Samuel Taylor @ Long Table

Next-Gen Pancakes From Regeneratively-Grown, Heirloom Grains

On this episode, Anthony and Kyle speak with Samuel Taylor who is the Founder and CEO of Long Table. Long Table is supporting regenerative agriculture with their pancake and waffle mixes made with regeneratively-grown, heirloom grains. They currently have three SKUs: popcorn, blue corn and gluten-free. Long Table mixes can be purchased on their website and Amazon or at Fresh Thyme stores. 

Acrobatic Love Interests 🤝 Popcorn Pancakes

Long Table’s pancakes were inspired by love – Samuel Taylor’s love of pancakes and his attempt to woo his future wife. Samuel was acting in a circus adaptation of Alice in Wonderland when he met aerial acrobat, Lindsey. Since they performed in the evenings, Samuel thought he would impress her with a breakfast date including delicious homemade pancakes. He knew average, conventional pancakes wouldn’t work though – while tasty, typical pancakes leave you feeling immediately too full and tired, only to be hungry again an hour later. He needed a pancake mix that would not only impress Lindsey, but also fuel her as an acrobatic performer. 

Samuel knew that flour from stone-ground, heirloom grains contained more nutrients than conventionally milled flour. He also had this memory of eating amazingly delicious popcorn-flour pancakes as a child. So he created his own pancake mix with heirloom popcorn, “milled” with his kitchen blender. While his memory of eating popcorn pancakes was proven false (his friend’s dad confirmed he never used popcorn flour), the idea was a winner. The pancakes were especially light and fluffy, while packing in a unique flavor and enough protein to stave off hunger. 

Lindsey liked the pancakes and she liked Samuel. The couple gave out Samuel’s winning, protein-packed pancake mix at their wedding and began selling the mix at local farmer’s markets. 

“My wife and I fell in love. We love pancakes. We started selling them because we had our careers in the theater and we didn't want to wait tables the way some of our peers were. So instead of working in that industry, we worked in farmers markets.” - Samuel

Building A Better World for Future Generations

COVID-19 was a turning point for Samuel. Every live theater shut down, leaving him, his wife and their peers without work. It was a challenging period and a crucial inflection point. The world felt fragile and crises like climate change seemed too big and important to ignore. Samuel began to reflect on his part in creating a better world for his child. He began learning more about regenerative agriculture and started to see the opportunity to drive impact if he were to seriously grow a pancake brand that sourced from regenerative farmers. The idea gave him hope and motivation in a dark time, so he decided to go all-in on Long Table. 

The name Long Table comes from the idea of passing down food from generation to generation at the family table. For Samuel, the name also encapsulates the power of regenerative agriculture and how it is a part of enabling us all to be able to pass down a healthier planet to future generations.

“I thought this kid (my son) is gonna be sixteen one day and he's gonna be smart enough and old enough to say ‘you knew about climate change your whole damn life. What did you do about it?’  I want a good answer for him when he asks that question. That was really the defining moment for me when I decided, okay, I'm gonna go full-time on Long Table. I'm going to really do this and try to build something that is scalable and has a much larger, more important impact.” - Samuel

How Ross From Friends and Shark Tank Changed the Business

“I feel like the world is just full of absolute lunatics who start food businesses with no idea what they are doing. And I cannot overstate to you the degree to which that is true for me. I literally had never heard of CPG before I started a pancake business.” - Samuel

As a new entrepreneur, Samuel took a slower approach to growing Long Table, taking courses on entrepreneurship and learning by doing along the way. He continued to sell the pancake mix at farmers markets and little by little grew the brand’s online DTC sales. By 2022, Long Table reached $90,000 in annual revenue.

The brand reached that milestone solely from Samuel’s initial, personal investment of $5,000, and he knew more capital investment was needed. Coincidentally, his long-time friend, David Schwimmer, from the hit show Friends had an idea: Samuel should go on Shark Tank. 

Samuel agreed to apply to the show and was accepted. His episode aired in January of 2023, featuring his wife’s acrobatics and David Schwimmer serving waffles to the Sharks. While all of the Sharks agreed that the pancakes were the absolute best they’d ever had, none of them decided to invest. The show was still hugely beneficial for Long Table – they saw a quarter-million dollars sales boost before the first commercial break and a total of a million dollars in sales over the next six weeks. Since then, Long Table has retained many of the customers and ended 2023 with $1.7 million in revenue. The publicity and stamp of approval from Shark Tank really boosted Long Table’s business and has opened doors for continued growth.

