#106 - Carrie Richards @ Richards Regenerative - Wholesale Over DTC, Regenerative in Schools, and the Problem with Big Brands

Episode Recap:

ReGen Brands Recap #106 - Wholesale Over DTC, Regenerative in Schools, and the Problem with Big Brands - (RECAP LINK)

Episode Transcript:

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with AI and is not 100% accurate.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:00:13
Welcome to the ReGen Brands Podcast, the place for brands, retailers, investors, and other food system stakeholders to learn about the consumer brand supporting regenerative agriculture and how they're changing the world. I'm your host, AC. Thanks for tuning in. Now let's get into today's conversation. On this episode of the ReGen Brands Podcast, we're talking with Carrie Richards, the fourth generation rancher behind Richards Regenerative. Carrie takes us through her incredible journey from scrappy beef sales out of a friend's freezer to supplying over 40 school districts and major retailers like Sprouts.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:00:43
We deep dive into the challenges and contradictions of building a regenerative beef business from dealing with misleading country of origin labeling and predatory brand partnerships to navigating the real math behind carcass utilization, processing costs, and wholesale margins. Carrie also shares her hopes in the future use of nutrient density data, her fears about the future of the cattle market, and the launch of HarvestPath, a software platform purpose built to help small and midside ranchers thrive. Let's dive in. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the ReGen Brands Podcast. Very excited today to have my friend Carrie Richards from Richards Regenerative joining us.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:01:18
So welcome, Carrie.

Carrie Richards - 00:01:31
Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:01:34
Yeah. You also have an epic hat on, so I gotta get my hands on one of those hats. For those that are just listening to audio, we got a a great Richards Regenerative camo trucker hat, it looks like. But Carrie, for those that might not be familiar with the brand, can you give just a brief overview of what y'all produce and where people can find your products today?

Carrie Richards - 00:01:53
Yeah. We produce grass finished, pasture finished, regenerative beef in California. The main places you can buy our stuff is all the Sprouts Markets on the West Coast. We have our CPG products in there as well as online, through delivered cold, which is our three p l that does all of our delivery

Anthony Corsaro - 00:02:17
for

Carrie Richards - 00:02:17
us, as well as on Amazon. So those are kind of the three avenues you can get our products. And it's mainly ground beef, our, ancestral blend with heart and liver ground beef, and, various steaks.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:02:33
Love it. Love it. Mhmm. Well, I think this is clearly a family operation, and there's probably a fun origin story based on what I saw on the website that spans all the way back to to 2011 and maybe even earlier than that. But give people a feel for, you know, when did the ranching thing come about for y'all? When did the regenerative thing come about? And when did the brand kinda come about? What's the origin story behind the business as it exists today?

Carrie Richards - 00:02:58
Yeah. So my great grandfather bought our family ranch in Oregon House, California. No one knows where that is. It's fine. It's Add

Anthony Corsaro - 00:03:07
me to that list of people that have no idea where that is.

Carrie Richards - 00:03:10
There's like one person that's like, I know Oregon House is. It's an hour and twenty minutes, Northeast Of Sacramento in California. So, it's 6,500 acres and, it was purchased in 1941. So, my great grandfather ran it. My grandfather ran it. My father ran it, and now I'm running it. And maybe my kiddos or my niece and nephew, we don't really know yet. But, so that's kind of the the production line of who's been running the property.

Carrie Richards - 00:03:35
So my father I spent a lot of time up here as a child. I actually grew up in Sacramento, but like I said, it's only about an hour outside of Sac. Yeah. And so I have, three siblings, two brothers and a sister. And in twenty eleven ish, we started talking to dad about, you know, what's next, what are we gonna do, like, what's the next avenue for the ranch. And that was also kind of the omnivore's dilemma era and, like, things were Yeah. Things were getting a little bit, like, exciting around where does your meat come from?

Carrie Richards - 00:04:14
Where does your like, what are you eating? Is it pasture raised? Like, all of that was kind of bubbling up to the top at the same time.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:04:32
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:04:33
People were coming to my dad at that time and asking for a whole animal and asking us to finish animals for him, and he kinda didn't really understand. He was like, okay. Whatever. We'll finish some animals for the local guys. But we're like, dad, like, this is the thing. Grass fed beef, like, pasture raised, eating healthier, knowing where your food comes from, and he was kinda like, oh, whatever. And and so it kinda started really scrappy where my, siblings and I were selling whole beefs in, the Bay Area where we were all living at the time to family and friends.

Carrie Richards - 00:04:57
I sold a half beef to my book club, like, out of my friend's freezer in their garage with my little clipboard. I mean, it was real scrappy in the beginning.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:05:17
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:05:18
So, I think 2012, we sold like 16 head and we were like, oh my god, we did it.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:05:24
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:05:25
At that time, we joined American Grass Fed Association because we wanted to have some sort of, like, outline of how we raise our animals, what to do, what not to do. And then shortly after that, we decided we were gonna try this thing out and maybe try and sell to some restaurants and butcher shops, and we hired a part time salesperson. Mhmm. That was 2013. And then the business kind of exploded after that because, like I said, during that time, the where's your food come from movement was happening. That kind of is where we started tracking all of our animals online using our Salesforce system that we now have turned into a product, which I can talk about later. But, yeah, we we needed a way to organize the ranch, the operation, the animals, the production from the Bay Area because we weren't living up here yet.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:06:20
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:06:21
And so that was kind of where we decided, alright, this is this is a go. And we started Richard's Grass Fed Beef. We weren't Richards Regenerative at the time because we didn't know what regenerative was at the time, mainly. And so we we moved to about a load a month, in 2015, and I raised my hand as the person that would come up to the ranch and kinda help pivot this property to a 100% grass fed, grazed, sorry, grass finished operation. Tracking all the animals, tracking the audits for American grass fed, and my husband and I and our two kiddos moved up in 2016.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:07:06
And before before you did that, Carrie, what how was the ranch, like, being run more specifically, previous to that?

Carrie Richards - 00:07:13
We were very traditional. We were a cow calf. We were buying animals from our cousin up in Modoc County, who we still buy animals from today. And we had about, it's funny because we were arguing about how many animals we had. And so that's what started the health work company because we're like, we need to know how many animals we have. Yeah. So at the time, we had about 600, mama cows.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:07:41
Okay.

Carrie Richards - 00:07:42
And so we were very traditional. Like I said, we would sell all of them to the auction, keep some replacement heifers for our, herd, and then we'd finish the small handful of animals for local families and friends. Got it. And so that was where we've been in that tradition for years. My great grandfather had a purebred Hereford herd, and that was his thing. My dad did a purebred Murray Gray herd for a while, and that was his thing. My grandfather was very into horses, so we used to have a ton of horses and breeding horses and all the things, but it was, we never were a finishing operation and we never had a meat company.

