Editor’s note: A previous version of this article stated the Ballerina Farm Store would open on May 27. The opening has since been moved to June.
Hannah Neeleman’s work with Ballerina Farm has taken her from rural France to an Irish cooking school, but her favorite part of the job is getting to work with her family at home in Utah.
“We’re a family first, and that’s what’s most important to me,” Hannah said at an event Friday celebrating the upcoming opening of the Ballerina Farm Store. “Working with Daniel ... and also having our kids close to us, that’s my favorite part about all of it.”
The Ballerina Farm Store, a grocery store and cafe set to open in Midway, Utah, in June, has been a labor of love in progress for several years. Hannah and her husband, David Neeleman, who goes by Daniel, founded their farm in Kamas in 2017. While they’ve sold items like frozen meat and baked goods online for years, all of their products haven’t been available in a brick-and-mortar location until April, when they opened a small farm stand in Kamas.
The new store will sell Ballerina Farm products alongside items from local and international vendors. Fresh bread and other baked goods will be made in-house daily, and visitors can purchase food from a seasonal menu and enjoy their meal on picnic benches outside.
The Ballerina Farm Store brings the world to Midway while still feeling intensely local, thanks to the personal connection the Neelemans have to each of the items for sale. The goat milk soap is handmade by a woman who lives by the Weber River. The Irish tomato relish comes from Ballymaloe, the culinary school in Ireland the Neelemans attended for three months earlier this year. Their gourmet sea salt comes from a small farm in France, and the dried pasta is made by a family in Italy.
“Obviously it’s not all local, but (they’re) really intentional and beautiful products,” Hannah said. “Daniel and I both have a love of food and a love of farms, and I feel like that’s really where this market shines, is being a food-first market.”
While the store will likely attract visitors from out of town, especially given the Neelemans’ large social media following, the store was not envisioned as a tourist attraction — quite the opposite, in fact. This is the Neelemans’ love letter to rural Utah and homegrown foods, they said, and they want it to serve the local community first and foremost.
Daniel said the store isn’t another Utah souvenir shop. Whether it’s someone coming into town and stocking up their Airbnb or a local grabbing a baguette for their breakfast, the Neelemans hope it will be a place for people to try new things and connect with their community.
“We want people to get in the habit of buying fresh bread every day and buying raw milk every day and just making that more of a routine,” Hannah said. “That’s kind of the point of the market. We want to be food first, not a gift shop.”
Roberts: Ballerina Farm Store is meant to inspire backyard farmers
Brad Roberts, Ballerina Farm’s director of customer experience, said the brand focuses on locally sourced items but also looks around the world for goods that are forward-thinking and sustainable. The goal is to get people closer to their food and even encourage them to start growing it themselves.
Roberts said that while Ballerina Farm would like to be an authority for people to turn to for farming and gardening, its main hope is to inspire and help people grow and make their own food.
“We really view our customers as the hero of the story, and we get to be the guide — you know, the Gandalf or the Yoda,” he joked. “I want them to feel empowered and confident that people are doing this in their own backyards.”
The from-scratch sourdough, pasta and butter that Hannah makes for her 10 million Instagram followers may seem out of place in the modern world, but Ballerina Farm isn’t so old-fashioned as to be impractical. The store may sell homemade butter, but it’s not churned by hand — the chefs use a standard KitchenAid mixer. The dairy cows graze in real pastures and are often milked by hand, but there are also robots that assist in the milking.
“It’s bringing things that were done in the past, but infusing it with the power of innovation and technology,” Roberts said. “We want people to experience that. We don’t want to be so nostalgic that it feels like cosplay, not real.”
Hannah says the most special part of the store is its kitchen, which will lean into locally grown, seasonal food from both Ballerina Farm and other Utah growers.
“That’s going to be the heart of the market, is fresh breads and dishes and preserves,” Hannah said. “Every day, we’re going to be cooking up delicious things.”
Catherine Clark, Ballerina Farm Store’s lead chef, has been working with local Utah farms for years and said she’s excited to share that with the store’s customers.
“We’re excited to be part of the Midway community and bring something wonderful here,” Clark said. “I’m so excited to be part of the food revolution ... showing people how magical food can be, and sourcing local ingredients and doing things really responsibly and sustainably.”
Alex Blosil, a chef who oversees dairy production at Ballerina Farm, said their dairy, which was the first to open in Utah in the last 40 years, produces around 1,000 gallons of milk a day.
“We can only sell so much raw milk,” Blosil said. “So now we make cheeses, we make butter, we’re going to make ice cream.”
Even the buttermilk left over from the butter-making process will be used in some products.
“We have a lot of exciting things that we’ll be able to do with our milk, and it’s delicious,” Blosil said.
Hannah said the blessing and the curse of running a family business is that their personal and professional lives are so intertwined.
“Sometimes we do have to be like, ‘OK, we’re not actually going to talk about business anymore today,’ because, as CEOs, there are big decisions, and the weight is heavy, and there’s a lot on the line,” Hannah said. “But we’re a family first.”
“At some point in the night, we try to turn it off,” Daniel added. “If you let us, we will go 24 hours a day.”
The family’s hard work has paid off, although the Neelemans were quick to thank their team for making the store possible. Daniel said he and Hannah are not micromanagers — they have an incredible creative and culinary team who brought their store to life.
“The brand is bigger than just Hannah and Daniel, and for us, that’s like a dream come true,” Daniel said. “We don’t want the brand to be just us. We want it to be bigger than us.”
Midway, a cozy town full of Swiss chalet-style architecture, seems like the perfect spot to welcome Ballerina Farm.
“Ballerina Farm loves Midway, and we hope Midway loves Ballerina Farm,” Daniel said.
The Ballerina Farm store is tucked off of Midway’s Main Street just south of the city hall. The store opens in June and will be open Tuesday-Saturday 9 a.m.-8 p.m.
