#59 - Edd Lees @ Wildfarmed

Episode Recap:

ReGen Brands Recap #59 - Leading The UK's Regenerative Wheat Revolution - (RECAP LINK)

Episode Transcript:

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

Kyle Krull - 00:00:15
Welcome to The ReGen Brands Podcast. This is a place for consumers, operators and investors to learn about the consumer brands, supporting regenerative agriculture and how they're changing the world. This is your host, Kyle, joined by my co-host ac who's going to take us into the episode.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:00:33
On this episode, we have Edd Lees who is one of the co-founders at Wildfarmed Wildfarmed is supporting regenerative agriculture with its lineup of regenerative wheat flours that are used in retailers, restaurants and bakeries across the United Kingdom and powered by a network of 80 regenerative farmers. In this episode, we learn how the brand was started when a famous DJ traded in his turntables for a tractor, how they've grown the business through a branded B to B to C strategy and their big plans for the first Wildfarmed CPG product launch in 2024. Edd is exactly what Wildfarmed aims to be across their entire business full of life. We were honored to have him be our first international guest and kick off our international series as we start the New Year Wildfarmed has built something truly amazing and it was super fun. To get a behind the scenes, look at all the critical pieces of their business with the most important one being human connection. Let's dive in. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the ReGen Brands Podcast.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:01:27
Very excitEdd today to have the first episode of our international series with Edd from Wildfarmed. So welcome Edd. Yeah.

Edd Lees - 00:01:49
Thank you for having me. Good to see you guys.

Kyle Krull - 00:01:51
We're super stoked to have you. I already feel out of my depth because I'm typically like the retail distribution guy and I know a decent amount about the US market and that's not gonna be pertinent to today's conversation at all. Um So it's gonna be a lot of curiosity,

Anthony Corsaro - 00:02:07
just bring your curious to learn.

Kyle Krull - 00:02:09
We're here to learn today. Um But, you know, give us like a quick lay of the land for those who are unfamiliar with Wildfarmed. And, you know, because most of our audience is us based is probably gonna be most of us. What sort of products do you all produce? Where can people find you today if they were in the UK or wherever your products are sold?

Edd Lees - 00:02:26
Yeah. Um We produce regenerative grown wheat, which is made into flour and a variety of other baked goods, pizza, pasta biscuits. And we work with uh over 400 different uh customers or uh collaborators in the UK. Uh And you would know you were uh consuming it because we've never done a single white label sale. So it's really more of a B to B to C model than just a pure B to B play.

Kyle Krull - 00:02:55
Super interesting. And we definitely want to dive into more of that and how you're communicating that story to the consumer, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. So we pump the brakes.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:03:06
Well, Kyle's reading my mind because I was, I was gonna tell everyone if this, if you don't usually go to the website of the, of the brand, uh, go this time because the Wildfarmed website is elite. It tells the story really, really well, it tells kind of what y'all are doing in, in an awesome fashion. So definitely a plug for that. But, you know, Edd, uh we know that your business partner went from a DJ to a farmer and that's how this thing got startEdd, but tell us that story and how you got involvEdd and, and how this whole thing came

Edd Lees - 00:03:34
to be, man. Yeah, I mean, actually one of them was a Grammy nominated DJ musician. Uh, the other one was, um, uh, a television show host. Uh, he, he was, he was on like prime time, uh UK TV. And, um, and I, and I worked in finance in, um, in a pretty well paid but boring job. And those guys are both enormous. Andy's 69. George is 65 and I'm like to claim I'm 6 ft. And so these are like these two kind of like famous massive guys that look like a little random finance dwarf in the background. But, um, but yeah, how it started was Andy was, um, Andy was, Andy was in a band called Groove Armada.

Edd Lees - 00:04:01
Um, they were touring the world about 15 years ago. He was coming back from a gig one day and he read an article about modern agriculture and all the problems that go with it. And at the end was this amazing bit of journalism that said, if you don't like the system don't depend on it. And that's been exactly. And that kick started. He took that pretty seriously.

Edd Lees - 00:04:27
Yeah, a, a series of actions that dragged a lot of people down a rabbit hole. And, um, his first response to that was to start growing vegetables for himself uh at home where he was living in Southwest France at the time. Um, and then, as he will tell it, the, uh the first time he saw the seed become a plant and the plant become food like his entire world changed. Um, he then, uh the vegetable patch became a polytunnel. The polytunnel then became uh a small stall at the local market in France. And then he took the appalling financial decision to sell his publishing rights for his music, which should have been his country and buy a farm in France, having never spent any time on a farm before.

Edd Lees - 00:05:17
And I'll tell you this, uh, the farm that the French will sell to a 6 ft nine English DJ is not the best farm in France. Yeah. Arguably, arguably the worst farm in France. It was, uh it was, I think it has less than half a percent organic matter. Um It was technically infertile, you could say. Uh and then having never driven a tractor, never operated, um a grain silo, having never uh set up a fencing before he, he embarked on a version of organic agriculture. Um And the results were predictable if depressing.

