Should any company own the term “bean club”?
Steve Sando founded his Bean Club as a joke in 2013.
The idea seemed silly at first: who would be interested in a bean box subscription? However, it was this concept that would attract thousands of bean lovers several years later, becoming a national phenomenon for the bean community.
Sando began selling select selections of heirloom beans at Napa farmers markets, where he had successfully sold heirloom beans under his brand, Rancho Gordo. Over time, it transitioned to mail order as membership grew.
“Bean Club is very unusual and in 2013 there really was nothing like it,” Sando said. “It's really something specific for extreme bean enthusiasts.”
As of 2020, Sando's Bean Club had amassed 11,000 members. Five years later, that number has tripled to more than 30,000, with a growing waiting list of more than 36,000 people.
For many, Rancho Gordo beans have become a pantry staple and cooking essential. They have brought together thousands of people through 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 do is go to the Facebook group and search for it to see what other people have done with it,” said Jane McClintock, a DC resident and Bean Club member.
However, amid Rancho Gordo's rise to heirloom bean status, recent controversy spread following Sando's decision to trademark Bean Club and pursue other brands using the phrase. So far, it has sent letters to two similar brands threatening legal action if they continued to describe their memberships as a “bean club.”
A California native, Sando began growing beans in his Napa home around 2001 and steadily built his longtime bean empire, which now supplies 2.5 million pounds of beans annually and works with nearly 15 farmers in central California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and several Mexican cooperatives.
The decision to register the Bean Club trademark came in 2021, after he noticed that one of his clients had started a Heirloom Beans & Grains Club and occasionally referred to it as “bean club” for short.
The customer was Lisa Riznikove, executive director of Foodocracy, a nonprofit she founded in 2020. Riznikove used to offer Rancho Gordo beans in quarterly subscription boxes for Slow Food USA. After transitioning to a for-profit organization, realizing it was a better vehicle to promote his mission of supporting small farms, Riznikove launched his Heirloom Beans & Grains Club in 2021.
“It was very small when we first launched it, we told Rancho Gordo and he decided he didn't want to sell it to us anymore because he didn't like the fact that we had a club,” Riznikove said.
Sando said his company found instances where Riznikove used the phrase “bean club” in blog posts and emails. He said there were still photos of Rancho Gordo beans on Foodocracy's website and that was confusing customers.
Riznikove said he has never encountered a confused customer.
“I've never had a customer ask me if we have Rancho Gordo at the club, or if these are Rancho Gordo beans,” he said.
Sando applied for a trademark in 2022 and received it the following year. He said his company had sent Riznikove two letters asking him to stop using the phrase, and when they received 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 own little way of doing it, not to rule the world and intimidate people,” he said.
Riznikove said she was never contacted before receiving the cease and desist letter, and that she was not familiar with the brand. After consulting with a trademark attorney, Riznikove decided it wasn't worth the fight and is in the process of removing cases in which he had used the phrase.
“It's just a logical, generic descriptive term for what it is,” Riznikove said. “In my opinion, it's not something you can own.”
Riznikove said he knows many other small farms that have bean clubs and that they are a reliable source of income.
“Our broader concern is that overly generic brands become a form of control that encourages business 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 collective run by farmers in Finger Lakes, New York. The company had been using the phrase “bean club” to refer to its seasonal bean subscription programs.
Kristen Loria founded Buttermilk Bean in 2021 to support farmers at different scales and bring their products from the field to the market at a fair price, in addition to growing their own crops. That same year he founded a winter “bean club.”
After receiving the trademark notice from Rancho Gordo, he changed the name to “bean share.”
The notice surprised Loria, who was surprised that anyone had registered the term.
“It was disappointing, because that was what we had been doing for four years and people knew it that way,” he said.
Buttermilk Bean currently has about 600 members for its spring and winter actions.
“In the end, what we're doing is more important than what it's called, but certainly, yeah, it doesn't seem like a term that should belong to just one company,” he said.
Rancho Gordo is not the first brand to apply a trademark related to a popular and culturally significant food. Chef David Chang came under similar criticism 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 that used the name. In response to the backlash, Chang stopped enforcing the brand and publicly apologized that same year.
For Sando, the Bean Club brand is not comparable to Chang's Chili Crisp, as Bean Club is something Sando created “out of thin air.”
“There was nothing like it,” Sando said. “We did something amazing and we are being punished for it.”
Others within the bean community support Sando's decision to legally defend his brand.
“What he's doing is exactly the right thing and there's no litigation… he's trying to avoid lawsuits,” McClintock said. “It's trying to avoid having to take other food companies to court to defend its brand in exactly the same way that companies that own escalators and zippers failed to do so.”
A Rancho Gordo Bean Club subscription box.
(Rancho Gordo)
For McClintock, the Sando brand recalls a personal experience, in which 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,” he said. “You have no obligation to sacrifice and diminish your own intellectual property for the sake of these other businesses.”
Joining the Bean Club was a “game changer” for McClintock, as it exposed her to new bean varieties and flavors, as well as a community of bean enthusiasts.
“Before Steve Sando founded the Bean Club, there was no Bean Club,” he said. “I would like people to focus more on the fact that, to my knowledge, he has done more than anyone else in this country to promote variety in the availability of beans.”
Susan Park, a Los Angeles-based food historian, nonprofit leader, and bean lover, opposes the idea of Rancho Gordo being high on beans.
“Everyone eats beans. It's the most universal and perfect food,” Park said.
For others, the Rancho Gordo debate has led to a broader conversation about food systems and how a brand can become the lens through which people view food, according to Lesley Sykes, who has worked in 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 his time in the bean industry, Sykes, in a recent Substack article, said he felt the weight of Rancho Gordo's dominance in the operational and consumer world of beans, dealing with comparisons and occasionally negative comments about Primary Beans “copying” Rancho Gordo.
“I'm doing all this work to build this network of farms that I really believe in, telling their story and taking the risk of putting all this information on the packaging… and then I thought, 'What's the point of this, if ultimately everyone is going to prefer this other brand?'” he said in an interview.
Sykes published his article on April 12, just 10 days after the San Francisco Chronicle published the story. Many flooded into the comments, agreeing with Sykes' views and contributing to the conversation about how brands can influence food systems. Sykes said his 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 traditional beans,” he said. “I'm just trying to recognize this cultural phenomenon and the obsession with a brand.”
Sykes said there should be more awareness and space for other bean brands.
“To grow and create more opportunities for farms, other brands… we can't have one person running their operations and dominating the space,” he said.
Sando said he is open to helping and collaborating with other bean brands, as long as “they don't copy us verbatim.”
Although no other trademark concerns have been raised, Sando is committed to protecting Bean Club and taking action where necessary.
“There are a lot of trademarks from people who were innovative. I didn't invent traditional beans. [or] Even discovering them, but no one was doing them commercially like we were doing them, and we really hit a niche,” Sando said. “I love that other people want to do things, but the way we do it is like that, and it's ours.”
