Ep. 15 - Reject The Premise with Robby Sansom | Gross To Net

Robby Sansom is the co-founder and CEO of Force of Nature, a regenerative meat company based here in Austin that's now in Whole Foods nationally and 1,475 Publix stores. Before that, he was one of the first hires at EPIC Provisions, where he helped build the company from a scrappy Austin startup into a category-defining brand that General Mills acquired in 2016. Robby and I were on a panel together recently and I immediately knew I needed him on the podcast because the format was too constrained for the depth of what he has to say about our food system. We get into the real math behind regenerative agriculture — like the fact that it takes 500 years to create an inch of topsoil and the U.S. loses 2 billion tons of it every year — why most certification labels are misleading consumers, and why Force of Nature's beef at 75 cents an ounce is actually cheaper than a bag of Ruffles. The moment that stuck with me most: when I asked Robby whether regenerative agriculture can scale, he said he rejects the premise of the question entirely. The current system isn't the baseline. It's the one that's failing.

Follow Robby on LinkedIn and Force Of Nature on Instagram at @forceofnaturemeats. Check out Force of Nature at forceofnature.com and sign up for their newsletter — even if you never buy anything, the education alone is worth it. And if you're digging Gross to Net, subscribe, leave a review, and tell someone who needs to hear conversations like this one.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Welcome to Gross to Nut, everybody, the podcast that looks at what uh builders, entrepreneurs, and thinkers are optimizing for in their work and in their life and what that costs. I'm super excited about my guest today. Uh, he spent the last decade inside two companies that have fundamentally changed how America thinks about meat. He was one of the first hires at Epic Provisions, serving as the CFO and COO, helping build the company from an Austin startup into a category-defining brand that General Mills acquired in 2016. Then in 2019, alongside Epic's co-founders Taylor and Katie, he launched Force of Nature, a regenerative meat company headquartered also here in Austin, that's now in Whole Foods Nationally, 1,475 public stores, and working with awesome food service partners like Hop Dotty. Uh, Force of Nature sells bee uh beef, bison, elk, venison, wild boar, and they have a chicken program that threw out the industry playbook on how poultry should be raised. Today we're talking about what regenerative agriculture actually means when you strip away marketing, what it takes to build a premium supply chain in a commodity market, and why he believes the industrial food system is living on borrowed time. I'm talking with the co-founder and CEO of Force of Nature, Robbie Sandstom. Welcome, Robbie. Nice to have you, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Thanks, George. Quite the intro. Appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

I hey, you know what? I'm known far and wide for my intros. Uh Robbie, we were both on a panel uh I think last week, two weeks ago, recently. Uh, and just hearing you talk for a few minutes about uh regenerative agriculture, I wanted the panel to be about to turn into a panel about regenerative agriculture. And I feel like if I just said, Hey, can you explain regenerative agriculture to me? I could just turn my mic on mute and you'd fill the whole time with that.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yeah, you're gonna have to probably rein me in.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

That's I don't want to rein you in, man. I because I felt like you got reined in because the panel we were on, while it was a good, you know, panel, it was not about regenerative agriculture. And so I was like, oh, this is too reined in a format for Robbie. Uh you've written a lot about this, uh, you've talked a lot about this. It's not your first podcast interview. So uh let's start from the let's start from the top. Like, can can we go back to like you you were uh uh you're an MBA, is that right? Uh I have a master's uh in accounting. In accounting, okay. How did how did that like were were you a regenerative ag guy? Like when did that start for you? Because not a lot of regenerative ag people start in accounting, I would I would venture.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

No, I don't think I don't think most people start in accounting, but uh I did go to graduate school at UT in business, and the one discipline I didn't actually find interesting was accounting, and so having and and at the time you had to wait uh to go back to graduate school, so I could get graduate school classes, get effectively an MBA, and learn a discipline I wouldn't teach myself uh by by learning accounting. And they were the number one school in the country for accounting, so it's pretty good from a job security and stability standpoint. And I knew like any business you get in runs on accounting, and so having an understanding of kind of that back end, and then you know, being able to learn product and organization, null design, and leadership and marketing, and you know, all of these other things are the things that really fascinate me and intrigue me. And I'd already been doing entrepreneurial stuff when I was younger, so um that was there there was a fair bit that went into the why behind, hey, how do I how do I get a higher level degree as fast as possible and then get into the workforce and and start doing things that make a difference? Um I've always been into sports and outdoors, and you know, anything I can do that is is an outdoor adventure. Uh, like you said, we not only did we start these businesses in Austin, but we grew up in Austin, so the hill country and short drive down to the the the Texas coast, um, those are things that have always filled my cup, um, basically being out in the sunshine. You know, at the same time, I'd like I just said a second ago, I think business is interesting. I think it's a a fascinating puzzle with so many pieces that constantly move around. You don't have a box, so you get to know what it looks like, or there's no there's no instruction set, and then there's this really dynamic element called human beings, and you got to figure out how how to how that fits into an equation and how you work with people and develop them, and that that can be some of the most rewarding stuff you do. And so um I've loved businesses. Um, I worked in some um some consulting and then went into startups. Um, and then when I joined Epic, it was really like I I had already been successful in some startups and and and grown and um helped build some businesses, but that was the first time to your point where you know things coalesced where like my passions of doing things um you know with with with with performance and outdoor stewardship kind of collided with getting to run a startup and be entrepreneurial and and and be in business. And so at the time, Epic was really Thunderbird Energetica. Thunderbird Energetica was a vegan energy bar company. And Katie and Taylor, who started it, um, had their own personal health journey. And in that journey, um, they kept going further down the rabbit hole of vegetarianism to veganism to raw food, and the more they pursued the, you know, as the narrative would suggest, better and better and cleaner and cleaner um food philosophies, the worse their health became on a on a number of fronts. Um, performance, recovery, GI-related issues, joint-related issues. Um, you know, Katie was competing in the Iron Man World Championship, so she was not a, you know, uh a weekend warrior on the local scene. She was doing some some some really high-end level competitions and really struggling with the diet. They eventually figured out that adding animal protein back into their diet was the the cure to their ales and um saw saw massive improvements, and we're kind of left with the dilemma of, hey, like we have this vegan energy bar company, it's still a really great product, but we're also into animal protein and we're actually realizing there's a bigger opportunity, which is can we can we take the convenience and packability of these bars and bring animal sourced protein into the equation and simultaneously not evalue or sorry, not abandon these values that are cornerstone to the ethos of some of the why behind starting that company? So, how do we how do we continue to be champions for human health, champions for environmental stewardship, champions for welfare and favorable treatment of animals, and engage in a company that you know might pivot into sourcing and selling animal proteins? And that was really the beginning of the journey of, well, okay, so where does healthy meat come from? Where do where how do you check all those boxes? It's this idea of regenerative agriculture. Healthy animals come from health living on healthy lands, which come from healthy soils, which come from healthy animals, living a biologically consistent life and performing the ecosystem services that they evolved to perform on those lands and in those symbiotic relationships that should be celebrated. Um and you know, those animals then become healthy themselves as a result, and you know, it's the it's the virtuous cycle that replaces the vicious cycle that is our current food system, which is largely based off of planned death. Um if you think about that, what I mean by that is when you sprayed herbicide, it's you're killing everything across the landscape. We practice agriculture on um half of the land mass of the United States, and much of that agriculture is the chemical industrial variety. So you take, you know, whether it's plant agriculture, you're killing everything with a chemical herbicide before you then till everything to destroy the roots and the and the rhizosphere and the life that's in that soil so that you can create a monocrop of a single life form. Um, you know, and it's like that that seems like a weird foundation for a food system. And the same thing, like most of those crops go to be those additives and center store items, the corn, the soy. They also go to feed animals that are living in confinement and also unnatural environments where they're shoulder to shoulder with each other, they can't exhibit their natural behaviors. There's your welfare challenge highlighted right there, juxtaposed with animals again living in their natural setting. Um and you know, it's not hard to see which system you'd prefer and be more excited about. So we kind of went down that journey. Obviously, Epic was well, I mean, that's that's that's probably the end of your question. How do you go from those from those passions and interests to getting into animal agriculture? It started with a passion and food, and then being able to um overlap these things and part of agriculture, too, just in in fairness to the question, um, I did grow up with family that had land around, so I got to participate uh in some um, you know, goat, uh, cattle, chickens, rabbits, some some simple livestock stuff. So it was always interesting to me and a part of like what my family had been involved in, you know, from Johnson City out west Texas. Um, and uh and the same thing with me hunting. So like I always had this connection to animals and food and meat, and you know, preferred to source my own food and grow our own food. Um so it just really became that opportunity with Epic that that really brought all those things together and caused the stars to align.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Well, that's uh we I do want to go deeper into regenerative agriculture, obviously. Um but I let let me go way back, I guess, to a thing that you said that was just like uh made my that I didn't realize that kind of made my ears perk up. You said you decided to major in accounting because you didn't like accounting. Is that what you just said to me like three minutes ago? Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Yeah, I said that. I did say that.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