Edd Lees - 00:05:52
And uh and all he got back was a series of plants that we don't want, you can call weeds. Um, because he basically, his soil had been um uh his, his soil was in a situation where it was basically perfect that the fungal bacterial ratio was ideal for growing weeds and not for growing what he wanted to grow cash crops. Um He then embarked upon a number of years of trying to fight mechanical warfare rather than chemical warfare against nature. And as you guys will know and have heard from all sorts of people you've had on this podcast, uh Nature will win. Uh And nature was winning hard and um, and Andy was taking himself to the clo the, the, the brink of financial ruin. And he came across this book, uh written a very long time ago by a guy called Albert Howard.

Edd Lees - 00:06:45
We always say if you only ever read one book about agriculture. It could be this, but you've had John Kemp on this podcast. So I'm not gonna get into this stuff. And uh and uh and uh cos he, he's the new Albert Howard but the um but they um uh the, the long and short of it is in nature, there exists a diversity of plants and animals at all time. And when you replace that diversity with any sort of monobas system, you take a perfect solution and create a lot of problems. Um And so as a last roll of the dice, he then put his entire farm down to a diverse cover crop and bought a herd of cattle, having never had a cat or a dog before.

Edd Lees - 00:07:28
And um

Kyle Krull - 00:07:42
man who needs the me, you

Edd Lees - 00:07:44
know, goes straight in. Um And um and within a year, his soil was looking visibly different and um he then became obsessed with how can we, how can I grow crops in this soil while doing the least damage and continually improving it. And um and he's a deeply academic guy before. He was a DJ. He was a classical musician, a jazz musician. He went to uh Oxford University, got a top degree, like he's a very deeply academic guy. So he then became obsessed with who's got the best soil in the world. And the uh he took him to um to the Amish community and uh where he bought a bunch of equipment from these guys and he was at one point uh farming with horse drawn car and GPS, which we think may have been a will first.

Edd Lees - 00:08:18
And um

Kyle Krull - 00:08:34
I just need to pause real quick. The image of an English 6 ft nine DJ cruising up to an on this farm like yo, like let me, let me buy this ancient plow or whatever they're using. Like that's just like I need, I need somebody to create a series about this, this particular transaction. Yeah, exactly.

Edd Lees - 00:08:51
That, exactly that it, it, it was quite a humbling moment of my life as a, as a, as a, as a finance guy trying to, um negotiate in that situation as well, which I realized was, was, yeah, it was quite embarrassing, a humbling moment but we can move on from that. Um And um, and so he was doing that and eventually, like it, it all started to work but to your point, this 6 ft nine English farmer that the French farmers used to stop at the side of the road and, and look at him and laugh, you know, and it was like, and there's a, there's a theme throughout this story of like, you know, first they laugh at you, then they hate you and then they want to join you. And, uh, and I'm sure you guys can resonate with that a little bit. And, um, and we, um, so, so he was doing this, uh and it's very well documented elsewhere. All his exact farm uh trials and tribulations, but he figured it out is a long and short of it. How could I grow a cash crop in a healing soil? A continually healing soil? Ok. Bingo.

Edd Lees - 00:09:37
Then he went to sell the crop into the local grain dealer which is just an extension of global commodity markets and the numbers didn't add up. He just simply didn't add up. Hence why we're all here, right? And um this was his moment of like, I really am screwed now that I don't, you know what I figured all this beautiful thing out, but all of these things that, you know, we call externalities aren't paid for, they don't live on the spreadsheet. You guys know this. Um this was around the time I came in. Um George, our second partner has an equally brilliant story, but I can't tell it for too long and we'll spend the whole time telling the origin story.

Edd Lees - 00:10:16
George was a prime time TV, show host and thinking this doesn't, why is this not? I'm doing really well, but it doesn't feel great. And his father who's a, who's a actor over here, well known actor said, like game show host, it's not very serious in the general scheme of things. So, and then went off, George went off on a uh to find that he went off on what was meant to be a six month sabbatical and about three years into his six month sabbatical. He um he wasn't really getting anywhere and he thought, fuck it, I'll go to Ibiza and have a party and he bumped me there. And as I told you before, they're both very tall and there's this thing called the rule of a tall guy at a party and they all know each other and uh because they're ahead of everyone else and they, um, and they said, uh, and he was like expensive, the usual farming uh sorry party patter.

Edd Lees - 00:11:00
And Andy said, oh, I've just sold my publishing rights and I bought a farm. Ok. And so I've been following the story about George. George and I were good mates from, from way back. And when he came to this point where he couldn't sell it into the commodity market, I was like, this is because they have to be completely fungible items. I traded, um I didn't trade commodities but I traded equity derivatives and all sorts of different um securities for a very long time. Said, if you wanna, the items have to be fungible in markets, it's how markets work.

Edd Lees - 00:11:30
If you've added value, you have to travel up the value chain at this point. Andy was a little out of money and ideas and I said, so I said I helped him with George. We helped him set up a teeny tiny little bakery uh on his farm in an old farm building, we opened a tiny shop in town where he lived in this very small village. And in the second weekend that tiny shop was open, there was a queue for bread for the first time in this town since 1945 of mostly older people saying this is what bread used to taste like.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:12:12
Wow,

Kyle Krull - 00:12:13
amazing.

