LOS ANGELES — Steve Sando started his Bean Club as a joke in 2013.
The idea seemed silly at first — who would be interested in a bean box subscription? Yet it was this concept that would attract thousands of bean lovers several years later, becoming a national phenomenon for the bean community.
Sando started selling curated selections of heirloom beans at farmers’ markets in Napa, where he had successfully sold heirloom beans under his brand, Rancho Gordo. He eventually transitioned to mail orders as membership grew.
“Bean Club is so unusual, and in 2013 there really was nothing like that,” Sando said. “It’s really a specific thing for extreme bean enthusiasts.”
By 2020, Sando’s Bean Club had amassed 11,000 members. Five years later, that number tripled to more than 30,000, with a growing waitlist of more than 36,000 people.
For many, Rancho Gordo beans have become a pantry staple and cooking essential. They’ve brought thousands of people together via Facebook groups where club members share their favorite recipes and host regular events.
“If I have a bean that’s new to me, the first thing I’ll do is go on the Facebook group and search it up to see what other people have made with it,” said Jane McClintock, a D.C. resident and Bean Club member.
Amid Rancho Gordo’s rise in heirloom bean status, however, recent controversy spread after Sando’s decision to trademark Bean Club and pursue other brands using the phrase. Thus far, he’s sent letters to two similar brands threatening legal action if they continued describing their memberships as a “bean club.”
Sando, a California native, started growing beans in his Napa home around 2001 and steadily built his heirloom bean empire, now supplying 2.5 million pounds of beans annually and working with nearly 15 farmers in central California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and several Mexico co-ops.
The decision to trademark Bean Club came in 2021, after he noticed one of his customers had started an Heirloom Beans & Grains Club and occasionally referred to it as “bean club” for short.
The customer was Lisa Riznikove, chief executive of Foodocracy, a nonprofit she started in 2020. Riznikove used to offer Rancho Gordo’s beans in quarterly subscription boxes for Slow Food USA. After transitioning into a for-profit, having realized it was a better vehicle to further her mission of supporting small farms, Riznikove launched her Heirloom Beans & Grains Club in 2021.
“It was super small when we first launched it, and we told Rancho Gordo, and he decided he did not wish to sell to us anymore, because he did not like the fact that we had a club,” Riznikove said.
Sando said his company found instances where Riznikove used the phrase “bean club” on blog posts and emails. He said photos of Rancho Gordo beans were still on Foodocracy’s website, and that it was confusing customers.
Riznikove said she’s never encountered a confused customer.
“Never had a customer ever ask me if we have Rancho Gordo in the club, or if these are Rancho Gordo’s beans,” she said.
Sando applied for a trademark in 2022 and received it the following year. He said his company had sent Riznikove two letters requesting that she stop using the phrase, and after receiving no response, they sent a cease and desist letter in June 2025.
Sando said he wanted to protect Rancho Gordo’s unique, direct-to-consumer subscription model.
“We got the trademark to protect our small way of doing it, not to rule the world and bully people,” he said.
Riznikove said she was never contacted prior to receiving the cease and desist letter, and that she wasn’t aware of the trademark. After consulting with a trademark lawyer, Riznikove decided it wasn’t worth fighting and is in the process of removing the instances where she had used the phrase.
“It’s just a logical and generic descriptive term for what it is,” Riznikove said. “It’s not, in my opinion, an ownable thing.”
Riznikove said she knows of many other small farms that have bean clubs, and that it is a dependable source of income.
“Our broader concern is that overly generic trademarks become a form of gatekeeping that furthers corporate consolidation in the food industry, and small farms are always the ones who pay the price for that,” Riznikove said.
Rancho Gordo also sent a letter — though not an official cease and desist — to Buttermilk Bean in June 2025, a farmer-run collective in Finger Lakes, N.Y. The company had been using the phrase “bean club” to refer to its seasonal bean subscription programs.
Kristen Loria started Buttermilk Bean in 2021 to support farmers at different scales and get their products from the field to the market at a fair price, in addition to growing her own crops. She started a winter “bean club” that same year.