That's interesting. That's really interesting to me. I don't I've obviously I don't want to skip over all of the valuable like regenerative agriculture stuff because there's a big chunky bite there, but like your uh choice to do that is um i is interesting. It's very like I I get the I get the feeling from just the uh beginning of this conversation and conversations we've had uh in the past that uh you think pretty deeply about stuff or think you know eighteen or nineteen steps ahead. Um so like you're you're right about accounting. Like when I got into business, I wished that I had had more of a background in accounting or some deeper education in accounting, because you're right, it is the like without the accounting working out, business just doesn't work out. It's kind of like the most important layer before you're gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Well, it's the code, it's the code the the back end runs on.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

And so you gotta have you gotta have an understanding of it, and it's not particularly um exciting to read or learn about. Uh but it matters greatly if you ever want to if you want to do business, you know, for lack of for lack of a better framing, right? If you want to do business, that's helpful to know, and I wanted to do business. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I spent a lot of time searching and and and and trying to find what what really fulfilled and inspired me, but I knew I would need that. And I happened to be at the University of Texas, with it, which you had the number one accounting school in the country, so there was you know a certain level of job security and stability that came from that. We were coming out of a pretty tough time in 2001 where stability matters too. So there's just a lot of factors that kind of overlaid it. And then, like I said, I like learning, I like reading, I like, you know, there's a lot of things. I'll read books about marketing, I'll read books about um you know, business practices and disciplines and philosophies. I won't read books about accounting.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yeah, yeah, same. So, you know, I think that there's a lot of like stuff about like accounting is not really gonna change. Like the tools might change, but the concepts of accounting are not like business accounting are not gonna change, whether you're doing it in Excel or Net Suite or freaking Chat GPT or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Right. And like I said, I couldn't, I like I would have probably just tried to get an MBA, but at the time at UT you had to wait two years post-graduation to get an MBA. So I got by doing it that way, um I was able to go to take master's level classes. So I was in classes with MBAs, I basically got my graduate degree in business. So there was like a multi-faceted way of that I was coming at that and and and why a series of whys behind it.

SPEAKER_02 13:21

The sound bite here is gonna be if you want to quote unquote do business, then you have to quote unquote do accounting.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

I mean, you probably you've been doing this a long time. You advise a lot of up and up and coming brands and startups. It's like you have the brilliant idea and you have the spark and the passion, but you still gotta know what the heck you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

That's right. Yeah. And I agree with that. Like, I I think that um that was one of the things I wish we had. Like that my method of learning accounting was like, you know, three years into us having this like purpose-led mission-driven business. I was like, oh, I don't know anything about business accounting. So I like went back and took some like continuing education stuff about it. Um I don't I probably don't have as deep of a well as you do, specifically on accounting, but uh that's a really good insight. Let's go back to uh region agriculture because I I think thinking you know, speaking of like thinking, you know, 20 steps ahead because we've done uh you know, like part of the mission at my company is uh is like better sourcing, better ingredients, uh all of this sort of stuff. And the more you get into it, the more the more it becomes really, really uh obvious that it's uh it's a lot of broken systems, kind of on top of broken systems, because you're talking about like you know, I think uh in in regenerative, you know, uh um uh farming, there's topsoil issues, which you're talking about, like we're just kind of like burning topsoil every year without regenerating it. You've got these monoculture, um, whether the whether that monoculture is corn or chickens or cows or whatever that monoculture is. Um and then there's all of the supply chain around the feed, the fertilizer, where does that come from? How is it raised? It's it's a really intense problem. Uh getting into force of nature, like you talked a little bit about Epic. I I would I would like to know like what what was your because you were in Epic for what four-ish years? Does that sound right? Longer?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

A little longer. Um I don't know. I have to go look at LinkedIn, I think.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Five years, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Yeah, it depends. It was like early early 20 teens and then 2012 to 2019, probably.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

2019? Okay. Yeah. Because I know you were on uh you stayed on post-acquisition with that company, right? Yeah, for three more years. I don't know. Yeah. So so you were probably there for closer like seven, seven years. Anyway, uh doing great research as a podcast host here. But I I'm interested in the in the epic experience. Like what was uh what were some of the things you learned about business and and purpose on that journey? Like it sounds like you kind of refined some of your purpose during those years.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Yeah, well, on the regenerative lead-in, there, there's a whole bunch of other things you you didn't even touch on in terms of impact. So we'll we'll come back to that. But on the um Yeah, let's do that next. We'll we'll we'll keep teasing regenerative throughout um as we talk about more about accounting. Um the uh the um yeah, like I obviously learned a ton at Epic. You know, it wasn't my first startup or my first even successful startup, although it was the most successful one I've been a part of. Um I I I wasn't a startup before that where we were number 21 on the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies, and um, in in multiple years we spent on that list, and um, you know, by the time I I think I was like 27 or 28, I had like 80 people reporting to me across like IT and dev and marketing and sales and obviously accounting, but legal, and we had a video studio, and anyway, just just different stuff, you know. Um, and but you know, I think Epic is one of the first places where I saw and I learned a lot about what not to do prior to Epic, but I think the Epic was one of the first places where like you really saw the magic when you have a real mission that inspires people and it's authentic, and you have a team of passionate people that are dedicated to that mission, and like what a force for good that can be, and and and and what incredible results that you can produce if you nurture that and take care of it. And it's like I think a lot of business talks a lot about culture, um, and how you know leadership or some hired management group or team that maybe wasn't even part of the original founding wants to create a culture, and you try to it's like you don't create a culture. People create culture, you know. You you can set ideals and targets and standards, you can note values that you attempt to hire for, you can have a mission that you hope to direct people towards, but the people are going to create and they're gonna they're gonna be the living, breathing embodiment of whatever culture um you end up actually having, regardless of your intentions. And so, you know, I think at Epic we did it, it was the first place that I got to be a part of really laying out what we were trying to accomplish from a culture perspective and then figuring out how to bring in the people that brought it to life and understanding how to nurture that and grow it and develop it, up to the point where you know we were required by General Mills, and they had a very different culture, and it was really cool to see how um how we influenced that culture in a number of like silly but also meaningful ways. Um and so I think that was that was one of the really you know that I think that was an interesting learning um you know from a business perspective coming out of Epic. Um you know, I think being being nimble and um, you know, you always again, one of these you know, adages or ideals you hear about in business is to not be afraid to take risks or fail forward and fail fast and all these things. You know, I think at Epic we were able to do that um, you know, pretty well and take a lot of shots and and you know just say, hey, we're gonna do something and figure it out and be audacious. Do a lot, you know, most of the things that we did at Epic had never been done or we were told were impossible or were sort of ridiculous. Like, why would you put why would you have, you know, who wants shelf stable packable meat? Jerky's been around forever, it's not going anywhere. Okay. Um, you know, so like meat bars and jerky have uh have exploded since then. We were launched one of the first, I think, uh to my knowledge, the first bone broth in a CPG package we launched. We launched the first cooking tallow and cooking fat that I'm aware of simultaneously. We were the first people to put organs into any CPG product with our liver bars that we launched back you know in 2014 or so. Um all of these things are pretty massive categories or major trends today. Um, you know, and so you know, I think being being a little bit fearless and being um unapologetically authentic was was a pretty big takeaway. Um and uh you know, I credit some of some some of the learnings to Katie and Taylor, my my my my co-founders at Force of Nature and the founders of Epic, you know, they didn't have that business background that I had. So that's that's why we were a good team. They were dreamers, and I was um capable of taking whatever crazy thought they could they could come up with and bringing it to life and figuring out how to build a team and a company and a business around it that works. Um and you know, I think not being um not thinking conventionally about problems and thinking completely outside the box and coming at coming at opportunities or challenges with a with a different perspective. Like if we give ourselves pers per permission to suggest that this is a good idea or to think this is possible, don't just say it's hard and so we can't do it for these reasons. Look at flip the coin around and say, what are all the things that would need to work for it to happen? And all of a sudden you t you figure out how to take a complex problem and break it down into kind of first principles or bite-sized pieces. And all of a sudden it goes from being insurmountable to being entirely achievable. Um if you just look at what has to what you have to do versus why you can't do it. And I think that's that's where a lot of businesses fail. And then of course that probably segues into some of the learnings, you know, post-acquisition with General Mills is that a lot of learnings in that uh other other side of the journey, you know. Um you know, it's it's it's really interesting to me the perspective that people have about large businesses being um essentially, you know, kind of evil. Like it's it's bizarre, you know. Because I like I would agree that a lot of large, particularly food companies, have like are fundamentally in some ways psychopathic. You know, like they don't they like they have a fiduciary responsibility to generate shareholder returns, kind of regardless of what happens. And then you end up with um the incentives being perverse and then groupthink and all of these things that that yield a result, but it's not because there's there's bad actors necessarily in every I mean there's certainly bad actors in the world, but it's not because you know people behind the building are bad actors. And so like one of the things that we thought we were going to be preparing for when we sold was that like there's gonna be these suits with briefcases that come in that try to change everything, and we're there like at the gates with swords ready to defend and die for what we believe in, you know. And it turns out like we were met with a bunch of really intelligent, capable, eager, genuinely good people that were fans and consumers and neighbors, and wanted to you know wanted to be a part of what it was. In fact, we had like way more people try to join and be a part of the brand than than we than we had roles for. And so they kind of like we got to pick, you know, kind of some of the some of the cream of the crop because like that's we were inspiring to them. Um, and even the leadership, you know, the folks who led the acquisition and the presidents and the you know, the C-suite folks are like, you guys are doing something that really spats really speaks to consumers, it really matters, it's special. We're not gonna pay a premium for this brand to change it. Like, we want to learn from you. And we want to see we, you know, you're growing, we're sh we're we're declining in in in volume. Um you know, there's there's a lot of interest at the top and the bottom, and yet everything gets mucked up in the middle in these big bureaucratic organizations. So it's really fascinating to see how there can be alignment um in in such critical places and things can still fall apart in a really big organization. So I think a whole lot of lessons and and and learnings. Um learnings there.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

