Devon Levesque, the entrepreneur and athlete behind Sweet Honey Farm, a 20-acre wellness center in Marlboro, N.J., likes to meet prospective members in the sauna.
“I vet everyone,” said Mr. Levesque, 33, “and for the first six months, that was our one-on-one. We’d do a sauna session together.”
The sauna in question can seat 50, and it is nestled on Mr. Levesque’s property among a farmhouse, a greenhouse, a cafe, two chicken coops, a saltwater pool, a regulation-size basketball court and something called the “longevity barn,” a kitted out, high-tech gym, in a converted barn.
Like its owner, Sweet Honey Farm is a multihyphenate: one part bucolic, working farm, one part wellness center, one part co-working community. It has 197 active members and a waiting list of 14,000, according to Mr. Levesque.
A former Division 1 college football player, Mr. Levesque has built a hearty digital presence — now 1.1 million Instagram followers strong — by taking wellness and personal betterment to their extremes. He has climbed Mount Everest, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Aconcagua and Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica. (“Which was cold,” he said.) This summer, he plans to tackle Mount Denali, after which point he will have reached the highest point on five of the world’s seven continents. He has biked across the United States. In 2020, he bear-crawled all 26.2 miles of the New York City Marathon.
He is also a co-founder of Promix, a nutritional supplement company he sold to the private equity firm Paine Schwartz last year, and Rythm Health, an at-home blood-testing company that he started in May and is currently valued, in a Series A investment round, at $100 million.
Sweet Honey Farm, which was a working farm before he purchased it in 2022, is the spiritual home at the center of Mr. Levesque’s wellness empire. Beyond members and staff, its regular occupants include a small herd of cattle, goats and horses of both therapy and miniature varieties. There are egg-laying chickens and poultry chickens. The grounds, which grow 100 types of vegetables, are worked regeneratively, he says, without pesticides.
“Nothing’s been sprayed on this property in at least 50 years,” Mr. Levesque said.
Farm products not consumed on-site are distributed to the membership’s C.S.A.; the excess goes to local restaurants and hotels, including 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. (Mr. Levesque considers Barry Sternlicht, 1 Hotel’s founder, to be a mentor.)
If there is a typical member, he might look like Tyler Bennett, a commercial real estate investor and self-proclaimed “nutrition freak” who dabbles in ultramarathons. Mr. Bennett visits the farm about a couple of times a week, but its overlap with his life is more holistic. “It’s my country club,” he said, adding that he has hosted company retreats there, and regularly invites clients, colleagues and his family to join him.
“Probably the biggest thing missing from my life was a community like this,” Mr. Bennett said. “It’s nutrition, the land, fitness. It’s me.”
After Mr. Levesque bought the property and renovated its grounds to accommodate his own wellness-centered lifestyle, he noticed a shift in his productivity.
“I could be in the coffee shop, take a couple of calls, go to the gym, take a couple of calls and work out, you know, go up to the main house, take a couple of calls, jump in the sauna, take some calls,” he said. “I was always moving and everything just started to make sense. It started to flow. And so then my friends started to do that. They’d be here, they’d post up on their computer, they’d take a call, they’d go sauna, they’d jump back on a call, they’d go pet a horse, they’d jump back on a call. Like they’re mixing up their day. And I was like, ‘This is magical.’”
He went on, recalling how he came to decide to make it a business: “While I was on Everest, I was like, why don’t I open this up to my friends and community and let a select few people in?”
About 40 percent of Sweet Honey Farm’s clientele, he says, live in nearby New Jersey, like Mr. Bennett. Another 40 percent make the hourlong drive from New York City. The rest live further afield, but pay for the benefits of membership to a like-minded community — in addition to the nearly 200 core members, who pay $620 per month, there are another 150 members who pay $199 for digital access to Mr. Levesque’s one-on-one conversations.
Last month, this included a virtual conversation with Nicolas Jammet, a co-founder of Sweetgreen. The week after that appearance, Mr. Levesque hosted Lavinia Errico, a co-founder of Equinox Fitness Clubs.
“He’s right on target for 2025,” said Ms. Ericco, who lives in Los Angeles but visits the farm four or five times a year. “It’s not just about people that want to look good. It’s not just about being ripped and having abs. It’s really about being spiritually healthy, mentally healthy, emotionally heathy, energetically healthy. It’s really about the whole.”
Indeed, Mr. Levesque’s growing wellness portfolio is seamlessly integrating. There is a Promix juice bar in the main house; members are invited to take complimentary Rythm blood tests. Many of the members have become his friends. Some of the members are also informal — and formal — advisers on his entrepreneurial projects. Mr. Bennett noted that he sometimes reviews contracts for Mr. Levesque. He also said that his young children like to garden with Mr. Levesque’s mother.
One frigid Thursday morning in December, Mr. Levesque took a lap around his property. A man shot hoops on the basketball court while taking a phone call. Another man was in the gym, doing reps with free weights. Six members were in the kitchen, laptops open on the table in front of them. Five more, including Mr. Levesque’s mother and sister, and his girlfriend, Nina Bartell, congregated in the cafe.
“It’s a community,” Mr. Bennett said. “There’s a $200 million guy and a $200,000 gal, and you don’t know it because everyone is walking around in shorts, with no shirt on and no shoes on.”
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