Edd Lees - 00:12:15
This was the oh shit moment. We were just, I'm just trying to help a good guy out. He was getting paid loads of money, did whatever I wanted. It was all good. And um and he um uh so we said, OK, let's do a version of the bakery in London or this whole like the farm to Table network in London like cos we know London better. It's a market. We knew more. But I guess what's relevant is in the same time, Andy was a bakery was up and running. We were selling to local schools and restaurants and kids would come to the farm and looking at the soil from one field. They used to do a thing and say if you, if you dig uh you know some soil from the neighbour's field and dig some soil from my field and see the world.

Edd Lees - 00:12:50
And if anyone can find a worm in the neighbor's field, they can go mad under the pan chocolat in the uh in the bakery and they never got damaged. It always was relevant to how do you tell this like farm to table like local community short supply chain stories in a city where, you know, a city like London or a city, you know, most of us are gonna live in cities if we don't already. But how, you know, how do we find a way around that? And so, you know, we talked about it for a long time and in 2019, we decided, let's figure a way to scale this. Uh And I got to say, props to our sort of fourth co-founder Adriana because it often takes a woman to get three men organized. And uh and she joined us in 2019 and we uh in mid late 2019.

Edd Lees - 00:13:28
And we um and uh and, and I, well, her and I made a deal after having had a drink on Saturday, if I'm perfectly honest saying, let's let's quit our jobs and make a proper business out of this. And she went in Monday morning and quit her job and I was like, whoa, anyway. Um but yeah, so then I, I just been made ceo of, of the, of the finance business. I've done like my 20 years of getting to the top and then three months in quit and then, and then 2020 we, we all know how that played out, but it was quite a good year for planning and building and thinking and being deliberate in what we were going to do. And there were four of us then and there are 45 of us now and we're working with 80 farms across the UK and a handful in France. Still everyone's growing wheat under uh our set of, I'm sure we'll get to it.

Edd Lees - 00:14:17
But our third party audited set of standards that um that we've grown up within our community. It wasn't just us telling people what to do. Um And we got fully traceable supply chain selling to, let's say 400 customers.

Kyle Krull - 00:14:41
Dude, that's incredibly

Anthony Corsaro - 00:14:42
believable man. Yeah,

Kyle Krull - 00:14:44
I've got just more questions that I want to ask. Anthony and I are fighting

Anthony Corsaro - 00:14:49
just what was the time, the rough year where Andy bought the farm? So from that to 2019 was how long?

Edd Lees - 00:14:56
Uh and so Andy would have bought it 2010, 2011 around. Then we started helping him around 2015, 2016. I think I got involved and then 2019, we, we kind of got started 2020. We got going properly.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:15:14
Yeah, and I'll, I'll let Kyle ask you a question here in one second. I'm just gonna tell a story that's on the side of the whole personality of this, this company and the people behind it is so evident and it's evident by the fact that I'm just walking outside of Expo West last year and Edd just tappEdd me in the, in the middle of Mexico. I never met the dude and he's just like, mate, what's going on? Love what you're doing like let's talk blah, blah. And so it's a, it's a full circle moment to finally get here. But uh but yeah, man, just, I'm so happy that you did that and I'm happy that we're here. So I had to, I had to share that real

Kyle Krull - 00:15:46
quick. Uh I gotta give Anthony shit. That was the worst British accent I've ever heard in my life. That, that recreation, that was horrible. Um But I've got, I've got three questions I wanna ask. Um I'm famous for my multiple part questions. Number one, Edd, like why was this stimulating enough for you this opportunity stimulating enough for you to leave the CEO position that you have workEdd so hard to achieve. That's 12. Why wheat of all the potential things you could be growing? Why wheat? And in part three, what does regenerative wheat look like on farm versus conventional wheat? Just to give our listeners like a nice kind of juxtaposition of like what those practices actually look like on the ground.

Edd Lees - 00:16:29
Yeah. Yeah. Do you mind if I start with the last one first? Because it kind of ties to what Anthony just said. Um It's

Kyle Krull - 00:16:35
you do you, you do whatever feels right, you know, this is your, this is your party. Yeah. So

Edd Lees - 00:16:40
the uh the organizing thought throughout Wildfarmed is that we do everything full of life like the fields are full of life. So everything we grow is at least there's a series of things in our um in our standards, but there's at least two crops in the same field at the same time, two different. So a wheat and a bean is typically one and one flowering product, which brings a lot of the uh biodiversity to it. So there's always like a, a catch crop and then we're getting the nitrogen from a bean as a, as a sort of level one example or pea or something that will flower and our fields are full of life. Our people are full of life. It's how we recruit. It's how we decide what products to list. It's how we decide how we show up every single time we're full of life. So that's our organizing thought. Um And that ties into when I was tackling him in that.

