In June, a press release announced that the Beehive Meals CEO had been named a Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Mountain West Award winner.

“Selected by an independent panel of judges, Jackson was recognized for her entrepreneurial vision, leadership, company growth, and commitment to creating long-term value through innovation and impact,” the release said. “As a regional award winner, she now becomes eligible for consideration in the Entrepreneur Of The Year® National Awards later this year.”

Jackson told the Standard-Examiner it was quite the process after being nominated.

“I went through several different levels of the interview process and continued to be moved on and made it as a finalist,” she said. “And then my husband, Adam, and I were able to have the opportunity to fly out to Colorado Springs in Colorado and be a part of the award ceremony there where there were 37 finalists, and I was one of the 12 regional winners.”

According to the release, Jackson joins a handful of other Utah regional winners for 2026, including Brett Hopkins of Ken Garff Automotive Group, Jeff Reynolds of Sensapure Flavors, Kyle Freebairn of Frazil, Brian Beutler of Alianza and Ryan Anderson of Filevine.

“All these companies — out of the 37 finalists — they have 17,000 people, and last year’s revenue between all the companies was over $10.5 billion,” Jackson said. “So to just be a finalist, let alone a winner, was a little bit surreal.”

She said a conversation with one of the judges she’d interacted with put the win into perspective.

“I was talking to one of the judges afterwards, and it was one of the judges that, as I went through the interview processes, he would have been on my judge interview call,” she said. “I was just telling him how in shock I was about receiving the award and winning and just how compared to the other entrepreneurs, I didn’t think I necessarily had a chance. And he kind of stopped me there and just reminded me the importance of Beehive Meals and our business. But he really just talked about the fact that, one, the way we’ve built our business has been that true like scrappy entrepreneur from the ground up, and we bootstrapped the business. We haven’t brought on any outside capital to grow, and we’ve still been able to scale as a business. And then the other side of our actual business model in helping make meal prep made easy, helping get dinner on the table for busy moms, busy families and just the value that we add to our customers.”

Jackson noted that the business serves more than 10,000 families per month, a figure that climbs to around 15,000 per month in busier seasons.

“When I originally started the business, it was solely just to pay our mortgage and our own bills,” she said. “I never anticipated it to get to where it’s been. I never anticipated being in a 60,000-square-foot space and really just all the people that we employ and the lives that we touch every single month, whether it’s our employees or our customers.”

Anticipated or not, Beehive Meals is now in a 60,000-square-foot facility in Ogden with more than 120 employees and has been for around two months.

“It’s been a much needed change for us,” Jackson said. “We were very grown out of our previous space, which was around 25,000-square-feet. And now being in our new facility, it’s been definitely just a whirlwind of trying to create new processes because we have more space, we have more equipment, we don’t need to be quite as creative with our solutions — whether it’s freezer space or ‘Where are we going to put this,’ or, ‘Where are we going to do this activity,’ or whatever. It’s allowed us and our team to really take a step back and be able to create new processes that will help us continue to scale and take us to the next level.”

And she noted that there may be more big things on the horizon for Beehive Meals.

“We’re actually going to be looking, with our facility, at new packaging that we have in the works,” she said. “It should hopefully help us open up opportunities to have conversations about retail. So we’re going to start exploring those avenues, seeing if we can find a fit for Beehive Meals in a wholesale retail kind of place.”

In the meantime, as a regional Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award winner, Jackson moves on to the national competition with national winners eligible to compete in the World Entrepreneur Of The Year competition in 2027.