Carrie Richards - 00:08:15
So the meat company came from our generation. Mhmm. But yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:08:34
It's it's interesting. I feel like we've seen this theme with, folks on the beef side is, like, you almost have to start a meat company to become a finishing operation versus, like, vice versa, which I feel like you would think would be the opposite. But There's

Carrie Richards - 00:08:48
a lot of things I think I would have done differently.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:08:54
Yeah. I mean, I think anyone that starts a business or has any sort of entrepreneurial venture, we would all say that, myself included in a big way. Mhmm. So I cut you off in the middle of your story. You put your hand up to kinda go help with the transition specifically of the the land management, but that obviously is heavily tied to the the meat business. Take us back to those early days and and what that looked like and maybe some of the biggest challenges there.

Carrie Richards - 00:09:19
Yeah. When we moved up in 2016, I was still a commercial, wedding and portrait photographer. And I was like doing that on the side. I was living at the ranch. Our kids were two and four. I mean, it was bananas. So

Anthony Corsaro - 00:09:35
Sounds like it.

Carrie Richards - 00:09:37
Yeah. And I, you know, I was like, I ran my own business for ten years. I've got this.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:09:42
And then

Carrie Richards - 00:09:42
I moved to the ranch and I was like, I don't even know who we buy our hay from. Like, I don't even know, like, how the irrigation works. Like, it was one of those moments where you're like, you have this, like, false confidence because you've you've ran a business before, and then you move up here and you're like, oh, I have to worry about, like, commodity prices and, like, gas prices and, like, these bigger these bigger numbers and global issues that I never thought about before. And so that was that was really eye opening, water districts and getting on boards. And, you know, I always wondered by other ranchers and why my dad, like, ran for the for the board of supervisors. I was always like, what? Why does everyone that has large pieces of property have to get involved in oh, because you have to get involved because being an owner of a large piece of land in a community, you're kind of like an anchor to that community. And so you have to be involved with fire mitigation. You have to be involved with water rights.

Carrie Richards - 00:10:41
And so, anyway, it was drinking out

Anthony Corsaro - 00:10:49
of my mouth. California.

Carrie Richards - 00:10:51
Oh my goodness. Yes. All the that's where rules are made in California. We breed rule. I've decided, that's what we export. So we moved up here. It was great. And then at the time, the management that we had was not really feeling my excitement on, we're gonna have chickens, and we're gonna move them every day, and then we're gonna have pigs, and we're gonna have all the things, and we're gonna be Joel Salatin. And they were like, what what what are you thinking? So that that transition was tough. And I really had to learn that, like, certain pieces of land can handle those kinds of things, and certain pieces of land can handle different kinds of things. So that was my learning in, what we do now is we have a pastured pork program, and we have our grass fed beef finishing program. And those are the two main programs we have.

Carrie Richards - 00:11:46
The rotating chickens and the like, with the crazy heat we have here and just bringing in feed, like, there's all these things that I really wanted to do that over the years, I'm, like, realizing, like, oh, like, there's a reason why not all ranches do all the things.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:12:05
Right.

Carrie Richards - 00:12:06
Right. So American Grass Fed was actually a great ally for us because there's only a few of us in California that are American Grass Fed, so I just kinda cold called everybody. And that's how I met Tomcat Ranch, and a bunch of other producers that I'm still friends with today. And, they referred me to the Savory Institute, which is where I learned about regenerative and holistic management.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:12:32
Yeah. There's a great, NorCal crew of regen folks in general, but especially I feel like on the on the beef side. Mhmm. So love that you were able to tap into that network.

Carrie Richards - 00:12:42
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:12:43
As you were making the land transition, how did the the brand or the meat business go from, hey, we're selling six head a year to family and friends in in wholes and halves to whatever it became in kind of the next iteration? Tell tell me about that.

Carrie Richards - 00:12:58
I would like to say that it was really smooth and organized, but it was not, it was scrappy. It was, Hey, we got somebody that wants to buy 300 pounds of brisket a month. And we're like, okay. What do we do with the rest of the animal? So it was a constant, grow and shrink and grow and shrink. So from about 2012 or 2013 to 2019, we grew from that '16 head a year to about three loads a month.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:13:33
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:13:33
And we were in all sorts of avenues, especially our trim products. We're we're mainly in like, we were selling into Country Archer and Shake Shack. We helped grow the Shake Shack program here out in the West Coast, with our partner, Cream Co, and they're our distributor now still. That was started in 2019. But a lot of our big, trim products, bones and fat and grinds, were going to these bigger customers. We were then selling all of our prime cuts online, and then we had butcher shops and grocery stores and restaurants that we were working with. So, our mix during that time is similar to what it is now, which is about 90% wholesale and 10%, direct to consumer. That has since pivoted from that model.

Carrie Richards - 00:14:14
We had employees and we had, we have cold storage facilities all over the place. We actually had to after the pandemic, the boom of the pandemic became shrinking in, like, 2122. I'm sure you've talked to other producers and how how crazy that time was for all of us local folks because Yeah. 2019, it was like, oh, business as usual. 2020, we sold out everything we had because they couldn't bring in anything from other countries.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:15:00
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:15:01
And then it it all kind of, like, evened itself out, a few years after that. So, I was living up here. My brother was still in the Bay Area, and we basically condensed our team down to just our family and started selling a 100% distributor through our partner and our partner now, which is Cream Co Meats. And they are a distributor out of the Bay Area. So that was that was a tough decision, like Yeah. To to we had employees and we loved everybody and we wanted to keep growing and growing and growing. But at some point you, like I said, we've grown and we've shrunk and we've grown and we've shrunk, but we're still here. We're still fighting. Yeah. Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:15:35
But, yeah, the transition that transition was, that was a tough one for us.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:15:51
Yeah. But your mix of sales channels is always gonna dictate that. Mhmm. You know, having operated similar businesses in food and and having all these conversations now, like, it at a certain point, it just becomes math that you can't really engineer your way out of. Yeah. And I I do feel like I have a certain level of heightened interest or or and and empathy for the grass fed beef folks in the space because to me, it's like four layers of complexity that are really hard to control or plan around. You have the entire macro commodity, macroeconomic things that you already mentioned. Right? So, like, that's layer one, which is almost completely out of your control and and super unpredictable, especially in the times that we live in today.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:16:28
You have the actual, like, animal husbandry and the actual raising of the animal, which has all the biological variables that you really can't control. Mhmm. You have the processing element, which we've talked about really ad nauseam on this show, whole carcass utilization and also processing access and processing costs and efficiencies. You have all those variables. And then after those three layers, you have the final beast, which is, like, the most competitive, capitalistic end market to commercialize a product that's ever existed in the world. So it's like, woo. Just just the four four layers of fun.

Carrie Richards - 00:17:13
Four layers of fun. Yeah. And it it's it's it's hard for a lot of reasons. It's exciting for a lot of reasons, but, like, you can process an animal a 100 different ways. And so for months, you'll be like, this is our cut sheet. This is our cut sheet. And then you'll lose a customer, a big one. Even like a medium sized one. You'll have to pivot those. Do we make more grind?