I I agree with that, is that like my perspective is that it on like big companies that like there aren't evil big companies, it's just kind of like if I'm optimistic if my if my kind of like because I think uh I wrote about this a while ago. I like fiduciary duty is not really what people think it is, but if you're optimizing for a share price or optimizing for the financial outcome, and that kind of for you know the last 50 years has been the has been the king of everything is like I've gotta optimize for an accounting. Like obviously like accounting has to be part of it. We're gonna talk about accounting more because that's what this regenerative ag podcast is about. But the like the fact that the fact that they've gotta that they've gotta generate some cost savings or they have to push this thing through the bottom line, it can dilute at at best, right? It can dilute a mission. So it it is always interesting to me. I'm not gonna ask you to answer this because I unless you have the answer, but I do think that it is in my mind kind of an uh the the answer to it is to is that we have to be accountable for different things, or we have to be equally accountable for things that are more uh sustainable or regenerative, because I think there's a big distinction there, but like how do you uh how do you make the mission stronger when it goes to when it goes to big food or when it sells to private equity or whatever? How do you make how do you make the the mission stronger? What would what would you optimize for to make the mission stronger other than shareholder value?

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Well, a couple things. One, you know, I always think about like the the the the the the idea of running a business with like from a triple bottom line perspective. Money matters, right? I mean you gotta have it's gotta be financially viable or it's a not-for-profit. Um or and it will be unit doesn't create a a business case that others should follow. So you're not really creating a mission, you just have a short-term project. You know, a mission can grow and scale and expand, and so there has to be it has to be able to sustain itself financially. I do think of that triple bottom line as like a three-legged stool, though. You also have to think about your impact externally. Um, you got to think about your impact on the world around you, and that could be in welfare, that could be in the environment, that could be on on another thing, uh, on another level. And then you gotta think about people. You gotta think about your consumers, your employees, your partners, their health, wellness, life. So it's like people, planet, profit, the three piece. Um, let me ask you, let me ask you.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

Sorry. Sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

No, and I think I just think you you keep you gotta have if you really want to optimize or maximize an outcome, you gotta have three equal legs on the stool. You can't be missing a leg, certainly. Um, and you can't have one leg shorter the other, you got a pretty wobbly stool. You know, for the best net outcome for any individually, but certainly collective, collectively on any one of those pillars, um, they each need to be nurtured. And I think that's one of the big, these, the big thing that these companies forget. And they do, and to your point, like they begin to hyper focus on the on the financials because they have quarterly reviews and they have pressure from investors and all of these all of these sorts of things, and they begin to look at businesses as a PL. Um, and I mean, you don't think of your business as a PL, you think of it as a business. You literally birthed it in your kitchen and you care about it, and you bled and sweat for it, and it is an extension of who you are, and it has you think of it probably as something that actually has a life of its and an energy of its own as a as a soul. And, you know, the reason that a lot of these companies sell to these big businesses, and you see their success decline post-acquisition isn't because they're the because evil enters into the equation, it's because they don't know how to nurture something that is truly that unique and special. They it it they devolve it into a profit center and try to manage it like a a profit driver instead of what it may be, you know, some other set of things. And sure it should generate profit, but it should also be doing other things. Anyway, so there's there's a lot more, there's a lot more to that.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Well, I think that the I I would get back to the triple bottom line people uh planet profit I agree.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

And they take people, sorry, and they take people out of the equation too. Like they want people to rotate and get experience. You don't have like those lifelong invested people that are just like, I've sworn my allegiance to the to the flag of Yellow Bird and I will die for this cause. You know, that person might feel that way on day one, but 18 months later they're working for, you know, a bag of chips or something, um, a different brand in the portfolio. And so you don't have like you lose something really, really like you don't have great brands, you just have great teams. And if the team's turning over, you're you're really missing something, a critical element. Apologies for interrupting, but I feel like that's worth noting.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

No, no, apologies needed, man. Uh the the people planet profit one. Like I love triple bottom line. My problem with it is that the profit incentive gets so consistently enforced, right? Like, and you and to your point, like profit is enforced just in general. Like the company doesn't exist without profit, it doesn't exist without you know the financial controls. So like you wind up in you wind up in this other kind of territory of like, well, how do I how do I have this bottom line for people? What does that mean? What does it mean to have to do you know carbon accounting? Like, am I doing more, you know, if I'm doing carbon accounting to talk about, you know, the planet part of a triple bottom line for a company, like who's really holding me to that? Or do the shareholders care as much about that as they do about the stock price? Or because I think that it's like companies that say triple bottom line, I think a lot of it has to do with those people like you're saying, right? The teams that are that are passionate about it, people who come in and work at a a company like I I imagine you've got people at Force of Nature, maybe including yourself, who are making less money than they could be do at at a way easier job. Like you could probably you could probably make more money and have an easier job just based on the things that you've already done, right? But you're uh you're choosing a hard path, and the fact that you're doing that, you're waking up every day saying this is the path. We've got 8,000 inputs we have to manage, I've got all these people, it's a mission that's like um that that's like touching on like how do you communicate that regenerative products are so much better to a consumer. Like that that is so hard to do. It's so hard to m just make a playbook about that and be like, oh, this document is gonna live on, and that's what the culture's gonna be, you know, if you switch the entire team around. That's anyway. I'm maybe just saying stuff in reaction to what you've said, but like that's always been my thought is that like profit always kind of like is the thing that lives on, is like the the the need for profit will always survive any team, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Well it's it's still it's it's it's a fundamental pillar. It should, it should always live on. Right. But I think I think one of the things you're highlighting and where where it goes where it gets done poorly is one, we live in a reductionist society, so we're looking for shortcuts, and um, and and and two, I think that's where that authist authenticity we were talking about and sincerity we were talking about. I think it's becoming easier for consumers to sniff that out. What is this, what is this brand, what is this team, what are these people really about? Um, and I think that's you know, we'll probably get into it in some other some other parts of this conversation, but um, you know, as a consumer, that's that's what you're that's what you're looking for. At a time we've never been more distanced from our food and where it comes from, I think we are looking for relationship. And, you know, you don't have a relationship with somebody that is only interested in your money.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 32:02