“The enormous gift that Shark Tank gave to us is that people talk to us. Banks talk to us. Retailers talk to us. The caliber of person we're able to hire is raised because of all that. It’s a reality television show. It's crazy, but it changed our lives and we're enormously grateful for that opportunity.” - Samuel

Regeneratively-Grown & Stone-Milled Heirloom Grains

Long Table has sourced regeneratively-grown heirloom grains from the start. Samuel was introduced to regenerative agriculture through the Artisan Grain Collaborative, a group dedicated to building a regenerative grainshed in the Upper Midwest. Long Table works with Janie’s Mill in Illinois and Meadowlark Organics in Wisconsin to source their regenerative, stone-ground grains. Samuel is enthusiastic about the power of regenerative grains brands like Long Table to create a market for a variety of heirloom grains that are grown in a way that delivers a much better tasting product while also promoting farm resilience and soil health. 

“The yield of heirloom grains per acre is less. The size of the actual grain is a little bit less. So commercially in a commodity supply chain where all you can compete on is price, they don't do as well. We're trying to reestablish a connection between the farmer and the consumer to give farmers a market for the stuff they want to grow because heirloom grains, like heirloom tomatoes, there's a ton of varieties of them. You've got different tastes, different textures, different baking performances. And they're naturally more resilient to pests and disease.” - Samuel 

How the grains are processed is also important to Long Table. Stone milling retains flour quality and nutrient density. The stone milling process gently crushes all of the parts of the grain so that the nutrients in the bran and germ are retained, as opposed to the conventional milling process in which parts of the grain like the germ are removed and then synthetic versions of the nutrients and vitamins are added back in. 

Long Table mixes are made with a combination of heirloom grains, designed to optimize for taste, texture and farm biodiversity. For example, the blue corn mix is made with heirloom blue corn, heirloom rye, heirloom buckwheat and hazelnut meal. Diversifying the mix is a win-win approach in Samuel’s mind – the heirloom grains bring unique flavor and texture to the pancakes while also creating a market for farmers’ diverse crop rotation. Samuel hopes that as Long Table grows, it will be able to buy farmers’ entire crop rotations. Long Table also does short-run SKUs focusing on one individual farmer and one unique grain, such as Kernza or Turkey Red Wheat. These mixes allow Long Table to test new ideas while also sharing more of the farmer story with the consumer. 

Capital-Efficient, Omnichannel Growth

Samuel has been strategic and measured in his approach to growing Long Table. He has focused first on DTC to gather customer data in order to strategically set up distribution centers and enter retail stores in areas where they already have a high concentration of customers. Samuel is also using their experience launching in Fresh Thyme stores as a foundational learning process so that they are more equipped to do well when they expand into other retailers. Ultimately, Samuel has been laser focused on growing smartly without burning through the business’s cash flow. The brand is now at a point where it is seeking outside investment to meet its growth goals. 

“The only way to achieve the values of this business is to be commercially successful and to grow very big. And I think that the values that I have don't divert my focus. They create a stronger sense of focus to ask how this can actually move and transform. And the way that it moves and transforms is clearly by being a better product, by solving a problem for a customer, and speaking to their values.” - Samuel

50% Market Share 4 Regen

Samuel highlights three key actions needed to increase market share for regenerative brands. Foremost, he believes that bigger CPG brands must get on board. In order to trigger the bigger players to move, he says that emerging regenerative brands need to be outpacing their competitors. Second, he points out that grains brands specifically need improved processing infrastructure, including more heirloom grain millers and cold storage facilities. Finally, in order for emerging regenerative brands to be successful, Samuel points out that they need more and better funding. As he is currently in the midst of fundraising, Samuel shares how he wishes there were more values-minded financiers that didn’t see a need to choose between ROI and impact. 

For the future of regen brands, Samuel thinks certifications are key for establishing product differentiation and combating greenwashing. He also thinks they are absolutely crucial in creating a quick, easy visual marker for busy and distracted consumers to identify regenerative products. While Long Table is pursuing Regenified™ certification, Samuel sees room for multiple certifiers. He acknowledges the important role of the organic movement in calling out the need to rid the agriculture sector of harmful pesticides and chemicals, but also notes that setting organic as the foundation for regenerative certification is too high of a barrier to entry for most farmers. He appreciates that the Regenefied™ approach creates an easier on-ramp for farmers while also requiring continuous, measured improvement in order to maintain certification. 

This ReGen Recap was written by Katey Finnegan

You can check out the full episode with Samuel Taylor @ Long Table HERE

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