Edd Lees - 00:17:20
Um, we were we, um, and um, and uh, yeah, and why wheat? Ok. So, um, again, it wasn't like we sat with our stroking our cats and came up with this. It was, uh Andy took on the farm. It wasn't working. He wanted, uh when I told you the story, how he co he put his whole um farm down to cover crops. The first version he was doing was just sow in directly into them. So he needed really tall crops that would grow, that would grow above him.

Edd Lees - 00:17:49
And one of the things he came up with was that in that lawn mower, basically inter row mower to help mow in between them. But in, in in order to get the, the wheat sufficiently high. But if we needed very tall varieties and at that time, that took us down a road of like heritage wheats or heirloom wheats as you call them. Um and that kind of stuff. So that, so that was where we started. And then we developed a road, you know, the, the value add from wheat into um into bakery. And again, it's worth saying, but probably not worth diving into too much.

Edd Lees - 00:18:24
Now that, that wheat is a, it has a higher value in Europe than it does in the U SI. Don't mean like a dollar or cash value, but wheat is generally like the third crop, isn't it in, in the US behind that? So, yeah. Yeah. And um and um and what was the first question? I forgot now?

Edd Lees - 00:18:47
Oh, why

Kyle Krull - 00:18:54
did you decide to leave?

Edd Lees - 00:18:56
Yeah. Like why are any of us doing this? Right? So there's um there's a friend of our business who's a guy called Henry Dimbleby who um he wrote the National Food Strategy for a great name,

Kyle Krull - 00:19:08
like the UK name I've ever heard in my life. I could not laugh at that.

Edd Lees - 00:19:13
Henry Henry is he, he's like one, he, he, he, he's, he's like a statesman like guy and he, and he talks about the modern food system and he has this beautiful quote. I think we've done a uh a social post about it or if or we're about to or something. Cos he's written a book called Ravenous. It's an awesome book. But he says the way we eat is imperiling the way we eat because it's his doom that we're stuck in of bad health and making the soil worse and all these things. And when you start to see it, you can't unsee it. And you know, if you ask me, why have I started doing this thing? I started doing it, you know, obviously naively because no one would go into these things if you knew everything. And it's that naivety of doing things with a, with a new lens.

Edd Lees - 00:19:44
And you think about, you know, probably get into this at some point. But farmers have generation after generation after generation of this is how it's done and their colleges are telling them to do this and their dad and their neighbor and their uncle. And, you know, you can't, if you have the weight of all that, it's extremely difficult to stand in a field when you've got probably two weeks in a year to determine your financial outcome and say I'm going to do this completely differently. And what I've been told a good field looks like with just a crop and nothing else and totally clean. And these lunatics who don't know anything about farming are telling me I should have loads of other stuff in the same field at the same time, find things like that to be like you know, incredibly inspiring by taking people on a journey. When you've seen things with fresh eyes,

Anthony Corsaro - 00:20:42
I have super, super specific practice, practice questions and then a couple of other like higher level questions. When you talk about that diversity and field, are we talking like there's wheat here and then something over here, are we talking actual like hardcore intercropping? Are we talking about row diversity? So that that's question one, what does that actually look like? Question two are, are the standards public online? Like, can we, can we direct people to view them or do you have to be like a farmer and, and get them? You're, you're not in your head? Yes. OK, cool. Um So that's an easy one.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:21:08
And then the third one is, is there like a technical assistance component to this where you guys are actually helping the farmers implement these practices instead of like just giving them the standards and being like, hey, you know, good luck, buddy.

Edd Lees - 00:21:25
No, no, that's I'm, I'm really pleased you're asked that or I'd have definitely got told off by someone. Um It's um it's because we've spent an enormous amount of time, money resource on building uh a community. This is not a supplier relationship. Like that's one element of uh of it. It's way, way deeper than that because this isn't. Andy is some like legend, super farmer who's come up with this new way of farming. We haven't invented anything, you know, we've taken cues from all over the world, you know, like John K, massive, massive inspiration to us, you know, uh you know, the variety all over the world, some really smart people, but in the UK, we've worked with a ton of people who, who we've helped shape these standards with and yes, you can download them. I think you can download it. They're changing basically. If you can't already, you're about to be able to download the whole sort of 48 page document. It might be you have to put your email address in. So we know who has and who hasn't.

Edd Lees - 00:22:11
But um uh I, I believe you can, if not, you get the shorter one, you can ask for it and you do get it, anyone can get it and everyone can get it. Uh What did your question about the specifics of it? The, the things that are easy to understand are in field diversity at all time? So that could be uh as you say, uh inter row cropping or in the same like literally or poly cropping, multi cropping, whatever you wanna call it. Um Some people are doing extremely diverse rotations. Um It's a variety of different things. We want to make it relatively easy for people to make their own interpretations of. So it's diversity at all times ground cover where possible.

Edd Lees - 00:22:47
No use of anything that contains the word side and um a small amount of nutrition based only on need. So if you, if we take a, have you guys done much on sap testing in the podcast before?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:23:15
No, but I, but I know John talks about it all the time.