Um, you tend to have relationships with people that you think care about the things that you care about or that care about your well-being or offer more to you. And I think that's what you see consumers having starved for and desperately looking for and being attracted towards. And I think you saw that expressed in in the center store food revolution where brands, you know, we went from when you and I were younger and kids, and maybe the generation, you know, a few, a few uh one or so before ours, you know, it went from, hey, we could take a really complicated food system and make it faster and easier and more convenient and put it into these packages and cheapen it and cheapen it and cheapen it and cheapen it. Um, and then, you know, since we've been in business, we've really been emerging from that um where folks have been saying, wait a minute, you know, we've gone too far. There's there are some trade-offs that were made or negative externalities that exist that I'd actually like to actually like to not see perpetuated. And I'm gonna go uh and and and I'm gonna be attracted towards these brands that are taking positions on on certain issues or are making certain claims or have certain certifications or are suggesting that they have a concern for this constituency of the rainforest or this group of people or my health or for my heart or whatever. You know, whatever the thing may be, and however legitimate or or valid it is, it's it speaks to what consumers are looking for, which is like a deeper, more more meaningful connection than just like, hey, what are the what's in the box and what are the and what are the cooking instructions and can I get it done fast? And I think you're starting to see that, and like that's one of the the key elements of what we're trying to do with Force of Nature is to bring some of that into the perimeter of the store and and and and pull back the curtain and look you know behind the plastic and say like hey, there's a bigger story here, there's more there's more that um there's more that matters and there's more that I know that you already care about and expect that you're being um that you're being d delivered or under delivered. Um and and the industry is falling short of your expectations on, and and you know, we're we're highlighting some of that. So, you know, again, I think that consumers, you know, and and and and technology and information, a lot of this stuff is coming to the forefront where it's easier than ever to get credit for, and those folks that are faking it or feigning, you know, because they have carbon accounting and they're buying carbon credits and they're paying a guilt tax of some kind, you know, it's gonna be harder to pull the wool over folks' eyes. You know, there's only so many times that all of the fast food restaurants across the country can rebrand to earth tones of beige and green and tan before people realize it's still the same fucking fast food. It's still gonna kill them and it's garbage. Um and so you know, I think I think big food is is is probably in the same way, right? And then, of course, there's a lot of brands out there that look at um building a business, not because they say, like, hey, there's something here's something there's something important here, and there's something that matters. They look and they say, like, hey, wait, look, look at the algorithm. If X, then Y. I have this thesis that I can make a lot of money by doing this thing, and it's somewhat hollow, um, but certainly it can drive some profit. I think those things are getting sniffed out as well, and you can see them as the world evolves around us, and long-form commentary and discussion and content and lifestyle brands and these sorts of things matter more and more. There's a lot of stuff where you look and it's like, hey, there's a pretty package with a pretty set of promises, and you go you look at their website, and there's nothing there. There's no substance. There's no, it's not genuine. And so I think like, I think, again, to your point, like there is a there, there is and has historically been uh you know a prop a more profit-centric motive for most business. And I don't know that we're ever gonna see profit leave the equation. We shouldn't, it shouldn't be unhealthy.

SPEAKER_02 35:55

Yes, yes. I'm not suggesting it leave.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

But I think what we're gonna start to see is that people and planet get recognized as an important part of the equation such that if you lack on those or fall short on those, your profit will also suffer.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

Yeah. Uh well, hey ma'am, I w I want to take a quick break. I we're gonna we're gonna talk almost exclusively about regenerative ag in the last half of this. So everybody stick around. We will be uh right back. You're on Gross to Net. We're talking with Robbie Sandstom, CEO and co-founder at Force of Nature. Um we actually, instead of using our break to like go get water or something, we just kept talking about the subjects that we were talking about. So I just hit record again. But uh we're talking about triple bottom line, we're talking about people planet profit. I want to talk about uh regenerative agriculture. I know we keep teasing it. Um it's what I'm most excited to talk about, and I know we talked a lot about accounting and things of that nature in the first half. But let let me let me just let me just say again, Robbie, you're doing a thing, and your team and your company is doing a thing that is incredibly hard to do, and and probably I want to get your uh take on this, but is incredibly hard to even understand what all you need to do, right? Because as soon as you peel back one layer of like, oh, you know, they're not, you know, these animals aren't getting access to land to graze on, then it's like another layer of like, well, what is that land? Well, what's the quality of their feed? Well, what's the like what's the carbon footprint of all of this stuff? It's just like there there are there are a million dominoes, and my my guess is that when you started on this journey, you saw maybe like 10 of them, and then they started now. I'm I'm maybe putting words in your mouth, but that's what that that was kind of my experience looking at regenerative agriculture just on the like plant side of it, is like, well, what's upstream? Like, what is upstream of the farming practices, and then what is monoculture like? Are they crop rotating? Do they have roots in the soil like year-round, or do they just kind of nuke this land and then start again? Even if they're using organic fertilizer, what do all these marketing terms mean? Like, what does pasture raised mean? What is grass fed, like what do all these things mean? Uh you you talked about building trust with consumers, you and and I believe all that stuff too, right? Like, but consumers are busy and they are also pretty like price motivated. There's a lot in there's a lot that doesn't get um that doesn't get priced into like conventionally like factory farmed meat, which is most of what's out there. So let me maybe open the floor to to the Senator Robbie Sansome to to talk generally, like gen just generally about regenerative agriculture. What do you see what do you see as the biggest problem? Because the distinction between sustainable and regenerative is that sustainable is just don't make it worse, and regenerative is actively make it better. So what what's your what is the force of nature and the Robbie Sandsum like take on regenerative agriculture?