After receiving the trademark notice from Rancho Gordo, she changed the name to “bean share.”
The notice came as a shock to Loria, who was surprised someone would trademark the term.
“It was disappointing, because that was what we had been doing for four years, and people knew it that way,” she said.
Buttermilk Bean currently has about 600 members for its spring and winter shares.
“In the end, what we’re doing is more important than what it’s called, but certainly, yeah, it doesn’t feel like a term that should belong to one business,” she said.
Rancho Gordo isn’t the first brand to enforce a trademark related to a popular and culturally significant food. Chef David Chang came under similar fire in 2024 after he trademarked the term “chili crunch” — a popular Asian condiment and product sold under his Momofuku brand — and began sending cease and desist letters to companies using the name. In response to the backlash, Chang stopped enforcing the trademark and made a public apology that same year.
To Sando, the Bean Club trademark is not comparable to Chang’s chili crunch, as Bean Club is something Sando created “out of nothing.”
“Nothing like this existed,” Sando said. “We did something amazing, and we’re being punished for it.”
Others within the bean community support Sando’s decision to legally defend his trademark.
“What he’s doing is exactly the right thing to do, and it’s short of litigation … he’s trying to avoid lawsuits,” McClintock said. “He’s trying to avoid having to take other food businesses to court to defend his trademark exactly in the way that the companies that owned escalator and zipper were unsuccessful in doing.”
For McClintock, Sando’s trademark is reminiscent of a personal experience, where someone copied a logo she had designed for her small business.
“In business, there is competition, and competition should be fair, but it is competition,” she said. “He’s under no obligation to sacrifice and diminish his own intellectual property for the sake of these other businesses.”
Joining Bean Club was a “revolution” for McClintock, as it exposed her to new varieties and flavors of beans, in addition to a community of bean enthusiasts.
“Before Steve Sando founded the Bean Club, there was no bean club,” she said. “I wish people would focus more on the fact that he has done more than any other person in this country that I’m aware of, to promote variety in the availability of beans.”
Susan Park, an L.A.-based food historian, nonprofit leader and bean lover, opposes the idea that Rancho Gordo has elevated beans.
“Everybody eats beans. That’s the most universal, perfect food,” Park said.
For others, the Rancho Gordo debate has led to a larger conversation about food systems and how one brand can become the lens through which people view food, according to Lesley Sykes, who has worked in fresh produce and beans for decades and now writes the Eating Patterns newsletter on Substack.
Sykes previously owned Primary Beans in 2020, before selling it to Foodocracy in 2025.
During her time in the bean industry, Sykes, in a recent Substack piece, said she felt the weight of Rancho Gordo’s dominance in the operational and consumer world of beans, dealing with comparison and occasionally negative comments about Primary Beans “copying” Rancho Gordo.
“I’m doing all this work to build this network of farms I truly believe in, and telling their story, and taking the risk by putting all this information on packaging … and then it was kind of like, ‘What is this for, if ultimately, everyone’s gonna prefer this other brand?’” she said in an interview.
Sykes published her article April 12, just 10 days after the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story. Many flooded the comments, agreeing with Sykes’ views and adding to the conversation about how brands can influence food systems. Sykes said that her article served as a call to action for others to reflect on their consumer choices and look at “what’s hype and what’s real.”
“Rancho Gordo is synonymous with heirloom beans,” she said. “I’m just trying to acknowledge this cultural phenomenon and obsession with a brand.”
Sykes said there should be more awareness and space for other bean brands.
“In order to grow and create more opportunities for farms, other brands … we can’t just have one person have their operations and dominate the space,” she said.
Sando said he is open to helping and collaborating with other bean brands, as long as “they’re not copying us verbatim.”
Though no other trademark concerns have arisen, Sando is committed to protecting Bean Club and pursuing action when necessary.
“There are a lot of trademarks of people who were innovators. I didn’t invent heirloom beans (or) even discover them, but nobody was doing them commercially like we were, and we really hit a niche,” Sando said. “I love that other people want to do stuff, but the way we do it is this way, and it’s ours.”