Carrie Richards - 00:17:29
Do we it's so it's such a tricky industry for planning. And like you said, processing has doubled in price since 2020. Everything's more expensive and it's just the thing that excites me the most is like your conversation you had with Edacious, who is concentrating a lot on the, nutrient density of our products, like of grass fed and pasture raised, because that is kind of the deep data that can differentiate us from just a commodity product. So I'm I was excited to hear that you talked to them, and I I listened a little bit to it. And, we love working with them, and that's been a really that's been kind of a game changer for us.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:18:28
Yeah. Love that. And I've been having conversations as of late. Like, we're in this really, I think, interesting time, in in the regen ag, movement. Like, there's some conflicting momentum, in my opinion. Like, we have this whole Maha thing that I think has really caused a level of heightened awareness, like, at large, but Yeah. I think the agenda there is gonna be very watered down to ever get to, like, the true transformative solutions that a lot of the people that we've talked to are pioneering, but I'm still hopeful in the, you know, rising tide of whatever that thing is.

Carrie Richards - 00:19:04
Mhmm.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:19:04
We have people like Edacious and what Eric is doing and many others where we're, like, continuing to back up all this stuff with real data and provide real evidence. And it feels like and this could be just me projecting, but it feels like many of the folks that have been in in the fight for a number of years are kind of burnt out, and there's been some attrition and some of the challenges from kind of the macroeconomic context of right now, some of the pullback in funding, everything from philanthropy to kind of for profit investment and and and even, you know, working capital. So it feels like we're in this really interesting kind of spot at the moment, this this very real inflection point. And, you know, I I guess I don't have anything to wrap all that up in a pretty bow other than just to say it's very interesting to be in the middle of, and it's gonna be very interesting to watch and see kinda where things are at in 2028, 2030,

Carrie Richards - 00:19:56
etcetera. I mean, something that we did right before the pandemic and during is the pandemic was terrible, but it had these, like it had these tiny little bright spots. I don't know if you remember, but they shut all the schools down, but then they decided immediately they were gonna continue to feed everybody, which I thought was amazing. And so we were able to pivot pretty quickly. We had already been discussing trying to get our product into the schools, our trim products. Yeah. And so we were able to get into two districts in 2020, because they needed it. They needed the product, Cisco and all the big distributors are having issues getting stuff imported.

Carrie Richards - 00:20:34
And so with Creme Co, we built this really amazing program called beef to institution and with Tomcat ranch and calf. And like, it literally took like 12 different entities, like half of them, nonprofits, the rest of us, all industry people to create this really cool beef to institution program. And so in 2020, we were in two school districts, and then last year, we were in 41 school districts.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:21:09
Wow.

Carrie Richards - 00:21:09
So it's been a really cool yeah. It's been a really cool program, to get all of our trim bay basically allocated immediately to this avenue that is like it it makes you feel good because you're feeding the kiddos, and it's also, like, going to such a good cause. That's been a really bright spot from the pandemic that, we've really tapped into that. We're now selling in some of the UC schools as well through our distributor, Cream Co. And it's been that that part's been really exciting, but I just I worry, like you said, with these unsure times, we are getting diluted by by imports all the time. And and I get it, and I it's like you said, at some point, it just becomes meh.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:22:04
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:22:04
But there's so many domestic regenerative producers in California across the state, and there's so many large buyers of products, you know, like the Applegate's or the General Mills that could buy our product because there's so little of it and blend it into their cheaper product. But that I that doesn't seem to be happening. And it's it the like you said about the burnout, it's like the the motivation and the the snowball was, like, starting to roll down the hill for regenerative. And now I feel like it's a little bit foggy of, like, where it's gonna go. But if you ask if I ask anyone that buys from us, they're like, we buy from you because you are taking care of the land. We love the way you're raising your animals. And I get a lot of ex vegans that are customers that are like they're like, if I'm gonna buy from anyone, I'm gonna buy from you.

Carrie Richards - 00:22:55
It's it's hard because we live in this space where we are the example of what people want.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:23:11
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:23:11
But we're in a weird time where, like, people really tight on cash and people are really nervous about the future of the world. And but at the same time, everyone's health is terrible. So that's why the information, I'm like, we kinda need this information to help people make a an educated decision at the store. Yeah. So that's just that's those are kind of the challenges we have at the moment is

Anthony Corsaro - 00:23:38
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:23:38
How do we educate people, also raise the animals, also sell it, also distribute it, also work with our partners, like, you know, like most of us.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:23:49
Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot I wanna pull pull from what you just shared. So let me let me make a couple maybe observations, and then we'll I'll I'll get to a question eventually. One thing you said really quickly that I just want the audience to pick up on is part of that, beefed institution is the UC, the University of California, which what is there? 12 or 13 campuses in

Carrie Richards - 00:24:09
Yeah. UCSU system? We sell into UC Davis hospitals as well as UC Davis schools. And then a couple of the other UCS as well as Berkeley and Stanford.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:24:20
Yeah. But the, the UC system has to be procuring what a billion dollars plus in food,

Carrie Richards - 00:24:27
at least

Anthony Corsaro - 00:24:28
you would think

Carrie Richards - 00:24:29
this big compared to their entire amount.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:24:32
Yeah. But just it's a it's a huge opportunity, I think, for the procuring of of good food, especially in a state like California where you have so much domestic or local production that, like, it really can serve as a backbone there. So I just I wanna put a pin in that, and I wanna use it to illustrate and maybe ask you a question, Carrie, about we've had a lot of folks, on the show where they are definitely not 90% wholesale, 10% d to c. You know? Mhmm. Especially coming off of COVID, they really moved the business to maybe a fifty fifty or some sort of heightened percentage d to c versus wholesale.

Carrie Richards - 00:25:03
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:25:03
To me, my assumed perspective there based on the little that you've shared and and the little that I know about your business that I want you to elaborate on is a few things drive that for y'all. Right? You have really good institutional opportunities that you've kinda mentioned, right, with some of the, beefed institution and the the farm to school programs. You have a affluent, you know, urban market near you that is an outlet for you in the Bay Area. Right? You have a very competent and good wholesaler in CreamCo that can probably deliver throughput and margin that makes sense, where a lot of the the ranchers and the brands we talk to, they don't have that in their geography. Right. So am I right on that in general? And could you just elaborate maybe on on that takeaway?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:25:41
Because I think it's just an important kind of business takeaway that maybe is a little contrarian to some of the people that we've we've talked to, but it works for you all. So I'd love to know.

Carrie Richards - 00:25:54
You're correct you're very correct in, the the anchor, which was the school system in the UCs. They got rid of all of our trim and our, less expensive cuts for us, which is the bulk of the animal. So that was, like, a real anchor for for growing that wholesale customer. CreamCo has been a partner of ours for years, and so they knew our product. They knew our customers. That transition was very easy. And like you said, in the Bay Area, there is a little bit more of affluence.