SPEAKER_00 40:10

Yeah, it's it's it's a it's a big it's a big conversation topic and it's a complicated one, no doubt. Um, you know, I think in its in its simplest form, regenerative agriculture is is is farming and ranching in the image of nature and as best as we can emulating the blueprint that it's left. So you know you you alluded to some practice-based discussion points, right? Um when you had said, were there roots in the ground and stuff? And we can go through what those what those principles are. But I think effectively what those principles are doing is trying to ensure you have healthy functioning natural systems. So I think of those as things like the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient cycle, the energy cycle, energy being kind of like the sun, photosynthesis, energy transfers into the soil through the roots of plants. Um, lots of nerdy science stuff behind all those things, but you want those systems functioning, and that's what those systems are what are thriving or what are functioning in thriving ecosystems. And our agriculture systems are not thriving ecosystems, they are absolutely degrading or desertifying and massively disrupted ecosystems because we've broken those cycles. And those principles that I alluded to of regenerative agriculture, being namely, you know, most commonly cited as you know, limiting chemical and mechanical disturbance. So don't spray and and and till um uh in chemical and mechanical warfare on nature, um, green-growing plants and living uh roots year-round. So like maximize the photosynthetic capacity of an area so it can use the energy of the sun and and pull carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into food for the for the soil and grow soil and and and in and and in doing so create more nutrient-rich food and and and and more health and vitality for everything on top of the soil. Um the living the living roots things is is really important important. If you till you don't have uh any of that stuff happening either. You know, you don't you don't have the ability for that amazing nutrient exchange, and um you know you don't have life beneath the soil being kickstarted by the those beings and plants that can transfer the most valuable energy source on earth to the to those beneath the soil. Um, diversity, um, you know, again, everything has a role. Some plants actually fix nitrogen, for example. You know, I think the atmosphere is like 78% nitrogen. So when we spray nitrogen fertilizer, it's because we've broken that nutrient cycle and that energy cycle and that cycle that transfers atmospheric nitrogen back into the ground. You know, everything grew. We had these monster plants feeding the dino dinosaurs millions of years ago without fertilizers being sprayed. We have we have the capacity to do these things if we let um these, you know, we have diverse uh organisms and plants and animals and microbiology and macrobiology and uh you know megafauna and whatnot doing the jobs that they that they evolved to do. And so can we celebrate those? Can we allow those those those things to happen on the land and in how we're managing the land through agriculture? Um you know, same thing for insects. For every undesirable insect, there's potentially thousands of desirable ones that help mitigate. And you know, you tend to actually see in studies where you spray pesticides. Um, there are many instances where research has shown you have disproportionately more undesirable pests in those areas because you non selectively eliminate all life. And when you do that, you kill all the good stuff, and there's lots more good stuff than there is bad stuff. And whenever you don't have anything in the system to maintain balance, you can end up with those sort of plagues and an overwhelming environment where you know these undesirable, um You know, or these pests can come in and and and cause uh havoc and harm. Animal impact is an important um uh one of the principles. You know, animals have a role in in functioning ecosystems. You don't usually see functioning ecosystems in nature where it's exclusively plants or exclusively animals. You tend to see them um in a sim in some sort of a symbiotic relationship. And here in North America in particular, where we had um some of the largest grassland systems and pasture systems on Earth, and we had the largest herds of megafauna since the last ice age and the bison, you know, these these animals evolved um along with these systems to keep them functioning. There's a reason they call bison keystone to those systems, because even relative to their numbers, they have a disproportionate um impact on the ecosystem. I would I would say beavers are are are less celebrated, but equally impactful and and and impressive and the historical role they would have had, and and yet we've decimated their numbers and won't go too far down that. But animals um, you know, and and and insects and other things should be a part of a healthy system. And I, you know, I'm I'm I might be forgetting one because I'm elaborating as I'm going, but know your context as an important final one. You know, one of the things that we do is in agriculture is we we try to impose our will on landscapes where it may not otherwise be appropriate. And, you know, the example I would give is like it's probably not ideal to try to raise bananas in Alaska. Um that might be an extreme example, but when we reduce our food system down to geographic and region and culturally appropriate foods to the point where the U.S. disproportionately produces corn and soy, these commodity crops for much of the globe, um, we start to try to force plants and other things and force land to accommodate them. And we use, again, this chemical, this mechanical, all of these inputs and tools to try to impose our will on nature. Well, again, that's not going back to what I'd explained as regenerative. That's not working with nature. Um, and a lot of what the the conventional system has done in disrupting those cycles and failing to honor those principles is mine and extract the fertility that has been deposited into our ecology and our food production systems for generations, for millennia. And to your point about, you know, sustainable is just not making it worse and regenerative is about making it better, you know, think of this as like a bank account. You know, you can you can take withdrawals up to a point, and then there's nothing left. Um, you know, you have to start making deposits if you want to keep taking withdrawals, and that's what a food system requires. It should be circular. You know, there should be stuff going in and stuff coming out. You can't only extract and only withdraw, or eventually you run out. And that's where where you know some of the concern and some of the importance with regenerative comes into the equation is like, hey, we have to start reinvesting in these. And we've learned the lesson the hard way. We learned it in the Dust Bowl. Um, we've learned it in a number of civilizations through the years that have um, you know, almost like a metronome over thousand-year cycles exhausted their resource base, and and then the civilization has collapsed, usually exhausting your resource base either precedes or follows or corresponds with um war, and you know, as as you pursue other people's resources and then disease and then famine, and then, you know, like you can look to South America and the rainforests, you can look to the Fertile Crescent that is now a desert, where allegedly life and human life spawned, um, you know, different places in the Middle East. Um, you know, this is this is a tale as old as time. Plato and Aristotle were writing about soil health long ago. You know, and so I would I would again juxtapose what I'm what I'm trying to explain here with the system that we have, where, like I said, half of the land mass of the United States has agriculture practiced on it, 40% of the land mass of the globe. You highlighted that this leads to topsoil issues, that's food security and food system stability. It also leads to pollinator issues, it leads to acidification of the ocean, which has major, major issues. It leads to, it has impacts on floods and droughts and precipitation patterns and weather patterns. Um it has issues on you know why there are dead zones in the ocean where life can't form or where uh life uh is absent in streams and rivers that have algae blooms with all the oxygen sucked out because of the agriculture chemicals of which 50% run off. It's why glyphosate is showing up in breast milk and and in blood and in urine of all of us when the research is done, because that's the most commonly used um herbicide in the in the US and desiccant. Um, you know, there's the look the the reasons and concerns that and why everybody should care in the list just goes on and on. And you know, the the question I often get is like, well, that's all great, but really is it scalable? Um and the answer is yes, because I think, you know, candidly, much of the globe, historically and at present, um, still lives on subsistence farming, which is more of, you know, there is no closed loop left any longer, but more closed looped in this open loop system and extractive and input-based systems that we have. Um, and I think there's a million examples of why it's scalable. But I also have to, you know, when I'm faced with that question, start off by saying I reject the premise because I believe the question is premised on we have a an effective and sustainable and viable system for the future today, and we have the luxury of critiquing regenerative agriculture as an alternative. And I would say we don't have the luxury of that choice. And I and I reject the premise that the existing system is viable because it's so extractive, because we're seeing the nutrition of our food decline, our topsoil, which is considered to be a non-renewable resource, which takes over 500 years to create an inch of, we're seeing that erode. Globally, we're seeing these land desertify, land become less capable of producing food. It's requiring more inputs. Right now, we literally just had an executive order pass so that we could make glyphosate because we've broken our food system so much that without it, the concern is we will starve and we can't create food as a nation. And we're about to see more of that happen because of a strait being closed in the Middle East halfway across the globe, limiting some of the trade of the fundamental uh building blocks of fertilizers and other um key components of a food system. So I can go as as as as as I can elaborate on any of these points and go as deep into this as you want, but I think, you know, I get really excited about it because I see the potential and I get to work with it and see how land changes and see the opportunity and I see how critical and necessary it is. And this is why I get not excited not only to do the work, but excited to share it with consumers and hope, you know, that as they become more aware of these issues, they become more capable of stepping up and going back to our conversation on you know how you create advocacy for something in business beyond profit, it's it's it's really through motivating consumers. I don't think anybody will create a product a consumer won't buy. Yeah, and the more consumers. Not for long, right? And the more consumers are empowered with knowledge, they can vote with their dollars and we can see the sort of change we want to see in the world.

SPEAKER_02 51:12

I I agree with pretty much all of that, right? I I think that there was a there's a lot of great bits in there that we're not gonna spend we we don't really don't have the time to elaborate on, but I think just the idea of it takes 500 years to generate an inch of topsoil, right? Like that's a that's a thing that I you know that's a that's a note that I had uh prior to our conversation. That it's just like you can write that sentence down and hang it on the wall and look at it every day for ten years, and it would never ever get old. You know what I mean? Like 500 years to generate an inch of topsoil, and that's like the like the idea of we need to deposit uh we need to deposit some resources here if we're gonna keep mining the resources, we got a lot of people to feed. Um and I I do think that you're right that we're making broadly a general assumption that what we have um that what we have today is like the base, right? That like the agricultural system that we have today is like oh this is this is what we've got, this is what's gonna take us forward. We're open to alternatives, and you're like, no, no, no, this isn't this isn't the alternative. This is like the only one that like if we're still, you know, 100, 200, 500 years from now, if we want to still be like harvesting healthy food and all this sort of stuff, it is kind of the only option.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

Oh, dude, it's crazy. And like and there's so much we don't know. Um, you know, and like we thought my macronutrients were the were the end all be all, then we realized about micronutrients and minerals. Now we're into these phytochemicals and nutrients and compounds, and you know, like what is health? What is what are the things that we rely on? How do we create the the vitality that we're looking for? I mean, there's a in in healthy soil, there's a billion living organisms per teaspoon. And they'll they're all there for a reason.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

