Over the past few months, Hannah Neeleman — the influencer better known as Ballerina Farm — has been busy expanding her empire. After years of selling direct-to-consumer frozen beef from her 328-acre Utah farm, she and her husband Daniel opened their first roadside farm stand this spring. A few months later, they launched Ballerina Farm’s flagship store, a highly curated rustic market with everything from sourdough starter and butter churners to strawberry whey lemonade.
Yet while the farm stand is close to the family’s home in Kamas, Utah, the Neelemans decided to open their store 20 miles away, in the town of Midway. “We’ve loved Midway since our kids were really little,” Neeleman told KPCW. “It’s just a match made in heaven to be here, because we love this area so much.” Residents describe Midway as a fairy tale town; a picturesque Swiss-inspired village tucked into the mountains, with a glockenspiel clock at Town Hall. Hallmark Christmas movies are filmed there. It’s also very small, with about 6,000 residents — and not all of them are thrilled that an influencer with more than 10 million followers has decided to set up shop there.
Since the Ballerina Farm Store opened in July, Main Street has been busier than ever. “The whole place is literally overrun by wannabe trad wives,” one local wrote on Reddit. The Neelemans, who have eight children, are devout members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and Mormon moms have been flocking to the shop, oversized cups of soda in hand. Locals say the store usually has a long line of young women in prairie dresses taking selfies and filming themselves. “A few weeks ago, I was getting pizza with a friend and she was like, Oh my god, look, Hannah Neeleman just walked in,” one woman who lives nearby told me. “I turned around and was like, Babe, that’s not Hannah Neeleman — but it’s definitely a customer of hers.”
When the store first opened, Neeleman told Deseret News that their goal was to get people “in the habit of buying fresh bread every day and buying raw milk every day and just making that more of a routine.” But some locals told me that the crowds have made it difficult to actually shop there. “I’ve never gone into the store, because every time I’m curious to go, there’s a line out the door,” one resident said. It’s also expensive: a bag of strawberry crème protein powder — made with “calf-first sourced colostrum” — goes for $67.
Even if you’re willing to brave the crowds, items often sell out quickly — except for the soft serve, which has been getting mixed reviews. “I feel like it should be clearly stated that it is made with raw milk, because I paid $8 for an ice cream that was absolutely horrendous,” one woman claimed on TikTok. “The ice cream is usually the last thing to sell out,” a woman who lives nearby told me. (The store has been jumping in the comments to clarify that the milk in their ice cream is pasteurized.)
The throngs of people driving in from around the state have brought new foot traffic to the surrounding businesses. Lindsey Leavitt, the co-owner of a bookstore a few blocks away, says that since the store opened over the summer, they’ve had way more customers — many of them carrying Ballerina Farm’s signature red gingham tote bags. On a recent Saturday, she says they doubled their usual sales. “It’s the Ballerina Farm effect,” she says. “Anywhere I go, people are talking about it.” Another Midway resident tells me that she and her parents have stopped going out to eat on the weekends. “No one can get a table on a Saturday anymore, because the lines are so long.”
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And good luck trying to find a parking spot. To the annoyance of their neighbors, the Ballerina Farm Store only has a handful of on-street spots in front of the store. “It’s been pretty crazy. People are taking spots in our parking lot and parking in people’s driveways, and their cars are getting towed,” a woman who works at a nearby restaurant told me. After the store first opened, makeshift signs declaring “No Ballerina Farm Parking” started popping up, and people who live down the street have been lining their yards with traffic cones to keep cars away. “The parking lot at the post office will be completely full, but no one will be inside,” one woman complained. “They’re all around the corner, at the Ballerina Farm Store.”
The same woman told me it’s become hard enough to find parking downtown that she’s started riding her bike to run errands. She’s also complained to the city council. Midway is a one-stoplight town. “People from out of town are driving 65 miles an hour on these quiet rural streets, where there are kids on scooters and dogs and the occasional runaway pig,” she says.
Another local I spoke to agreed that the town “wasn’t prepared” for just how many people the store would bring in. “I don’t think Ballerina Farm was prepared,” she added. “I think they just wanted to have a storefront and a cute little market, and now they’re just scrambling to meet demand.” (The Ballerina Farm team did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, neighbors who have been working in the community for years feel resentful of a store that seemingly sprung up overnight. Daniel is the son of the founder of JetBlue, and grew up in the Connecticut suburbs. Hannah films herself cooking on a stove that retails for more than $30,000. “This is an expensive area to rent space,” says Andrew Berthrong, who owns the local sourdough bakery Hawk & Sparrow, which he ran out of his garage for years to make ends meet. “For my fellow business owners, it’s a struggle. It takes a long time to get investments and the money to build something up. I don’t know if jealousy is the right word, but, you know, we all wish we could just bankroll our passion.”
Since the Neelemans came to town, Berthrong says he’s had a harder time hiring for his own bakery. “This community is really not that big.” One of Berthrong’s former employees now works at the store. He says the Neelemans tried to hire him, too. “They wanted to know if I could do sourdough for their shop and parbake loaves for their shipping boxes,” he says. “I said no — I have my shop right down the street.”
“It’s just silly,” says another woman, pointing out that the town already has a sourdough bakery, a dairy farm, and houseware shops — one of which was already selling Ballerina Farm protein powder. “Everything she’s selling, we already have. She’s just putting her name on it.”