Edd Lees - 00:23:18
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, but it's essentially uh in layman's terms, which we all are, uh it's like taking a blood test for a plant and saying uh what does it actually need? Because a lot of times here people are chucking a bunch of nitrogen on when the plant could be short of boron or manganese, which is making the nitrogen bioavailable to the plant. So a small amount, a limited amount in small doses of nitrogen we do allow. It's not an organic product, certainly by UK standards and uh integration of livestock uh once every three years at minimum. So that where possible using animals over the land. So those are the basic tenets of it. It shows in a lot of different ways the technical support is massive. It's a huge part of what we do. And again, it's collaborative and community based. We would never have thought that something as simple as a whatsapp group could have the impact that it's had.

Edd Lees - 00:23:53
We literally, we started a whatsapp group and the with the farmers just to kind of keep people in touch and a bit of knowledge sharing. And if you've seen this and if you've done that and we've got a whatsapp group with like 2000 years of farming experience in it now, you know, so that going back to that example of a farmer being it's standing in a field going, I'm seeing a bit of this and a bit of that and, you know, and the engagement within it is amazing. We've got all sorts of people who are not in our farming community trying to get in it now, but we have to be not trying to be us and them, but we have to be somewhat guarded for the, you know, filtering for, you know, for givers. And I mean, people who are members of the community, but that technical support is we give uh efficient, like as part of being in the Wildfarmed community, you get access to a bunch of agronomists on us, you get access to a bunch of sap testing on us and then the more informal stuff about meeting up, we, we do like regular meetups, we do a lot of farm visits again, a very highly relevant point that I didn't say before is when Andy moved back to the UK, which was 2020. He entered essentially like an X factor competition for sustainable farmers that was set up by a body called the, called the National Trust in the UK, which owns all those big is

Kyle Krull - 00:25:19
Sammy Cell still the key judge for their

Edd Lees - 00:25:25
character. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I wouldn't know. I can only tell you the farming one and his name, his name was Harry obviously. And, uh, and, um, Harry or Jeffrey or something like that. And, uh, and, um, and they, and they, um, uh, in England being so small and with such a history of a small number of families who all sort of know each other and farming community pretty tight knit. We didn't know anyone. We were just three people didn't have the background and because it was COVID Andy was living in France, he couldn't come to any in person meetings. So he had to do everything on Zoom and there were God knows how many people applied for this thing. Uh, because he, that what you won was a 25 year tenancy on this beautiful farm in the Cotswold, which is a really nice part of the UK, like hour and a half out of London. And we didn't expect to win. And then Andy won, of course.

Edd Lees - 00:26:04
And then, um, didn't really tell his wife that he had entered it because he didn't think he was going to win. And it was like, um, got two teenage kids were going back to the UK. They, their kids, his kids had never lived in the UK. They lived in France for life. And, um, they, um, yeah, and they, but, but I was winning that what's relevant about that is a National Trust is, um, it's a, it's a, it's a body with a lot of it, very high esteem in the UK. Like they don't give this stuff up. It's been around for centuries and they also, certainly a lot of the, the, um, the, the land in it has and they, um, they seen as a guardian of what's done, right.

Edd Lees - 00:26:41
And they were looking to attach themselves to a sustainable agriculture solution and they chose well farmed as the partner and they're now rolling that out across, you know, encouraging, uh, other tenant farmers across their properties to do the same thing. I don't know how we got on to that, but it was a super oh, this is right. Super relevant point is farmers are typically highly practical people that learn by seeing and coming to see a farm. I can sit here on a podcast as a guy who's never planted a seed in his life and say, oh, you just put all these things in the field at the same time and then you harvest them at the same time and you separate them with a separator and then, and they're fine off. You go, it's easy. Alright, mate. Yeah. All right. And uh calm down and it's uh and, and then uh and then actually seeing, OK. So literally this is the drill. So how does the drill go in? And what is the mower?

Edd Lees - 00:27:24
And so is it, can you do it, is it in, is it in 90 centimeter spacings or is it in 1 50 centimeter spacings? And, and to your point before, is it one through the next field and all of these actual practical questions, having this uh sort of headquarters. It's been amazing for farmer learning. It's been amazing for uh customer engagement and supply chain engagement. You know, one of the real advantages we'll probably get on to this later. One of the real advantages of the UK or England specifically is, it's a very densely populated, pretty small country, I think England, not the UK, but England, I've got a feeling is the fifth or sixth most densely populated country in the world, but you don't think about it because that Scotland's quite big and northern Ireland.

Edd Lees - 00:28:01
Have you spread it out a bit in Wales. Um And it's why Amazon always did a lot of their testing here. Like I think we had prime here, maybe before the US, they do a lot of testing here and it's been quite a good way of bringing a community, you bringing people in and taking them out. And again, one of my favorite things that we use is like they, they arrive as uh passengers and leave as messengers.

Kyle Krull - 00:28:42
Oh, yeah, that's, that's really cool. Um I want to pivot and kind of go and this is reversal again for Anthony and I, Anthony is asking multiple questions. I'm pivoting to commercialization. Um I want to bring it back to the part of the story where you talked about, you know, people had lined up for bread for the first time since 1945. And how like what, what, what happened after that? Aha moment. It was like, OK, this is real. We need to figure out how we scale this. Why did you choose the type of commercialization that you chose? How did you end up communicating the unique value proposition of the way that you were growing wheat to those consumers via these new B to B partners?