And to your point about topsoil, you know, it took 500 years to create an inch of topsoil, just to like put some perspective on on my point about how we're exhausting these resources. Every year in the United States, we lose two billion tons of topsoil. It's our number one export. That's how much we lose to erosion because we're not protecting it, because we're not building it, because we're not preserving it, we allow it to be tilled and left bare. Um and oh yeah, armor the soil was one of those principles that we that we that we left off. Um the soil should be covered, we don't want to lose it. Two, you know, what is two billion tons of topsoil look like? Well, you you you could put two tons in the back of a pickup truck. So imagine a pickup truck full, the bed of a giant mound of dirt in a pickup truck. That's two tons. You'd still need a billion pickup trucks. Your average pickup truck of like 19 or 20 feet, that's that's a row of pickup trucks that wrap around the equator 150 times. That's how much topsoil we lose in the US in one year. And we've been doing it for decades. And it takes 500 years to make an inch. That's where our food comes from, and that's what all terrestrial life relies on.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

Yeah. So that's I mean, that's uh that's uh hugely important, right? Is an understatement to say that that's important. But it's also it's also like uh it is also, I think, in general, hard for consumers to digest. Like we've talked uh you've you've mentioned this a couple of times, and I fully agree with you that like a business is in service to its consumers and you know, obviously like there's shareholders in there, but like a business won't exist without customers. And so like we have to always be thinking about as people operating businesses of any kind, you know, even maybe this podcast is a business, there's no reason to do it if nobody listens to it, right? There's no reason, you know, you don't get to you don't get to do regenerative meat if nobody's buying force of nature products. And I think that like uh one of the things I'm I'm not gonna I'm gonna resist going back to accounting, but I am gonna go back to the business side of it a little bit, is that you can have something like a yellow bird or a force of nature or something that is mission-driven, that is working with uh with farmers or ranchers and is doing the hard work and and that can resonate with the natural category first. It can you can go first to a place like Whole Foods where that communication is being actively done by the retailer and you have uh, you know, a built-in customer base who's cared about this stuff for decades, you know, for a long time. But a lot of people are buying groceries somewhere else, they're buying them at Walmart or Kroger or Safeway or Albertsons or they're buying stuff on Amazon. How are you guys at um like at Force of Nature, how are you thinking about some of those, some of those, because there's some real tension between like what what is actually best. There are a lot of there are a lot of brands that start in natural or have success in natural that are mostly marketing. I'm not gonna name names, but they're doing a lot of marketing for we don't have time. We don't have time to name all the names, right? But it's like they're marketing a better for you product, and there's a lot who are like in the headlines just recently, right? But like they're marketing, they're marketing a better product, and people with limited time, consumers with limited time, are biting on a marketing message and a price point, all of which are important things for businesses. But like the the really crucial underpinning of is this really good? Is this really better for me? I I would make the argument, which I think is fairly well supported, that most consumers care, right? Like all the things that you're saying, I think people would like agree that they care about it, that they care about the planet that they live in, that they care about what they put in their body, but they might be still making different decisions because they're shopping price per ounce, or they're shopping they're shopping in some other way that is not that does not clearly line up with like a hey, like if I asked anybody, hey, do you think do you want humanity to still be around in a thousand years? Most people would say yes to that, right? That's a pretty easy question. Like, do I still want humanity to be around in a thousand years? We we're not we don't have time to address on this podcast the people who would say no to that question, but like that's it, that's a that's a softball, right? That's a that's an underhand pitch right there. Like so are you making decisions now to support that hypothesis, right? Am I paying a dollar a pound more for regenerative beef, two dollars a pound more, five dollars a pound more? Where at what point will I justify that? And how do you guys think let me let me make this concise by asking, how do you guys think about messaging the work that you're doing at Force of Nature to consumers?

SPEAKER_00 58:19

That's one of the that's that's the hardest part, especially being in a in a in a perimeter store commodity categories. How do you reach consumers? How do you j how do you validate your premium? How do you justify and differentiate relative to to the set that you're in? Weighing all of those factors that you just laid out and some of the confounding variables that deceive consumers like claims and certifications often uh can and do. You know, I think that my there's there's there's two things I would say. One, the only value proposition is not the the future. It's a it's a it's a big and important one, and we could talk about you know the deferred health costs of eating unhealthy food and the multi-trillion dollars a year that we spend on, you know, preventable health issues largely related to to food choices and how we mislead and miseducate people on those topics. Um it's it's really difficult to convince people to say, you know, to protect tomorrow by making a sacrifice today. So, you know, I think one of the things that we do is we talk a lot about the actual health superiority of the product too, which there is. Um, there's a lot of ways, you know, and and and we do other things that go beyond regenerative. We aren't just regenerative. You know, like regenerative is an important part of what we do, but we're testing our meat for PFAS, we're testing our meat for heavy metals, we're testing our meat for using over 300 different agriculture chemicals that have existed in agriculture in the US over the last 30 years. Every one of the most popular agricultures of the last 30 years, we test for those. Um, but we don't have an organic seal on our package. Why? Well, we we have a protocol that says we don't, you know, we want to we want to regulate or limit the use of of chemical inputs in in these systems, but we don't require an organic certification. Organic acreage in the US between 2016 and 2021 didn't grow, it actually went down. Organic's not growing. If you want to scale a solution and drive a and drive change in our food system, we need a system that creates more value and is more obtainable to both the food producers and the consumers. How do we bring costs down? How do we bring quality up? How do we support the people that are most critical in the system, the people that create the food and the people that purchase the food? We live in a time and an age where we're able to do that. There are some tools and some solutions and some things that we that that were brought to bear over the over the last generation that helped bring objectivity and um consumer advocacy into the equation, but if we're not serving our ideals with some of those some of those tools and and and claims and certifications, we got to rethink it. Like my ultimate source of truth is if a consumer walks through the supply chain, what are they left? How do they feel? Um, would they buy the product or not? And I feel like in in meat in particular, if you walk, if if a consumer walks a supply chain that they're actively purchasing, even when they buy for a set of claims or values, most often they will be disappointed. They will realize that they're being underserved and it will and they will want something different. And they would be willing to pay slightly more. That's for them to determine. They can do the calculus themselves, but they'd be willing to pay slightly more. Mike, I am confident that if a consumer walks my system, they're going to be excited about what they're paying for and what they're supporting. And so when you ask how we how we market ourselves, that's how we try to do it. We don't collect Girl Scout badges on our packages that we have to pay, we have to impose on ranchers who are struggling like never before. More, more, more, the last quarter, more farmer bankruptcies than any quarter in history. We're still losing farms at an unprecedented rate. We still have an aging population of farmers. Farmers are still going bankrupt and committing suicide at unprecedented rates. Like they are not out there fat and happy and just trying to take advantage of us. The more things we ask of them to bear costs and bear audits and do things, uh, the more difficult things are for them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pursue improvements. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to raise the bar and um and support them and champion the causes that we have, whether they be about limiting the use of chemicals, or whether it be about improving welfare, or whether it be about um you know regeneration or improving uh environmental outcomes. Those are all things, those are all worthy pursuits, but I think we have to think differently about how we how we go at those, and that's what force of nature is trying to do. We build those into our protocols, we meet and visit these people ourselves, um, we test the end products, and then we go to town with content and messaging and story and trying to reach consumers with a with with a different um message than they're accustomed to. And in meat in particular, they're not accustomed to the meat company trying to reach them at all. Usually the meat companies are just trying to shield um and and hide behind a curtain what's actually actually going on. Like the last thing they want to do is to have a consumer aware of what they're actually getting. That'd be the end of days for most meat businesses. So for us to even be the first to come out and say, hey, we want a relationship with you, we're proud of what we're doing, we want to show it to you, we want to talk to you about it, we want to tell you about issues in the industry, we want to tell you about what we're doing about those issues and why you why we think you should care about them. I'm not telling you you have to care about them, but if you do, you're gonna want to listen to this, you're gonna want to know this. And I think I think we're offering, we're not trying to change consumer behavior. I think what we're offering is what consumers already expect and what they already think they're getting when they're being when they're being served products. You know, they're like, and I and I and I don't mean to, you know, you know, we can get we can elaborate on it too, but when you see things in the store like vegetarian fed as a claim for pork or poultry, like it's it's sadly comical because that should be a red flag to most consumers. The only way you can, number one, they're omnivores. They should be eating a diverse diet. They should be living out in a pasture on the land somewhere, uh rooting or scratching and pecking at you know, grubs and and and insects and other things. The only way that you can make a vegetarian-fed claim for a monogastric like a pig or a chicken is if they've lived their life fully confined in a synthetic industrial environment. So if you ever see a vegetarian fed, know that that life, that animal's not going outside. That animal's not living an evolutionarily consistent life or a biologically consistent life. But we figured out how to how to hack consumer um behavior and thinking, and we've sort of indoctrinated and trained people into thinking certain things have value when they don't, and because it tests well, they put it on a package as a claim. And so these are the sort of things where, like you said earlier on, we're going about how we market and how we tell our stories and how we brand the product the hard way. It would be way easy for us to buy cheaper product with certifications on them that can that consumers thought were superior. But we more often than not are buying, sourcing more expensive stuff because we're working with better producers, even though they don't carry some of the claims that consumers think are the most valuable. It doesn't mean all claims are bad. My pantry's full of organic stuff, you know. But to me, like that's one of the big takeaways is like that's the starting point. Like, you don't like I buy when I buy yellow bird, I buy the I, you know, I look I look for the products that you have, some organic, and I buy the organic one because I know what I'm getting. But I'm not buying it because it's organic. I'm buying, I'm buying it because it's yellow bird. I know your story, I know your care and your passion for the products that you're putting into it. Then I'm choosing the claim amongst, you know, after I understand and appreciate what you're doing, that you actually care about all of the ingredients, you care about the people that are making the food, you care about your consumer, you want the Best product in the market, you care that there's no water in it, you're not, you know, filling it with crap and garbage, and it's organic. So, like those claims and certifications, those things are like the either the starting point for something unfamiliar or the nice to have after you really understand the true foundation and ethos of who you're supporting, but they're definitely not the single source golden, you know, silver bullet um tool that you should be using to make your purchasing decisions, especially if it's something that's um foundation to your plate, right? Like most meals a day have meat on the plate. Most consumers are buying pretty consistently the same products week in and week out if they're if they're feeding themselves and their families. It's it's it's worth trying to figure out if that if you are as important to that brand as they are to you. And it's really not hard to figure out um in you know less than two minutes of of digging in and looking in, and we're gonna try to, you know, that's a big ask for folks to go do some research. So we're gonna try to put it in front of you, and we're gonna try to reach you um through storytelling to make it even easier.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:01

