Meet Your Neighbor: Bryan Beller is all about family

Dogs are man’s best friend. One dog is a family’s best friend.

Meet your neighbor Bryan Beller, owner of Black Willow Food Truck in Mansfield.

“That’s named after my dog, a black lab named Willow,” Beller said. “She's a full-blooded English Lab. She’s our loyal farm dog. Willow is the best dog we’ve ever had. She was a throwaway rescue.”

Willow is more than just their dog’s name.

“We name everything off of my dog. We’ve named our farm after her; we named our business after her,” he said.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Willow Farms in Bellville delivered pork products to high-end clients in Cincinnati.

“Cincinnati is the pork capitol. It’s known for its pork,” Beller said. “One Sunday, (Gov. Mike) DeWine got on the TV and shut it all down. By summer, I’ve got a freezer full of pork, all these hogs out here.”

Before starting his food truck business, Beller had worked in restaurants.

“I used to cook under a chef for about 16 years," he said. "It just seemed like the obvious thing to do was to open a food truck and start going from wholesale to retail.”

Now that the family has operated its food truck since the fall of 2020, they’ve honed their niche product. “Nobody’s doing pork birria tacos. Birria is a cooking style; it takes 48 hours to cook,” Beller said.

Traditional birria in Mexico involves boiling an entire goat, head included. Beller doesn’t go that route. He uses pork shoulders. “It was easy for me to do pork because that’s what I raised,” he added.

A self-sufficient, independent family

Bryan Beller and his wife, Jessica Beller, have been married for 28 years and have 11 children.

“We fostered 15 children. We had eight biological (children) and we adopted three. We had a lot of kids that aged out that we didn’t adopt, but they still consider us their family,” Bryan Beller said.

The family tries to be self-sufficient while maintaining their independence. He says they homeschool, homestead and farm and utilize renewable sources of energy.

“I’m probably about 85% self-sustained on our farm,” Bryan Beller said. “I have solar. We’ve heated with wood for almost 20 years. We’ve always been independent-minded people. We try to instill that into our children.”

As their food truck business began, the Bellers looked for new ways to engage their kids.

“We work with them. They wanted to be a part of it and we wanted them to be a part of it. What better way to teach your children than just go do it with them?” Bryan Beller said.

Readers can suggest future "Meet Your Neighbor" profiles to correspondent Joe Di Lullo at muckrack.com/dilulloj or jp.dilullo0926@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Mansfield-area OH profile: Bryan Beller and Black Willow Food Truck