClusters, the North American Food Systems Network created the AgriCluster Resilience and Expansion (ACRE) program. ACRE, […]
We had a wonderful time this week at the International Elderberry Symposium in Columbia, Mo.! Thanks to the amazing friends we made there, we will have some big announcements coming soon, so stay tuned! One of those big connections we made was with Elderglen, an Australian company producing elderberry products. We also got to hang […]
Thank you to the Heartland Regional Food Business Center for their post about Lionberry on Instagram! The Business Center is an incredible community resource that supports farm and food enterprises as they develop food and markets in the region. You can follow their Instagram page and view the post below. In their own words: “The […]
If you have visited our LionBerry booth at a recent show, you have probably seen bottles of honey from our friends at SHoney Farm and Kennel. Located in Pottawatomie County, Kenny and Courtney started Shoney in 2021 with a single hive and have now grown into a multi-yard operation where they raise honeybees, harvest honeycomb […]
Eric Myers of Myers Mushrooms is one of our biggest small business allies! This commercial mushroom master has shared so much knowledge with us and we even wrangled him for a recent dinner when we were in Wichita for The Women’s Fair. Myers started his business in El Paso, Texas, in 2015 and eventually moved […]
Buehler Farms has been a staple in the local farming community for more than 125 years. Located in Mt. Vernon, Missouri, Buehler Farms is committed to “agroforestry” which they describe as: At Buehler Farms, we approach farming with the belief that healthy land produces healthy plants and elderberry is at the heart of that mission. […]
We make two products with elderberry: LIONBERRY Regenerative Hydration and Elderberry Sips. Neither one is a syrup.
Syrup is fine for pancakes. Thicker is not better.
For elderberry — as food, as medicine, for maximum benefit — drop the pH, pasteurize fast, protect plant properties, no powders.
Long, slow steeping in heat — like simmering elderberry with spices for hours — is not better. Powder is fine for powdered sugar, powdered snow, and baby powder — but not elderberry. There is no place for powder in food. Dehydrating and powdering food changes cell structure, uses too much heat, and burns off delicate plant properties.
We never use dehydrated powder. Most powdered elderberry comes from overseas. About 95% of drugstore elderberry products rely on powdered European elderberry.
We use the native American elderberry — Sambucus canadensis, fresh-pressed. American elderberry contains dramatically higher levels of anthocyanins — the purple antioxidants — roughly 10× the antioxidant activity of blueberries, for perspective. It’s beyond a superfruit. It also has antiviral activity and supports gut health and immune modulation.
LIONBERRY Regenerative Hydration is more than a sports drink. It’s a recovery drink — for after you got your butt kicked, or for whatever it is that life did to you.
It’s strange what we give athletes and kids: sports drinks and energy drinks loaded with artificial colors, sweeteners, powdered isolates, and caffeine. LIONBERRY is the opposite. Not an energy drink. No isolates. No powders. Whole plants, intact, grown out of the ground by farmers.
Plants work through synergy. Their compounds evolved to function together. Isolating one molecule misses the point.
For LIONBERRY Regenerative Hydration, we start with a clear, light base of elderflower tea — easily drinkable — and add it to our elderberry. The anthocyanins in elderberry are delicate. Long heat destroys them. Repeated freezing and thawing destroys them. Powdering destroys them.
Mass spectrometry consistently shows that whole-food preparations retain broader nutritional complexity than powders or isolates. Dehydration and reduction require too much heat — the plant properties burn off.
We engineer pH first — not reduction, not boiling, not cooking it down into a syrup.
Elderberry starts around pH 5.1. That’s too high for safe bottling.
People brag about odd things. I have heard competitors advertise that they never add water to their elderberry syrup. Good. I should hope not.
Making an elderberry syrup is about as medicinal as making pancake syrup. Making syrup is traditionally done by cooking elderberry down with honey and spices. That’s worse than adding water. The plant properties are all gone.
To preserve plant properties, you need to drop the pH to prevent botulism, preserve anthocyanins, and proceed with a hot fill, hold, and then hermetically seal — without boiling the plant into oblivion.
We don’t make syrup.
Our second product is Elderberry Sips — that’s the name. Capital E. Capital S. Plural.
Elderberry Sips uses fresh-pressed elderberry — never powder, never concentrate. We add Concord grape (RESERVITOL – heart support) and tart cherry (melatonin & magnesium). Together they naturally drop the pH to ~3.7, allowing fast pasteurization without heat that causes degradation of purple elderberry anthocyanins. The lower pH protects the delicate plant properties. Elderberry Sips is ~15% tart cherry and Concord grape added to fresh-pressed American elderberry — without gallons of honey and without turning it into a syrup sugar bomb.
A syrup is defined as ~60% solids. To get there, you must boil and reduce. That process destroys anthocyanins.
Cinnamon is great — but it needs long, hot steeping. Elderberry needs fast, controlled heat. They are biologically opposite processes.
“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
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.
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
• Not a single-farm expansion program
• Not a commodity-scale production model
• Not a vertically integrated corporate system
• 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.
• Core grower group established
• Regular coordination underway
• Shared infrastructure priorities identified
• Grower recruitment initiated
• Early coordination with grocery buyers in progress
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.
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
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