Yeah, I and I would I would argue um just to kind of back that up, I would I would argue that brand might be more important today than it's ever been because we have the opportunity to tell those stories, and you can have like I mean, I know that the the conversation around like brand loyalty is is complicated, right? We have a ton of options. We're as consumers overwhelmed with options and stories that people are telling us, whether those stories, whether those stories have merit, or they're just marketing stories, or I guess increasingly if those videos are AI generated or whatever, right? That like we're we're kind of inundated with stories. Uh my my uh take on it is that like brand becomes uh essential and important, where like force of nature, for example, as a brand, if I can prove all of this stuff and I can uh tell that r like relatably to a consumer and consistently to a consumer, and I can back it up, but you can back it up with your you know with with your product testing and with your studies and with your st you know your actual stories with your ranchers and farmers, then all of a sudden like the brand is the important thing there. The brand is the collateral um uh that you're selling, and that it's easy to say, like, this is why brand is valuable, right? Is because like now you've got people who are bought into something that ends up on their plate, you know, once, twice, three times every day, right? Like, whether it's beef or chicken or eggs or something uh something related that like it be it can become easier for consumers if I can say this is the brand that I trust for meat, this is the brand that I trust for ketchup, this is the brand that I trust for rice, or you've got a couple of brands that you trust. I don't know if everybody sits down and does that. I I know that there's a lot of there's a lot of cost shopping that goes on out there. Um I know I know we're kind of in the home stretch right now. I've got a couple more things that I that I wanted to cover, so I'll I'll uh I'll take us I'll take us just a few minutes over time just because I want to ask I want to ask this question about about cost disparity, right? Which I which I imagine in commodity is one of the things that one of the things that kind of you look at every day, right? We we hear it, you know, hot sauce is highly commoditized as well, it's just not as big of a category as meat, right? It's not as frequently purchased or consumed as your category. Uh how are you guys thinking about like the like the price disparity between what you're selling, which is a uh you know easily confirmable superior product to what people are you know trained to buy, basically. How are you thinking about the price difference?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:05

Does that get asked of from your consumers a lot or yeah, I think there's no doubt we're we're amongst, if not the most, premium from a price perspective in in the set, and you know, I would I would say that's largely because we you know we're sourcing higher quality stuff that costs more, um, and then and then spending more trying to explain to people why. Um but why should somebody pay that premium and how do we help them get over the hump? I mean there's a there's a number of of of ways I look at it, right? You know, and and I'm not um and I'm not you know only I don't only care about force of nature. You know, I first of all I tell people like the best place to get meat is to hunt it yourself, to struggle and to fail, and to form a relationship with it, and to appreciate what you have and not waste it. Um and then I say the second best place to get your meat is to grow it yourself and to do it the way that aligns with your values, and ideally that's clean and regenerative and full of health and nutrition, or to have somebody that you're ne that is a neighbor to you who you know and trust and love to grow that food for you. Like I hope that we're the third best place to get meat.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:19

Um and that we're there for you on a national scale and um and we're accessible and and we're addressing problems. And I agree that I think brand is is is critically important. Um and I think we're trying to stand for like by not having 13 different certifications on our package, we're trying to say because our brand stand behind it, stands behind it, that's how we're able to work with the best of the best farmers and producers who may not be able to get certifications because they can't afford to, and they and and to reach those with and and to reach customers with those products and be you know by doing doing the work in the middle. Um sorry, I just I I lost track of the question real quick. Um, that's all right.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:05

We're talking we're talking about uh like pricing and how you're approaching with retailers, consumers, etc.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:11

And so I think you know there's a reason that we that that that we're at that premium price point, but then I I you know I just kind of go back to and and you and I uh spoke about this the other day. In the grand scheme of things, what people are spending money on is expensive, and what we are offering is inexpensive on a true and absolute basis. And so, you know, the example I often give is my beef on a price per ounce is you know something like 75 cents an ounce, and ruffles potato chips are like $1.30 an ounce, and Hershey's are like $1.15 an ounce. I mean, depending on on where you go, the all of the items that you find in the checkout aisle that are so inexpensive and cheap that they're considered to be an impulse buy are more expensive per ounce than this superfood that you can live on that is the foundation of your plate and this should be the cornerstone of your diet. Those other things that we're spending money on are actually harmful to us. They're not bringing value into our life or to our health directly in the present, and certainly not in the future for ourselves or a broader constituency. And then you can expand that into other things people buy regularly that we think are cheap, like bottled water or coffee, um, or the premium things that people regularly, you know, can buy, like juices and you know, sometimes nuts. And so, you know, when you think about like what it takes to survive, it it's it's it's it's really important that we're buying the best the best stuff and and putting it into our body amongst amongst an alternative set. I also think that it's it's uh it's cheaper on an absolute basis than the cheap food that people feed themselves. So, you know, I do this all the time. I buy organic frozen vegetables, and I buy my meat, and I can make an incredibly nutritious meal for my family in 15 minutes by sauteing that meat and adding the frozen vegetables, maybe adding some rice. You know, I'm like 17 bucks in to feed a family of four.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:20

Yeah, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

I usually get a value meal at Chick-fil-A or your local burger joint for 17 bucks. You can't get two spinning wheels of mystery meat and a big gulp and a bag of chips at 7 Eleven sometimes for less than 15 bucks. And so, like, we tell ourselves this story. We're all indoctrinated into this belief system that fast food is cheap. It's not, it's actually dollar for dollar expensive. And you look at the externalities and the cost to your body and your health and your mindset and your it's expensive.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:53

You don't even have to look at second and third order to say fast food is expensive. Like you can say first order for me to go pay, you know, $20 to eat at Chick-fil-A.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:04

