4 days ago
Texan Trio Aims To Bring Regenerative Meats To American Dinner Tables
Katie Forrest, Taylor Collins, and Robby Sansom of Force of Nature.
About an hour outside of Austin, near Fredericksburg, Texas, amidst Hill Country, three successful entrepreneurs have decided to invest in a new venture -- one that includes 900 acres of open lands, currently occupied by bison, turkeys, and pigs to name a few.
Katie Forrest and Taylor Collins had started Epic Provisions over a decade ago after being endurance athletes who had shifted to a Paleo diet for nutrition. Robby Sansom, a close friend who was also interest in the food industry, had joined them as CFO and COO at Epic. The trio grew the company, and then sold it to General Mills for reportedly $100 million. While they continued to work with General Mills on how to grow Epic (and learn the pain points along the way), it was with that success -- and some of those earnings -- that they set their eyes on what would be next: building a go-to supply chain of pasture-raised and grass-fed meats.
They'd already been immersed in the world of jerky and dried meats, and were working with regenerative ranchers like White Oak Pastures in Georgia. So the world of regenerative agriculture was not new. But instead of creating a snack, they wanted to create a one-stop shop for healthier, grass-fed, pasture-raised meats (such as beef, bison, elk, venison, boar, and chicken).
Thus, their latest venture is Force of Nature. And their home office, you could say, is Roam Ranch, where not only do they look after a herd of bison but also host events, run workshops, welcome guests, and even live full-time.
As Collins pulls out the golf cart from the driveway, he points out the soil difference between his neighbor's and his. He jokes, 'Ours is full of weeds, and we kinda prefer it that way.'
When they bought the land, he said it was sandy, drought-ridden dirt. Today, it's buzzing with activity, even though they've been dealing with drought in the region, Forrest explains. This regeneration of soil is partly due to the bison.
'Bison are nature's iteration of the perfect soil builders,' Sansom says.
Their hooves press on the soil, with all their weight, 3,000 pounds worth, he explains. That chips away at the soil crust and incorporates organic matter. Plus, as they roll on their backs, they spread seeds into the ground, further encouraging native grasses and flowers to grow.
It's mid-March on the ranch. 'If you come back in a month, this is a jungle, a real food forest. The diversity, the pollinators, there is just so much going on,' says Collins.
Plus, there will be baby bison roaming around, says Forrest. 'The majority of the herd is females, and we had a 100% pregnancy rate, which is really incredible. That's a demonstration of health and contextual appropriateness. But imagine this being 70% more animals in a couple of months.'
Bison, in the States, have gone from being in the millions to then in periods of near extinction (in the 1800s) and now are seeing a revival thanks to conservation efforts. Yellowstone, which has the largest herd, at about 5,000 animals is perhaps the best demonstration of conservation at work. But at Roam Ranch, Forrest and Collins are tending to Texas, or Southern bison, which are more compact animals than their northern counterparts -- albeit from the same family. And they too have roamed these lands wild in the past, as did black bears, mountain lines, and black panthers says Collins. But most of those are now extinct, he adds.
Roam Ranch is an example of one of the many ranches, the Force of Nature team works with to procure their meat. These range from Kansas to South Dakota to Nebraska and Montana. Most are family-owned and they're focused on regenerative grazing and using livestock as a way to revitalize soils and the land.
Now they're also tackling America's most popular meat: poultry.
'We didn't use to eat a lot of chicken one generation ago. We eat now 350% more chicken than people would have eaten in the 40s and 50s. And if you go back, historically, there would not have been tribes of people nomadically roaming the grasslands following flocks of chicken,' Sansom says.
So it's a challenging problem to solve. Can poultry be done at scale and regeneratively? Not yet, he says, but they're trying. Ultimately, it may also require people to curb their chicken addiction. Much of the problem lies in human's tendency to want to dominate nature. 'When we foce corn to grow, soy to grow, or in this case, force chickens to flourish in a places and in quantities that would be inconsistent with the evolutionary context, we're out of sync.'
But Force of Nature wants to be that one-stop shop for regenerative meat -- and that would include poultry. Thus, the trio are tackling one of the most popular meat sources in America and finding ways to do it more regeneratively.
'We're trying to justify making these changes so that we can be the first domino that cracks the door for others to follow,' says Sansom. 'It's not us alone that is going to solve this problem. It has to be a community of growers, producers, brands, and even consumers to find the solutions.'
The Cornish Cross chicken, he explains, was the winner in the late 1940s, which was bred to be raised indoors and grew fast. 99% of the chickens consumed today come from this one breed. Force of Nature is not selling this breed; but instead a slow-growing heritage breed, where the goal isn't to multiply them in size in 5 weeks indoors, but allow them to have a more nutritious diet and a life outdoors.
And Sansom says clearly that while they're working towards a better poultry industry, they don't feel that 'a regenerative chicken exists at scale today -- yet.' That's because chickens need feed as their main source of food. And for every one acre of pasture-raised chickens, almost 40 acres of food crops are needed. So the answer is not so simple, given the demand for chicken in today's diet.
While the Force of Nature believes deeply in regenerative, Sansom says they don't use any regenerative claims on their packaging. 'We work with ROC, Regenify, Savory Institute's Land to Market, and other certifications because the ranchers we source from use those certifications, but we ourselves do not make those claims at this time.'
Instead, it's something they do on the backend -- and they welcome questions from customers. But at the moment, they argue that the costs involved with adding certifications on the product could increase the prices further, which they're not keen to do.
Plus, it means juggling expectations of different parties. Grocery store buyers, for example, he explains, want price points that are affordable while hitting these values. For them, velocity is a key word: how many units can you sell in a particular category. Given that the trio have been working in the food industry for over 15 years now, they're well-versed in the needs of the different parties involved in retail and distribution. That's why their meats today are available through their website directly and in over 4,000 retailers.
'We had one of the largest health food retailers out here in 2016 to talk them about a regenerative approach to meats. These things take time as people begin to understand that importance of what we're doing. And we want it to be a relationship and a partnership, not transactional,' Sansom adds.
Forrest, Collins, and Sansom have all seen the ups and downs of building new supply chains; the challenges are endless. That said, they're not giving up on a vision where Americans eat less, but higher quality meat -- a real shift from the commoditized, industrial approach that has dominated in recent decades.