Carrie Richards - 00:26:19
Another anchor account that we have right now is the Sprouts Market. So a lot of our a lot of our middle cuts are going there. And then, like I said, we we had to condense everything down in 2022, and kind of start over because we we got rid of our employee that was doing our d two c. And so we found a partner in the middle of of The US, delivered cold, and they are gonna they are doing everything for us. And so we're regrowing that d two c, and we want it to be more of our production, and it's growing every month. But, yeah, we are we are a little bit of an anomaly.

Carrie Richards - 00:27:04
Like, I know you talked to Will and Jenny, and, they they have a lot more online d two c business, and it's it's wonderful. It's it's high calorie, especially in California, which is why we moved it we moved it to Texas because because of math. Yeah. The math in California, it just didn't pencil. So, so, yeah, that's you're right. We had a lot of anchors that could move us in this direction of more wholesale.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:27:40
Yeah. And that's, I think, like, the I think part of the reason why we wanted to create this platform was we don't need anyone to put an Excel spreadsheet up on the screen. But in a lot of the conversations about regenerative, we don't talk enough about how, like, it's re it really comes down to, can you make the margin and the gross profit dollars to make this thing work? And we didn't see a lot of examples of that happening in the space that didn't include people operating some sort of a brand. Now a brand can be majority wholesale versus direct consumer like what you all are doing. It's still a brand. Right?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:28:08
Or it can be the opposite or it can be some other sort of something. But, ultimately, you know, a brand in my opinion is, are people buying it from you specifically because they know about x y z about you, the product, etcetera. And it's the end of the day. It's can you make the margin and the gross profit dollars work in whatever context you're operating in? You talked about the domestic versus the international piece. This has been coming up, I think a lot.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:28:36
I think maybe the last handful, especially of, of grass fed beef, regenerative beef folks that we've had on. It seems like a tough thing for us to figure out as a group. You know, we've talked about, I think, some of the the reasons why detention exists. We've talked about kind of why the cost of production is significantly lower, some of the market dynamics. So I don't know if I have the perfect prompt or question for you, Carrie, but I'd love to just hear you maybe elaborate on some of the things that you're thinking about there, your take on it, or things that you'd like to have the community think about. You know? What what's top of mind for you on that topic?

Carrie Richards - 00:29:19
Yeah. I mean, we've worked with we've worked with big brands before that buy most of their product out of the country, and then they bring us in as a, like, look what we're doing. And the goal

Anthony Corsaro - 00:29:31
You you coined it as the dog and pony show when I saw you at Expo West, which I think you said it's happened to the tune of, what, 12 times? Yep. Which is

Carrie Richards - 00:29:40
You can you can Google my name, and I'm usually attached to some brand we don't sell to anymore. Yeah. Which is infuriating, but it's also, like, that's how this industry works. So Mhmm. I I think us smaller producers, when that happens, we need to have a more robust contract. We need to have a more robust forward thinking plan. And when you're young and you're hungry and you're growing a brand and you're like, someone's gonna buy 19,000 pounds of our trim every month. Yes.

Carrie Richards - 00:30:04
Like

Anthony Corsaro - 00:30:16
I'll

Carrie Richards - 00:30:16
figure it out. Like, let me do the dog and pony show, but in the long run, it's not good for us. Like we need to stand up to these brands and stand up and be like, okay, yes, you can use my face because you are doing the right thing from, you know, buying from us. But that ends when you stop by or that ends on this date. And let's talk about the goal of introducing more domestic product into your supply chain. And if that doesn't, if that's not the avenue you want to go down, just be upfront, just be upfront that like, you're gonna pay us a ridiculous amount for this product, for this period of time, and you're gonna use me as marketing and, like and then it ends. Yeah. It's not just this ongoing, like, forever marketing campaign that that doesn't really that's fake news, basically.

Carrie Richards - 00:31:04
So, that's a tough situation that I get caught into a lot, but the intention is there. Like we've worked with really large brands that wanna, they wanna buy from us. They throw me on their podcast, and they buy 3,000 pounds of liver, and then they never talk to us again.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:31:30
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:31:31
Like, I get that they I get that they wanna do the right thing, but we live in a land now where it's shareholders and doing the right thing. Shareholders usually win.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:31:45
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:31:45
And it's, it's infuriating for us that are doing the right thing, which is why a lot of us go to the direct to consumer route because we're like, screw these big accounts. They are not they don't have our best intention. I will say, though, like, our current partners and our current customers are actually being really wonderful. But it's, it's not those giant accounts that we used to work with in the past. As far as imports go, you know, these big brands have the power to buy from us and blend us in and help us grow, but there's just a lot of fear in the marketplace, I think.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:32:29
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:32:29
And I you know, I don't have a solution for that, but I'll tell you what my fear is. My fear is right now, animals in in The US are worth more than they've ever been.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:32:38
Right.

Carrie Richards - 00:32:39
And nobody's growing their herds. A lot of old timers are cashing out, or they're just not keeping replacements. And I worry that the the market's gonna get so high that it's gonna crash. Mhmm. And then these big feedlot companies are gonna scoop everybody up, and then everybody's gonna be owned by the same company. And if all you buy is Costco beef, all you end up with is with is Costco beef.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:33:05
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:33:06
And so I that's that's my fear. I hope that doesn't happen. The the cattle market usually has these ten year cycles. And right now, it's just it's so high that everyone is excited and worried at the exact same time. And it's it's just like a weird it's a weird place to be. And it's a weird to own property and have animals and then own a meat company. And

Anthony Corsaro - 00:33:32
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:33:32
It, like, one side is doing great, and the other side is, like, barely hanging on because it's like, how do we compete in this market? So, anyway, I I don't have a solution, but, like, those are the things that I think about all the time is, like, these big brands have the opportunity to buy from us. Yeah. It's a teeny tiny amount of the 800,000 pounds they buy every month, but it helps us so much. It helps the whole industry of regenerative so much. But, yeah, it's it's a conundrum that we're all thinking about all the time. And I'm constantly getting these reports, and I'm like, oh my god. Is it gonna crash?

Carrie Richards - 00:34:05
Is it gonna stay high? Like, it's Yeah. It's bananas right now.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:34:20
Yeah. I I really appreciate you sharing all that, and I appreciate the, like, the ask isn't even, hey, buy all of your product from us. It's like buy trim that you mix in with other trim so that it's not even as much of a, you know, margin compression. But I get I get the brand side of it too. Like, if you can get away with it and you can just bank that margin and you can tell your boss or, you know, the CFO is gonna see that it's 2%, 4%, whatever percent higher. It's like it's tough to it's tough to say no to that, especially when, you know, other than being domestic, it seems like a lot of that supply has the same attributes or claims or certifications at this point. Mhmm. So That drives it. Right. Right.