But convenience food, but convenience store food's expensive too. It's expensive. Which is where, you know, which is where folks that live in food swamps are getting a lot of their, you know, their Cheetos and their hot takis or whatever, and they're and they're like sugar-filled energy drink. When you're spending four dollars on on some snacks at a convenience store, you could have got a full serving with 20 grams of protein and creatine and all of the micronutrients of need. And you know, you know what I mean? Like it's it's it's so valuable. And so I think we've we've lost sight of what is valuable and what is costly and what is cheap and what is it.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:45

We should walk a supermarket and make a list that just price compares everything in the store by ounce, price per ounce, instead of just I do think that that's interesting to be like, hey, we're comparing it mostly with what's right next door to it, but we're also not saying like the I I think that like eat this, not that, with like, oh, don't eat Hershey's Kisses, eat uh eat regeneratively raised bison.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:10

Yeah. And so amongst it's it's shocking how inexpensive meat is in the grand scheme of things. Still, our meat is more expensive, and so how we differentiate within meat is the way that is the way we've kind of laid out, you know, previously on this call. But I think it's important to note that like again, how much more expensive are we than the alternative? You know, you're looking at like five or ten cents an ounce, maybe. So it's like, you know, buy some meat. Um, we are the best. Um, if you can't afford us, uh buy some buy some other meat. Um, but but don't don't kid yourself that the other stuff you're doing um and and have normalized isn't really expensive and and really costly for you.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:51

Well, let's talk about um ca because you had teed this up. Uh you talked about frozen meat for you you guys are selling uh primarily frozen, right? Um and then you just mentioned like frozen organic vegetables. I love frozen fruit, frozen meat, frozen vegetables because I know a lot more about the supply chains, but can't can you talk for a minute about like why frozen? Because it just because it's something that it's something that gets kind of like countermarketed a lot, like fresh, never frozen is like is like a badge of honor that I don't in in some cases I understand it like I wouldn't want like I wouldn't want romaine lettuce to get frozen because it is gonna affect like I don't want to make a salad out of previously frozen romaine lettuce, but like blueberries, excellent, freeze them the day you pick them, right? Like that's what I want.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:44

Yeah, the you know the reason I referenced it, there there's there's a lot of reasons why you might that I that I could pitch frozen. I I reference it typically in that in that example because it's so convenient. It's not gonna perish in your freezer. Um, it's on standby. You know, again, a lot of the a lot of the when talking about how expensive meat is, a lot of times you're met with like, well, so and so, you know, the the the parent I'm imagining is working two jobs and doesn't have time to cook food at home, and I'm like, I can make this meal with frozen food faster than it takes them to drive to the fast food restaurant and back.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:23

You know, or in in some amount, in some cases, the amount of time it takes to microwave the dinner or to put it in the oven. Um, the the the the the the already prepared meal. But like, why do so so a lot of the like I buy fresh fruits and vegetables? Yeah. But the reason I always have the frozen stuff is like it's my contingency plan, it's my backup plan, it's my in a pinch, plus it's plus it's great. So it's convenient, it's always around, you know. I got two kids, I got a two and a four-year-old little girl. Like sometimes you need the the the fast thing, the convenient thing on the go. Also, um, when you freeze fruits and vegetables close to harvest time, you preserve um the nutritional profile of the of those products. What people don't realize is every every minute, every hour, every day after picking, the the nutrient density of um of your vegetables declines. It just goes down. It doesn't go up, it doesn't flatline, it doesn't sustain, it goes down and down and down and down and down until it rots. And so there is a there is a reality that frozen fruits, frozen vegetables, they retain a moment at a moment in time, particularly early with early proximity or close proximity to the harvest state, the nutritional profile of that product for you as a consumer. So there is a benefit on a on a nutritional spectrum, and there's research and stuff that you could look at to dig into that. So I'd say that on the nutrition side of things and on a on a convenience side of things, from a cost perspective, you're probably better buying the the fresh item. But if I gave my example and said, hey, if you went and bought some fresh sweet potatoes and some fresh broccoli and some fresh cauliflower and some fresh carrots, and then you peeled them and then you chopped them up, and then you like it it it it it it might cut you know a another two dollars off of my $17 meal, perhaps. Um, but but you but you added it.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:10

It doesn't account for the labor. And it also doesn't account for like again, like we're we're already out of time, but it doesn't account for like the second and third tier effects of the amount of produce that gets thrown away at home, the amount of produce that gets thrown away at the store, the amount of meat that gets thrown away at a retail.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:30

40% of produce.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:31

40% of produce is it gets thrown out, right? Because it rots, because we can't use it fast enough, because we buy it, and then they're like, oh man, we forgot whatever. Now we've got bananas we got to throw away, or we've got old fish that we're afraid to use. But it but if that's frozen, um again, it's like I I I want people to shop more frozen just in general, just be just because there are a lot of problems. I I know that it is uh it is a complicated issue, but um let me ask you one more question and then I'm gonna give you uh your afternoon back. That I've in the because we've yeah, you know, just because you said earlier that uh everybody is too reductionist, I'm gonna ask an incredibly reductionist question, and that is in the in the meat industry in the US specifically, if you've got I'm gonna ask the magic wand question, so just brace yourself for it, if you've got a magic wand and you can fix one thing and one thing only, what do you what do you fix about it? And I know you already said like you know, it's not just force of nature, it's the whole kind of like industry, because we have to make better choices writ large, right? Not just with your brand or my brand or this consortium of brands, but like if you've got a magic wand and I can say like you can make one change in the in the in the meat industry in America, where where do you focus? Where do you look?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:03

That's a super interesting question. You're really into that question because that's that's one of the questions we got asked a couple weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

No, the magic wand question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:10

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of ran with that one in front of that audience too. Hopefully that works out for me.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:14

You did, yeah, we'll see.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

Um I don't I don't know that I have as provocative a take uh this time as I did last week um with that group we were meeting with. Um, you know, honestly, like I think if I could wave a magic wand as it relates to our meat system, I would I would it would be that consumers have full transparency into exactly the system and the life and the animal and the company behind what they're buying. Because I think if that happens, everything else falls into place.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:46

Yeah, like everybody just standardizes you have to Tyson has to show exactly the process and you just side by side them.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:54

Yeah, it's it's it's a magic wand, so we don't have to get too much into the semantics of how it actually works. Right. Right. But like if a customer saw a product on the shelf and knew where that product came from and saw the the horrid conditions, the treatment, the the feed, the chemicals, the just the nonsense, um, and could see next to it something that like was actually beautiful and inspiring. Maybe it even comes from a family uh farm, you know. Um, you know, I think that we I think a lot of these conversations and a lot of these questions and a lot of these challenges just all start to quickly work themselves out.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:27

Yeah. I like that. I love that answer. And I have loved this conversation. Robbie, um, you've been overly generous with your time. Thank you for going over with me a little bit. Um, you can find uh uh Robbie on LinkedIn, Robbie Sandsom, uh Force of Nature. What what's y'all's uh how can we find your I'm gonna drop some links in the episode description. How can we find more about you and more about Force of Nature?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:52

Yep, our website is forceofnature.com. Um, we have a blog and an email newsletter. Um I ask folks to sign up for it, not because I want to sell you stuff. We will. We'll we'll try to promote stuff too, but more more than that, we're trying to reach you with issues and educate. And so I hope you sign up and and and if you don't ever buy anything, that's great too. Just learn and and and and put an ear to the ground and become a part of um equipping yourself to be uh a better advocate uh for yourself. And then on on Instagram at Force of Nature Meets, we put up put out a bunch of stuff there as well. If you want to learn more about some of what we're doing and and and and again what's going on with our food system, that's where we try to be a thought leader on a lot of these issues.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:33

Awesome. Uh, you guys go follow Robbie, follow Force of Nature. Robbie, thanks again for joining me today, and thank you guys for joining both of us. Uh, remember to give Gross to Net, the podcast, like 18 stars out of five, I think, as many stars as you can possibly fit in there. Uh like, subscribe, come back for more amazing conversations like these. Uh Robbie, I hope you have a great day, and I hope all you listeners have a fantastic day, and I love you. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:00

Thank you, George.