Edd Lees - 00:29:20
Yeah, that, that's a great question. Um So what did we do? We, we, we wanted to start doing it in, in the UK because that's where, that's where we're based. It's where we know the market. Um And frankly, France is a horrible place to do business, but

Kyle Krull - 00:29:43
we don't

Anthony Corsaro - 00:29:43
know, we don't know. So we're going to take your word for it.

Kyle Krull - 00:29:47
We talked about this before the podcast started for us to be like, if we lived on the west coast, we like, you know what, man, it's like doing business with. Kansas is terrible, like geographically, that's essentially like kind of what you're saying, which is hilarious. It's probably even closer than that. Um But sorry to interrupt you continue on.

Edd Lees - 00:30:03
So, so we needed to get, we need to start growing, grow in a way that, I mean, we weren't even called Wildfarmed at the time. We were the real food fight at the time. We um and we were like, how do we start growing grain along the way that Andy's grown, you know, we're gonna get to this, I'm sure. But the, the, the key bit was we have to marry up the entire supply chain, which we talked a bit about enabling farmers uh to make a transition rather than just expecting them to do everything, which is what's happened for the last however many years we've been saying to farmers, ok, now you got, you got, you got to do it, yield, yield, yield, everything's about yield, you gotta do it yield. And now all of a sudden we want to change the story. We can't just ask the farmers to do that after decades of telling them one thing. So it's crucially important to get the rest of the supply chain working. And actually the bit we're about to get into is we're gonna make a scalable change through human relationships. You know, like that's what brand is Ryan. We're going to get into the human relationship with food. The brand is the way to do it.

Edd Lees - 00:30:51
Um And so we decided how, why did we decide to do it? How we did it a step at a time pretty carefully and pretty conservatively, to be honest, how do we I know isn't the image we're given so far? But it was we're to find some growers who are willing to grow uh in nature's eye along ways that we're happy to sign off on because we didn't have the standards at the time. We didn't have any sort of um third party audit at the time and then find a processing partner, which again is something we should talk about. The difference between the, the UK and the US is, is, is significant. Um And um and then, and then how do you start anything you like? We, we were like, right, we'll start with trying to sell flour to the artisan community and the Michelin Star community because they typically really care about provenance.

Edd Lees - 00:31:38
Um There's a, there's a, one of the things about flour is even in a loaf of bread where it's the number one ingredient is typically less than 10% of the of the cost of the, of the retail cost of the item. So actually, I know when you go into things like pizza, it's even less. So you have the sort of the price elasticity if you want to say to really significantly charge a higher price without having to pass too much on to consumers particularly, you can, like I say, get all members of the supply chain to be involved and say you take a, take a higher margin but perhaps a slightly lower percentage margin on a more expensive product and pass some on all on to your customer. Then we're all playing our part and it was really that sort of nuance of selling flour that we thought we can get going like this. But as with anything, when you're asking people to pay more, OK, cool. I can afford to do that.

Edd Lees - 00:32:38
But if I can charge more for my product, why am I paying more for the flower? And this was the bit where it's important to say we'd set up a B to B to C play, not just a B to C play, B to B play. We've never done a single white label sale. So everybody who's ever bought our flower has either put it in, you know, on store called it a wear product. They put something on socials, they've put something on their website and that kind of makes sense because they're paying more for it, you know, like they're paying more for it. They should flex with doing that.

Edd Lees - 00:33:12
And um and for us as a brand that's important because you dot Around no one because they see it. They don't really know what it means, but it all builds into what I call the Kaiser Soze moment, which is at the end. Oh fuck, I've seen that there. I've seen it there and I've seen it there and the whole thing, you know, like coming together, which is, you know, kind of what we're approaching in 2024.

Kyle Krull - 00:33:41
Mhm So, so when, when you say that it's like slightly premium ac can you go ahead,

Anthony Corsaro - 00:33:47
we're on fire today. Uh Just to, just to recap the two lessons that I took away from that. Edd is uh is using B to B and food service to still grow brand awareness by attaching the brand to the end products, even though you're just selling the main ingrEddient and secondarily getting those customers on board with doing that because they are paying you a premium wholesale price and maybe the end product is increasing in price. But it's a substantially different uh difference for the wholesale increase than it is for the actual retail price increase to the consumer.

Edd Lees - 00:34:18
Yeah, exactly. That and, and, and they can pass it on. It's, it's, it's up to them, how they want to pass it on. And it's our job for, for our customers, the, the um the, the, the retailers, if you like to make their customers want to engage with Wildfarmed, you know, which is a big part of, of what we do. We end customer engagement even though typically not always our customers.

Kyle Krull - 00:34:39
So that, that's what I wanted to get to is what is the value proposition to those customers? Why do they want to buy a Wildfarmed? Is it because it just simply tastes better? Is it because you're telling a story about the regeneration of the land and some of that, that like mitigation of climate change, is it about the nutrient density of the products which we haven't really touched on yet? Like what does the UK market care about? And how do you bring people into that sort of top of funnel of, you know, this is why you want to support Wild part.