Carrie Richards - 00:35:06
So That's it. That's Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:35:09
That's the other challenging thing. I mean, a no brainer thing that is, like, a total duh to me is the country of origin labeling, which I feel like most of the people that listen to the show know that that's kind of asinine at this point and just needs to be, an easy switch to, like, look. If it's if it's imported, it needs to say it's imported. I don't care if it's processed here. Like, it's not product of The USA. I think that could be helpful. Mhmm.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:35:30
But, you know, I I have an idea that is super half baked and not based on the level of expertise that you have for sure. But is there an opportunity for some sort of a middle middleman broker aggregator or like cooperative of processors to get involved here? Because it seems like the challenge there would be doing that extra work and then paying that, that third party, like with margin that probably doesn't exist potentially, But it does feel like that person could maybe aggregate supply to make some of the math work a little bit better for some of those bigger off takers. Am I totally off base there? I mean

Carrie Richards - 00:36:12
There are few companies doing that.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:36:14
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:36:15
And we've worked with them and not worked with them. It's, it's tough because the logistics for the little guys for us are are they're just wonky. Like, I have my place in Oregon House, like, you know, friends up in Tamales Bay. Like, our state is giant. And so, like, to aggregate all these animals, and that's what I do for our business, I aggregate for our producer group. You'd have to kind of work with an aggregator of aggregators to, like, get that supply chain, but a lot of people do that. A lot of people do this, like, brokering deal where they never even touched the product, but they're like, I can get it over here. I can get it over there, and I can ship it to you.

Carrie Richards - 00:36:57
But the main issue is, like, how do we grow how do we grow an understanding of regenerative? And, like, I feel like Will and Jenny have done a really good job. You've done a really good job. Like, there are these leaders in the industry of marketing what we do, that Right. We need to lean on a little bit more and not worry so much about, like, I'm promoting White Oak. Like, White Oak's amazing. I wanna promote them all day.

Carrie Richards - 00:37:17
And the more people buy from them, the more they're interested in what I'm doing. So marketing is a big one. It it investment. I know it's like it's tricky. Like, investment in ag is tricky, especially in ag that isn't like the way you learn it in school, add glyphosate, add nutrients, sell lots of bigger, stronger, faster products with no nutrients. It's like, that's the program and people get nervous about, you know, trying to invest in something new, but like our nation's really unhealthy and like single ingredient food is what's going to help a lot of us get healthy.

Carrie Richards - 00:37:52
I actually have been on, like, a crazy health journey since the pandemic. We I tell this I told this story in a different podcast, but we did that amazing school's program. So in 2021, we had, like, this big event at the ranch, and we were talking about the school's program. And there was this big article, and I was, like, in the photo with everybody where I was like, yay. And I looked at the photo and I was like, like, that's me? Like, I hadn't been I hadn't been practicing what I preach. Right?

Carrie Richards - 00:38:33
Like, single source ingredients, eat healthy, eat a lot of protein, work out. And so I was like, oh my god. Like, I'm sitting here telling everybody to eat healthy and, like, regenerative is better, and and I'm letting my health go. And so it's it's been like a game changer since then to really, like, when I go to the store, if I find regenerative product, I just buy it. And that's just who I am and that's just what I'm doing and what I've chosen to do. Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:39:08
But I am a lot healthier than I was, like, five years ago, and I'm paying attention to what I eat. People get overwhelmed. People just get overwhelmed with all the choices and nutrient density is such a big deal. But it's hard, like the mark how do you market that? How do you market, like, healthier? Everyone thinks healthier. It's not gonna taste good. It always tastes better. Like, nutrient dense food tastes so much better.

Carrie Richards - 00:39:35
This is such a ramp.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:39:47
No. I mean, it's all stuff that I think is top of mind. And especially with the work that we're doing with the coalition and the trade association, which is like, we're trying to find some sort of

Carrie Richards - 00:39:58
Mhmm.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:39:58
Efficient, unified, harmonized, coherent narrative, bullet points, marketing tactics that Mhmm. You know, we can talk about as a as a large group. And it's it's not an easy thing to solve for. And Oh. It's not even the easiest thing to solve for just by commodity. And, you know, if anyone's done a good job, I feel like it is the grass fed, grass finished beef folks and kind of figuring out what has resonance there. My my questions around that success are, like, how much of that is attributed to carnivore and paleo influencers, which sometimes do bend the line between, I think, you know,

Carrie Richards - 00:40:45
I

Anthony Corsaro - 00:40:45
don't wanna say stretching the truth, but using some advantageous kind of marketing or bullet points. But, like, this stuff has real positive effect. And I think, overall, like, it has been good getting some of that truth back into the to the world for sure.

Carrie Richards - 00:41:00
Yeah. I

Anthony Corsaro - 00:41:00
mean, I see you at Expo West in March, and a couple weeks before, I'm on Instagram, and there's CarnivoreMD, Paul Saladino holding a brick of Yeah. Ground beef from y'all at Sprouts. And I'm like, oh my god. This is amazing. Like, I can't wait to talk to Carrie about that.

Carrie Richards - 00:41:13
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:41:14
And, you know, what what exactly did that do for y'all? We probably don't know, but I'm sure it had some sort of net positive effect on, especially, your your Sprouts business.

Carrie Richards - 00:41:23
Yes. But it it's I feel like it helped with the Sprouts program overall because Yeah. We are, again, a little one little brand in their giant repertoire of brands. And he picked our product up and he has, like, millions of followers. And he showed our logo and he was like, get it at Sprouts. And it was like Yeah. Such an amazing moment that we're like, oh my god. Somebody noticed us. So that I believe was a big game changer for just kind of solidifying our spot in Sprouts.

Carrie Richards - 00:41:50
Because when you get into a grocery chain, a lot of the time, they're like, you need to come do demos. You need shelf stock because you need to pay for this placement. And Sprouts has a different way of working with people. And it's been, it's been a really good relationship. And, and him picking up our product and showing it to ever to the world was like, I think really helped with solidifying our place in that grocery store.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:42:24
Yeah. Y'all have some cuts in the meat case at Sprouts too on top of some of the CPG products or or no?

Carrie Richards - 00:42:31
They're all CPG, and they're on the frozen grab and go, like, in the center of the store. It's New York, rib eye, and top sirloin, and then our our ground beef packs. Hopefully, we can get our, country blend in there, which is the liver and heart blend as well. But those are the four that we are carrying right now, and we just expanded into, Arizona.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:42:57
So California, Arizona, Nevada, that

Carrie Richards - 00:43:00
that the three right now.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:43:01
Okay.

Carrie Richards - 00:43:02
Yeah. It's nice because they also don't go, we want you on the whole West Coast, and we're like, Right. But, you know, a good problem, but sometimes it's nice to grow, like, you know, one state at a time, and we can actually, like, handle the processing.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:43:18
Yeah. I mean, those are three of the most important states for Sprout. So I I think it's great, if it's if it's working for y'all. So that's that's amazing. Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:43:25
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:43:26
Usually, Carrie, we talk about this a little earlier in the show, but one question I did have just on the agronomic side is what is unique about y'all's context that maybe you'd like to talk about or people should understand about how it affects the way y'all might raise the animals in and you said Oregon House, like, the state is the name. Oregon House, California.

