Eric Smith @ Edacious
Helping Brands Prove That Regenerative Products Are More Nutritious
On this episode, Kyle and Anthony talk with Eric Smith, the Founder and CEO of Edacious. Edacious offers radically easy lab testing and intuitive nutrition software for food system professionals. They help brands measure, benchmark, and communicate the nutritional value of their products so consumers can truly understand what they’re eating. Ultimately, the health of the soil drives the health of our gut and bodies, and Edacious is helping connect those dots.
The Food System Is Failing Us – But the Data Can Save Us
Eric started Edacious after a decade working at the intersection of ecology and economy. He worked in environmental certification and later in venture investing and philanthropic giving, focused on directing capital toward climate solutions. Through this work, he became less confident that there would ever be large-scale, universal frameworks to effectively address climate change, and absent of policy, he knew consumers would not willingly “foot the bill” for climate change either. Meanwhile, he also noticed that while most innovations follow a “better, faster, cheaper” model, regenerative agriculture was asking consumers to pay more for attributes they couldn’t always see or understand. This disconnect drove Eric to explore how to make regenerative agriculture resonate with consumers through measurable, data-backed benefits.
“Nutrition literally comes from the soil and ends up in the food. And when it’s more nutritious, it tastes good. And when we eat good food, we feel better. This is not rocket science, and yet, it's all hidden from us.” – Eric
Understanding the clear link between soil health and the nutritional quality of food, Eric saw an opportunity to tie regenerative agriculture directly to consumer interest in better health and food quality. With Edacious, he set out to create a system that helps producers test, benchmark, and communicate nutrient density in food. Today's food landscape prioritizes volume, shelf-stability, and cosmetic appearance, often at the expense of flavor, nutrition, and health. Edacious provides a complete nutritional profile of a food product, contextualizes the results, and enables brands to differentiate based on real data. Eric’s vision is that optimizing for nutrient density, rather than yield, can shift our food system to benefit both human and planetary health.
What the Nutrition Facts Panel Doesn’t Tell You
“Nutrition is being stolen from us every day, and we’re being lied to.” – Eric
Eric explains how the Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP) on food and beverage products is unhelpful and often incorrect. NPF data is typically pulled from generic and outdated USDA food composition databases and not created through actual ingredient testing. In fact, after most of their testing, Edacious is finding discrepancies of 50% to even 100% from what’s listed on a product’s NFP versus what shows up in the actual product. Eric also explains how the NFP centers on a few metrics indicating what consumers should avoid like total fat, sodium, and added sugars—ignoring far more relevant indicators of health. Edacious is addressing this gap by testing for metrics that truly matter, such as the balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, the quality of protein through amino acid profiles, and a broader range of vitamins and minerals. They’re also bringing phytochemicals into the conversation—compounds critical for long-term health that are entirely absent from today’s nutrition labels. By expanding and contextualizing this data, Edacious is redefining how we understand and communicate food quality.
The Five-Step Roadmap for Regenerative Brands
Edacious offers a five-step roadmap to help regenerative brands turn nutrient density into a strategic asset, enabling them to credibly communicate food quality and differentiate in a crowded marketplace:
1. Update the Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP): Using lab testing, Edacious helps brands generate real, product-specific data that is often significantly different from what’s currently printed on packaging.
2. Expand the NFP: Edacious helps brands add deeper, more meaningful data, such as omega-3 to omega-6 ratios, amino acid profiles, and a broader set of micronutrients.
3. Make strategic claims: Once brands have robust data, Edacious guides them in making truthful and compliant claims on-pack, on their website, and in other marketing materials. These can include health claims, source claims, and structure-function claims.
4. Build dedicated nutritional pages: Edacious encourages brands to move beyond the NFP by creating detailed nutritional pages on their websites and educational marketing material. For novel nutrients like phytochemicals, Edacious helps brands translate complex science—like carotenoid levels—into consumer-friendly messages tied to benefits such as immune, eye, or skin health.
5. Leverage third-party validation: As an ISO-accredited lab with rigorous audit standards, Edacious serves as an objective third-party validator, helping brands build consumer trust and removing any regulatory risk.
Edacious is committed to working with brands wherever they are in their journey. For brands that score below average on their nutritional profile, they offer guidance on improving nutrition through sourcing and, where appropriate, reformulation.
“We are walking our customers through a journey to turn nutrition into a strategic asset for their business to help them stand apart from the crowd.” – Eric
Why Benchmarks and Profiling Systems Matter
Edacious is laying the groundwork for a nutritional data revolution by building the first public benchmarks for food quality—what Eric calls the holy grail of systems change. By analyzing hundreds of samples over the past two years, Edacious has developed an incredibly rich dataset that allows for meaningful comparisons within and across food categories. This means that they are able to identify the nutritional profile of, for example, an average conventional chicken, and then have comparisons for pasture-raised chickens. That way a consumer can clearly see the difference between regenerative and conventional products.
The current benchmarks are focused on whole foods and ingredients (fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, milk) and lightly processed foods like tortilla chips, breads, and sausages. Results of comparisons so far have revealed stark contrasts: grass-fed beef is showing a different omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and 10 to 20 times higher concentrations of vitamins D, E, and K. Ultimately, Edacious benchmarks help compare regenerative to conventional, one regenerative brand to another, and even one product type to another (eg. protein from meat versus beans).
“You're either getting 1% of your daily vitamin value or you're getting 300%. That is nutrient density right there. We're either getting an insufficient intake of a vitamin or mineral or we're getting an adequate intake. We're [no longer] optimizing for these stupid guidelines that have been set by bad science forty years ago and are starting to think about optimizing for nutrition.” – Eric
How We Get Regen Brands to 50% Market Share by 2050
Eric believes we must activate the consumer base by linking the regenerative agriculture movement to personal health. When consumers understand that regeneratively grown foods can help restore and regenerate their own well-being, they are more likely to vote with their dollars. Eric thinks nutritional data is the key that enables this shift, offering brands a powerful new messaging and marketing playbook grounded in real evidence of superior food quality. By embracing nutrient density and making it visible—on-pack, online, and across social channels—brands can educate and empower shoppers to make more informed choices. But to scale this movement, more brands need to opt into nutritional analysis. The more data collected, the better the benchmarks and comparisons, enabling better transparency and communication by brands to consumers.
This ReGen Recap was written by Katey Finnegan
You can check out the full episode with Will & Jenni Harris at White Oak Pastures HERE
Subscribe to future episodes of the ReGen Brands Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. You can help support our mission of growing regenerative CPG brands with a 5-star rating!
Stay engaged in the conversation by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, The ReGen Brands Weekly, and connecting with us on LinkedIn: ReGen Brands, Kyle, and AC