Edd Lees - 00:35:04
Yeah, it it comes back to that thing of full of life, right? It's a message of life and hope. It's a message of agency. Like a lot of messaging around sustainability is incredibly negative. And actually we approach things with a lot. You take one look at our um our Instagram, you know, it's light heart. Yeah, it's lighthearted, it's saying um and also empowering like most people don't know that their greatest point of agency in the climate crisis and their health crisis is their food choices. And actually, if you want to get involved by seeing a cosign of that, then that's the way to do it. Like the original business model, the f that first iteration. And from the beginning, we'd always planned to be a consumer product. So we've spoken to consumers from the outset. Um but it was like an intel inside originally, like you see this, did you see Wildfarmed? Like it's a good one. It's a cosign.

Edd Lees - 00:35:50
That's why working with the top chefs in the country, the, you know, like the artisan bakeries, these kind of places. It was an important way to start within a con we've always thought of it within concentric circles rather than like a, a graph. It's like who's in the middle of the concentric circle, who's in the next circle outside that who's in the circle outside that. And we find that the businesses usually can look two circles inside at most. Most of them look one inside to what, who's influencing them. Like the big, you know, the Walmarts of the world aren't looking that hard at what, um, the artisan bakery in, in Santa Monica is doing, but it all sort of filters out that way.

Edd Lees - 00:36:27
So we started with that community, we spoke to their customers because we know them, we know they like our story, we know they like our tone of voice and it's how everything always starts, you know how the Supreme stars, there's a skate brand made for skaters and cool people. You know, it's the same story.

Kyle Krull - 00:36:52
And then from the cosine perspective, are, are your partners required to have some level of like your logo on the products or on the menu so that the consumers can make that recognition? Like, oh yeah, this is, this is Wildfarmed like I wanna buy

Edd Lees - 00:37:03
this. Yeah, exactly. Like I said, we, we are, we, we, we're somewhat flexible with it, but you have to say it somewhere like we don't do white label sales. And, and again, that's a mentality thing. That's not just trying to build our brand. That's uh if you're gonna pay significantly more for something that's affecting mass uh lung transformation at scale. Why on earth would you not wanna like call it out to your customers? Don't what I mean?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:37:31
Yeah. It's, it's also like a great business insight by accident because I it doesn't sound like you designed it this way. But if you're a start up outsource as much as you possibly can to someone that can do it better for a cheaper cost. And so if you do eventually want to become a consumer product, you're trying to flower in all these products that you're not making yourself, they're getting market feedback. Um You don't have to build all that infrastructure to actually manufacture it to sell it. So, you know, it's actually really, really amazing business. Um I think kind of by accident there. Um So that's really cool,

Edd Lees - 00:38:02
super light. The whole thing has always been Capex light. Um So that we can say we with best in class manufacturers all the time,

Anthony Corsaro - 00:38:11
they, they must have had a good finance guy with that Capex like, man, you know, um

Edd Lees - 00:38:17
you know, in all seriousness that I guess that's part of it is, you know, Andy's uh like I said, deeply academic guy, George is incredible storyteller and really, you know, he was before he was on TV, he was managing bands and um you know, he, he was, he was managing Lily Allen when she first started really finding talent and understanding the um you know, like what, what, what the sort of hate the word zeitgeist, you know, like what just what, what the style is thinking of that and to get to that TPP point. But yeah, I think that, you know, the, the blend of what all of us do and I can probably get on to it. Is you talk about capital raising? It's like a, a huge theme for the next 1015 years for me is gonna be like, where you can align purpose and profit, you know? Like that's it. Not just, oh, it has to be third sector or purpose because nothing's ever gonna, charity is not scalable, you know. And, um, I don't know, we're gonna talk lending capital later or I don't know when you want to do that.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:39:11
Yeah, let's, let's for sure. Talk about that. I want to talk about the commercial piece more as well. There's a burning question that I have on the production side and I'm, I'm almost hesitant to say it because I got to ask a really long question here, but I think we should talk about it and that's directly from the website. It says we work with a network of farmers, conventional organic larges states and family farms. What unites them is a desire to be supported and rewarded for embracing soil focused farming. And that's a really interesting comment on the website to me and what you've talked about with the farmer relationships because over here, what, what, what I, you know, diagnose the regenerative movement as on the grain side is it's organic regenerative versus conventional regenerative. And the organic people think the conventional regenerative is not regenerative because they spray and the conventional regenerative people think the organic people aren't regenerative because they till, and we are really over here, we have a, what I would call kind of a fissured movement because we have these like, little cliques and sects and that's a big impediment to our progress, at least in, in colonized opinion. And I think an increasingly larger amount of people's opinion and it seems like to me, you all have solved for that through greater alignment and almost using the brand to replace, having to be conventional organic. It's really, it's both and it's Wildfarmed.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:40:14
It doesn't really matter

Edd Lees - 00:40:30
that. That's exactly it because, you know, I guess this is kind of a certification question, right? And like, and it's important to say Andy was an organic farmer from the beginning and then we uh stepped out of organic two years ago. So even the only two years ago and it was so what's good about certification and organic? It's OK. So how do we start this? We love the organic community. Um The CEO of the Soil association, who's the um organic committee here is one of our growers, Helen Browning, amazing woman and she's a big supporter of ours and she's one of our growers and we, we, we love those guys. Um But the simple fact of the matter is that organic as a movement hasn't transformed sufficient land, certainly in the UK in the decades it's been around.