Carrie Richards - 00:43:44
Yes. It's in California.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:43:46
It's called

Carrie Richards - 00:43:46
Oregon House, California. It's teeny day. So our our property is not irrigated. So we run our animals here from December to June, and then they go up north to an irrigated pasture in Modoc County. Okay. So something unique that our business does is we try to utilize all the grass at prime time in all of California. As we know, California is a huge state. Yeah. So, up north, the grass is prime time starting in about June, ending in about, November.

Carrie Richards - 00:44:15
And then we have a lease with a white buffalo land trust down in Yeah. Southern California. Their grass comes on a little bit earlier than ours here at the ranch. So we're really trying to utilize the prime grazing and finishing time in California all over the state so that we have a consistent product. And then in the times where grass isn't growing, we're supplementing with a little bit of hay, either to keep the animals fat or to continue to grow them so that when they hit the prime time grass, they finish right on that grass. So I really my my job is the supply chain of the beef of of Richards Regenerative.

Carrie Richards - 00:44:56
So we buy from our cousin's property, my business partner, Spencer Smith, as well as, we have Belize in Southern California. So we're really trying to utilize all the grass when it's, like, the perfect finishing grass.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:45:20
Yeah. And you're you're harvesting and processing the entire year round, so you're also managing kind of animal life cycle and weight to to balance that as best you can too?

Carrie Richards - 00:45:30
Yeah. So our cousin grows his own hay, so he's able to get those animals fat at the end of the year and then keep them fat on his Yeah. Homegrown hay, which has been a game changer for us because the December well, like, the January to May April, May time in California is hard because the grass is beautiful and bright green, but it's super short, and it's not quite ready for finishing. Yeah. So it needs to be more carbacious. So he's able to supplement with, hay as well as up here. We'll we'll get hay brought to our ranch. And in those time frames, if we need to send animals, we'll supplement.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:46:09
Yeah. Sounds like similar to, what Lauren at Simple Creek kind of articulated as how they're they're rotating animals and trying to maximize, like, forage quality and density. I you know, it raises, like, an interesting conversation on another touch point that you and I have had is, like, we we are all trying to flip a cultural narrative of this beef being better than what is the air quote current gold standard, which is a unhealthy animal that's marbled with grain very quickly and has less nutritional, you know, benefit for you. But the entire, especially American consumers, train that that's actually better when it's not. So I just wonder, like, how do you think about, you know, how you all are trying to create value? You mentioned the Adatius piece, and you think there's a a big unlock with nutrient density data. But talk to me more about how you think about that as kind of a a marketer, in building this.

Carrie Richards - 00:47:05
Yeah. So we did a study with Adatius last year, and the nutrient density alliance. And they basically took forage samples, and then they took our beef samples down at White Buffalo, actually.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:47:18
Oh, no.

Carrie Richards - 00:47:19
And that was the first time we saw that our beef at the omega three to six ratio was so much more narrow, in favor of the threes

Anthony Corsaro - 00:47:29
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:47:29
Than commodity beef. And it was, like, off the charts, and we were like, oh, is this an anomaly? Like, is this just a random thing? And as we talked more with the day shifts, they're like, no. This is what we've consistently seen. Yeah. Because the animal you're harvesting is more metabolically healthy, and the animal in the feedlot is basically metabolically unhealthy, hence the range of sixes to threes. And so it's it's hard because you have, you know, where's the beef telling you that that big, huge marbled steak is the, is the gold standard.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:48:07
Right.

Carrie Richards - 00:48:09
But that's a really, really young animal that is obese. And so I don't know how to market against that because the machine is so big, but I can tell you that I feel great when I eat our product. And when I eat one of those steaks, I feel like hell. So that is the, measurement, what an end of one. So, that that is my measurement, but like, it's tough. It's tough to go against the grain in any industry, and this one is no different. But adacious, there's some bright, some shining light there with that data.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:48:51
Yeah. And, I mean, we're super bullish on what they're doing, and I think it's gonna be a huge unlock. I think it's still relatively unclear to me exactly how it becomes super effective marketing material from the data. I think they're making great progress there. And Eric, articulated some things really well, and we have some good examples of that. But in beef, specifically, it's even a different conversation based on whether you're talking about trim or cuts and depending on the sales channel you're talking about. Right? Because I'm at the grocery store. I'm looking to buy a brick pack of beef.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:49:20
There's not gonna be that much differentiation between the most regenerative and the most conventional other than maybe color. Right?

Carrie Richards - 00:49:30
Mhmm.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:49:30
Which, you know, that's probably a good indicator, but how much can you really differentiate that? I don't I don't know. Whereas the cuts, you know, the color's probably gonna look significantly different. The the marbling is gonna be a lot wider versus, like, more yellow. Right. Yeah. The meat's probably gonna appear a little bit leaner. So it's even interesting to think about that level of nuance of, are you gonna have to tell a different story?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:49:46
Are you gonna have to use different materials based on the actual skew when we're talking about beef? And, you know, to me, it's like it seems like a lot of the folks that are more focused on d to c, it's kind of a captive audience. You're not getting that visual comparison in the store, so you're not you're not doing that battle. It's more, hey. I'm trying to get you to buy something more than just a rib eye a rib eye and a fillet every single time, and then I need to kinda tell you maybe how to prepare it that's different than you're used to or Mhmm. Sell you some accompanying product that makes it easier to eat more diversity of my offerings so that I can manage, you know, carcass utilization and and margin.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:50:23
So I don't know. I just I I empathize with the business challenge of trying to think through all that and say, golly, where do you where do you even start? You know?

Carrie Richards - 00:50:40
Yeah. At least on, like, Instagram, you have, like, thirty seconds. In the store, you have, like, ten.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:50:47
Yeah. Because

Carrie Richards - 00:50:47
someone's basically looking at the label. They're looking for the things they wanna see. Like, is it organic? Is it grass fed? Or they're looking at price. They're looking at, like, five different things that they care about, and then they pick it up, throw it in the basket. I mean, the I mean, that's why we put regenerative in our name. We were like, at least we can throw this word in there, and they can flip it over. They can look it up. They can do whatever they want. But at least if they've heard the word before, they'll look at it and give it a second look, and they'll go, I heard that word on that podcast that one time.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:51:20
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:51:21
And we did a very, very different label this time. It is way softer. It is way more like organic. Yeah. We didn't want it to be the green and brown label that everyone has, which we totally had before, to be fair.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:51:37
Yeah. Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 00:51:38
We tried to we we tried to different differentiate ourselves in the case as much as we could so people can look at it and, like, make a decision. It's tough.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:51:50
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's there's, like, a lot of ways to win, but most of them are unknown until you try. So that's the challenge. Right. Right? It's like it's, it's interesting. Mhmm. You mentioned earlier the Harvest Path software system that you have developed, and I've talked to your brother, Tom, about it before. Mhmm. And super cool. Just, like, can you take us through the origin of that? Why that's important? What it does? Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:52:09
Why why you all wanted to, like, build it out and actually go commercialize it elsewhere? Like, talk to us about Harvest Path.

Carrie Richards - 00:52:24
Yeah. So it like like I said earlier, it started with arguing over how many cows we had. And so my brother, he worked at Salesforce for twenty five years, and he's done a lot of industry transitions of, like, getting an entire industry to put their information into a database to be more efficient. So he was like, this is right up my alley. So the the product grew as we grew. So at first, it was just animals in and then tracing, like, okay, this baby goes with this mom, and then we're gonna sell these animals. This is how much money we made. And then it turned into, okay, we're gonna cut the animal up. Okay. Now we're gonna sell this animal to this family.

Carrie Richards - 00:52:57
And so then we have to add products. Then we had to add inventory. And then as we got bigger, yields became like the big deal. And we're like, oh no, we have to do lots of animals. So like we attach lots of animals to this harvest. This harvest goes to YVB.

Carrie Richards - 00:53:11
They give us a sheet back. We enter in all that data. So it, it evolved as our business evolved. And then as we got to like, as we got to there, which was basically when we decided to shrink the business and go full distributor model, we we have the bandwidth to go, okay. Can we turn this into a product for other people? Yeah. And so we launched it last year. It's called the Harvest Path AI, but it's agricultural intelligence.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:53:53
We will

Carrie Richards - 00:53:54
be using AI for in the future, but, that is what the AI stands for, so don't be scared.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:54:00
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:54:01
But basically, you can trip track your animals through the app called, Animal Path, the pro and then it transitions to the processing called processing path, production path. Sorry. And then there's protein path and that's sales. And so within the program, there's three apps. The reason why we developed that way because that's how the industry works. You have the animals, you have the processing, you have the sales. And a lot of people own three different companies or two different companies, and we needed a way to snap the chalk line. Line.

Carrie Richards - 00:54:25
So, like, when the branch sells to the meat company and the meat company sells to a customer. And so, we integrated with, QuickBooks, and we developed it. It's fully secure. We have, like, a few customers right now that are our beta customers, but we're selling it online. And it's it's been a huge learning experience running a software company after running a Yeah. Yeah. After running a ranch ranch and after running a Yeah. Everything done.

Carrie Richards - 00:54:50
The other companies that

Anthony Corsaro - 00:55:01
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:55:02
We thought were just super simple to run. But, it's to empower the small to midsize rancher. And, honestly, it's robust enough to handle a 500 head a day production plan. Like, we that's the idea is to give some traceability back to the small guy, but also be able to offer it to the the bigger production houses as well.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:55:26
Yeah. We'll we'll definitely put the link in the show notes. Clarifying question of the the three apps or paths, it's designed to where if you're a customer, you could use one, you could use two, or you could use three, basically, depending on your needs and the, you know, amount of operating companies or complexity in your supply chain. Yeah?

Carrie Richards - 00:55:45
Correct. Yeah. If you wanna just do it to run your animals on your ranch, you can do that. If you run animals on your ranch but you sell to families, you can use, two of the paths to make sure you can track all your sales. And if you wanna do the whole gamut, you can run all three.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:56:03
Yeah. And it it's built on top of Salesforce. So you basically would be a Salesforce customer, and this is like a specialized version or some sort of

Carrie Richards - 00:56:10
action. Customer of ours of HarvestPath, but it's Okay. It's built on their platform. So that's why it comes with all the security and all of the robustness of their giant system. And that's why it could grow Like, if you were a larger company, it can handle that data. It's not gonna crash on you.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:56:29
Nice. Yeah. Dumb non rancher question. For the actual, like, on farm animal tracking, are we branding cattle? Are we using ear tags? Are we using chips? Like, I'm just super like, what's the what's the mechanism for tracking the actual animals on the farm?

Carrie Richards - 00:56:46
Yeah. So we we use brands and we use ear tags. We don't use EID yet, but we have the system set up for that. So if you if you are an EID user, then you can.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:56:58
EID is like a digital enhanced earphone.

Carrie Richards - 00:57:01
Electric electronic, and it comes with a little wand. And, basically, like, either the cattle run through the chute and it reads it, or you have a wand and then you can program stuff like their weight, their current weight, what shots they've gotten. We do it all manually, but what we did in the system is we did it so you can upload animals really quickly. So you do a starting tag and ending tag. You put in all the vaccinations and everything, and you just add all those animals really quickly. And if there's one offs, like, oh, this one had to get treated for this or this animal spotted and the rest of them are black, you can just edit those animals opposed to, like, entering one animal at a time, which nobody wants to do Yeah. Or has time to do.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:57:46
The the third path, like, basically, which is the commercial path, which is your managing inventory and sales, that seems straightforward to me. The the second path, I think, is the one I have additional questions on other than the It's the most complex part.

Carrie Richards - 00:57:59
For sure.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:58:00
Is is that, Carrie, like, an actually big ask of the processor from, like, a data management input perspective? Or, excuse me, Is all of that mostly kind of already happening now happening now and the data's just not being captured? Like, I'm just trying to understand the

Carrie Richards - 00:58:15
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:58:16
Is this a real burden on the processor? Is it actually, like, a great tool? Talk talk me through maybe implementation on on that path.

Carrie Richards - 00:58:22
So the the way that it's built now is for a it's specifically for an operation like ours, where we own animals. We send them to a production, step, and then we sell. Yep. We don't own a harv we don't own a slaughterhouse. Right. So it's it's very robust for companies like ours. As far as it's built to be able to handle a slaughterhouse production, but the barcode scanning and stuff is like phase two, And so that will come eventually.

Carrie Richards - 00:58:42
But right now it kind of sits in the front end and in the back end, and then whatever information comes out of the processing plant, like with YVB, we take their spreadsheets and we just upload them. Instead of like, before it was, like, entering each carcass weight

Anthony Corsaro - 00:59:11
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 00:59:11
One at a time. Now it just uploads it. It creates inventory. You can sell it. You can then do a further fabrication, which is what we call processing. So taking boxed beef and turning it in the steaks. We can track all of that, all the yields, all the costs, what warehouse it's in, the transportation. So it's it's built very robustly for a business like ours who doesn't own a slaughterhouse, but we are building it so that slaughterhouses and production houses can use it.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:59:43
Yeah. So right now, it's more that it integrates with a processor versus the processor is the ideal customer. Right now, the ideal customer is kind of a rancher that's also potentially an operator of some sort of commercial side meat business.

Carrie Richards - 00:59:56
Or an owner of a meat company that doesn't even own animals, and they're just buying them and they're throw throwing a label on it, and they're managing the production and yield and sales. It's, it's really robust for those types of companies. But the idea is to be able to handle the whole system. Cool. I have a question for you.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:00:17
Yeah. Go ahead.

Carrie Richards - 01:00:20
Okay. You've been doing this a while. Sounds like you were, evangelized on regenerative in, like, 2019 or 2020?

Anthony Corsaro - 01:00:28
Yes. Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 01:00:29
During COVID. You see the regenerative movement going? And what are the bright spots? What bright spots? Because I know all the dark spots.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:00:40
Yeah. It's a good question. I appreciate you you asking and flipping the script on me. I would say, like, I wanna have a upfront disclaimer of I feel very in the midst of some of those sticky challenges right now. So my my lens is is maybe a a little, tainted at the moment. I still remain super hopeful and optimistic, over the long term because, like, ultimately, the truth is on our side. Like, Joe at Serenity Kids said this in his podcast interview, and it's just like, this is the right thing that has the most co benefit for everyone involved, period.

Carrie Richards - 01:01:22
Right.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:01:22
So, you know, that's not gonna change. And it's basically on us dumb humans to, like, figure out the systems that bring that to life in a way that, you know, is better than than the current system. But I just think, like, everything's cyclical, and it feels like we're in a really big, transformative period and period of transition just in general in the world in just about every facet. Mhmm. And I think when that happens, like, the things that are being put to rest or dying fight really, really hard to stay alive. And

Carrie Richards - 01:01:56
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:01:56
It feels like we're in that last fight or in one of the last fights, and it's gonna just be kind of a slog. And I think my earlier comments around how there is some really intense positive things going on mixed with some really intense negative things going on is, like, a great indicator of the fact that we are in one of those moments. Mhmm. Because, you know, I'm not a a historian by any means, but my diagnosis would be that's probably pretty aligned with some similar stuff that we know has happened or or think has happened based on the information that we have. You know, but ultimately, you know, what does all that mean? I don't know. But what brings me back to the work is ultimately the truth is on our side.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:02:31
The that this is the right solution, and we we have to make it work from a human health mom buying food for herself and her kids. That is that that's gotta be the focus. And I I think, you know, that is lost in a lot of the farmer transition conversations sometimes, which, you know, helping the farmer transition, helping them have the education, helping them have a network, helping them have people in the area that they can talk to, helping them have the money to to transition. Yeah. It's all super important. But, ultimately, it has to be married to some market mechanism that rewards them still for the widget that they are outputting that they are growing, whether that's beef, coffee, bananas, wheat, whatever.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:03:16
And so that's a super self serving comment because, like, that's the piece that we are working on, that I am working on, and Mhmm. I have identified that gap. It's not a silver bullet. It's a piece of an entire system that needs to continue to be built and worked on. So, yeah, my turn to ramble. Don't know if that was coherent whatsoever, but that would be my my top thoughts, I guess, at the moment.

Carrie Richards - 01:03:51
No. I I understand. I understand the rambling, and I also understand challenges. It's a it's a, it's a tough time.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:03
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 01:04:03
And I feel like we need to, as a society, as a community, as whatever groups you are, we need to decide what's more important, the health of your body and your family and the community or the health

Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:18
Agree.

Carrie Richards - 01:04:19
Of your bank account. And it's like they those need to kinda even out instead of picking one to be more important than the other.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:30
Yeah. How can we reframe that trade off or eliminate it altogether, which is also a challenge. Yeah. And, you know, I I think, as people that are trying to be leaders or be of service in this space, the biggest challenge that I personally have is just many times you feel like the world isn't ready for what you're trying to, you know, help the world be ready for.

Carrie Richards - 01:04:56
Yeah.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:56
And so Yeah. You know, just maintaining a level of resiliency and faith through that is is probably the biggest challenge, I think, overall, which, there there's not, like, some easy button answer to do that, and it's different for everybody. Some people need a monthly Zoom call with a group of people in the industry. Some people need therapy. Some people just need a supportive spouse. Some people need, you know, monetary resources to just continue to fund things that maybe aren't super commercial commercializable short term. And so, you know, I I would love to see us all do something to support each other there more, but I don't have great coherence as to what maybe that could be that's, effective and efficient.

Carrie Richards - 01:05:38
Yeah. I always make a joke that we showed up to the regenerative party all excited and nobody was there. We're like, you are here. What's up guys? And we're like, hello, no one's here yet. And then like waves of people come in and you're like, welcome. And then they kind of go away And then they come in, like, it's it's kind of like an ever flowing ongoing party that, like, when people arrive, we embrace them and then they flow out and then new people come in. Man, it's been a roller coaster, but, you know, I'm here for it because the health of our community and family is the most important.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:06:20
Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Feels like a good spot to end. So I don't know if we need the last question, but I'll tee you up forward if you have anything to add. Okay. How do we get ReGen Brands to have 50% market share by 2050?

Carrie Richards - 01:06:37
50%. Yeah. K. That's twenty

Anthony Corsaro - 01:06:41
five year.

Carrie Richards - 01:06:43
Twenty five year. More conversations like this. Like, what you're doing is podcasts are a a big deal, and these conversations are a big deal. Understanding that what we're do the data that we're tracking in our system, the data that Edacious is tracking, like you said, it's the truth. And hopefully, investments and banking and all the people that have all the money

Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:21
Mhmm.

Carrie Richards - 01:07:21
Will see that this is actually a better option and invest in these system changes because it's, it's a big lift.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:34
Yeah.

Carrie Richards - 01:07:35
I mean, we are set up for a feedlot system. We are not set up for a regenerative system. So ideally, the truth that comes out in the data that we're all tracking will pivot that money towards a better system.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:51
Yep. Amen. I love it. Carrie, this has been awesome. Thanks for the time. I really appreciate it.

Carrie Richards - 01:07:58
Of course.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:08:00
Yeah. We will, thank you. We will share a bunch of links in the show notes for everybody. But as we always do, I will share the Richards Regenerative website before we exit, which is just richardsregenerative.com. So everybody check out the brand. Check out Carrie. She's awesome as you can tell from this conversation. And just, Carrie, thanks for your work, and thanks for being here today.

Carrie Richards - 01:08:23
Yeah. Of course. Thank you so much for having me. This has been awesome.

Anthony Corsaro - 01:08:27
Yeah. Anytime. For transcripts, show notes, and more information on this episode, check out our website regen-brands.com. That is regen-brands.com. You can also check out our YouTube channel, ReGen Brands, for all of our episodes with both video and audio. The best way to support our work is to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to future episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, the ReGen Brands Weekly, and follow our ReGen Brands LinkedIn page to stay in the know of all the latest news, insights, and perspectives from the world of regenerative CPG. Thanks so much for tuning in to the ReGen Brands Podcast. We hope you learned something new in this episode, and it empowers you to use your voice, your time, your talent, and your dollars to help us build a better and more regenerative food system. Love you guys.