Edd Lees - 00:41:07
And if, if you any, any right minded person, do you want a plate of food with chemicals on or a plate of food without chemicals on at the same price, then they're gonna do it. But it, it can't produce enough food in a system that people are willing to pay for. So we're looking for another way. But what it has got is trust and rigor. That's what certification brings. And it's like, how do you marry up trust and rigor with the fact that all the things we're learning, we keep talking about John, there's a bunch of super smart people looking at soil, the the tech is, is really getting better.

Edd Lees - 00:41:41
So it's going to be fast moving and developing science. But how do you take a body that's got a load of trust and been around for decades that takes a very long time to have heavy lockdown rules and say actually we're going to be able to move with the science for what we have is, is a set of standards that our community have come together to come up with. We don't, can't just change them whenever we want. But we if we combine trust and rigor with flexibility and transparency, that's one of the really big things I think the tech brought us. It's the fact that we can have completely uh transparent supply chain. Uh I think that that that enables the two and as long as you can, as long as you know, who's grown it and how they've grown it and what they've done to it, then you can sign up to if you wanna spray or don't wanna spray or you wanna do GLY state notes or whatever you want.

Edd Lees - 00:42:30
But I also in that think it's very difficult if you can't tell me if you can't tell me who's grown it or how they grew it. I don't know how you can tell me that it's definitely regenerating anything.

Kyle Krull - 00:42:56
Hm. I think the key, my key takeaway from that is transparency allows for decentralization while maintaining a set of high integrity standards, you know, and I, I'm not, I'm now wrestling with like, how do we implement that in the United States? And I, I don't know what the answer is, but that's, that's my biggest takeaway. And I think that you, you all hit the nail on the head. And what that allows for to your point is the potential to work with a far greater swath of land and to increase the potential positive outcome from the implementation of these practices, right? So I think the model is fantastic and it actually reminds me a lot of like what the region coalition is trying to do, not necessarily from a single ingredient perspective, but from like a macro brand perspective and it's really, really difficult. So kudos to you, for number one, you all your team um in your community for building this system and figuring out how to like communicate that effectively via this B to B model to consumers. It, it sounds really complicated and it feels like it's going in the right direction,

Edd Lees - 00:43:58
but it's crucial. It's really important to say. We haven't got it all figured out like this is moving. I don't think we'll ever solve it. I, sometimes I was where I was, I was in some, like, mad old building in, um, in uh, in Scotland. I was saying like these, these are the kind of buildings that people spent their whole life building and they didn't see, they didn't see it at the beginning. They didn't see it at the end. Like they, what's a rather familiar famous in Barcelona? And I'm like, I feel like that's what this is like, I'm not gonna see this finish. Neither are you two, you know, but if we can be part of it and do our thing and move it along the way and just have that mentality of we, we can't solve this or own this. We have again, I'll drop another one.

Edd Lees - 00:44:23
We've got the guy on in our, one of our advisors. It's a guy called uh Professor John Crawford, who's one of the U K's or maybe Europe's leading soil scientists. And he has this great quote. He says 10 years ago, I thought I understood 0.1% about soil. Now, I think I understand 0.01% about soil. It's like there's so much to learn and so much to do. And the one thing we know is that conventional commodity markets have a very poor track record in affecting uh land use change as do the existing certification models.

Kyle Krull - 00:45:11
Two quotes I want to share. Uh after that quote, number one is I love this quote so much as the island of our knowledge grows so too do the shores of our ignorance. Uh So it's like the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And then another stat that's like blows my mind is like we know more about the composition of the dust on the moon than we do about our own soil. And to think about like the allocation. Yeah, the allocation of resources and what we've spent money on as a culture is like why do we need to know what's in moon dust? You know, how many millions or billions of dollars have we spent on moon dust? You know, it's just, it's just silly.

Edd Lees - 00:45:49
Yeah. There you go. Wow, they're great. Mhm

Anthony Corsaro - 00:45:52
mhm Let's let's talk processing and then let's talk capital. I I definitely wanna make sure we talk about both of those. So you know, take us through the processing journey and what's that been like to set up? You know, maybe the initial setup and what that looks like now what that look like in the future like what, what does that look

Edd Lees - 00:46:07
like? Yeah, again, this is so because so, so when we um grew the grain in France um uh it was lower protein than um in absolute higher numbers than, than uh than a lot of mills we used to. So they didn't want to mill it. So we bought our own mill and started milling it. And then, um and we realized that actually out and out protein levels, the proteins broken down were gonna get way out of my comfort zone here. But I don't think you two know, is uh is uh the protein in uh in, in wheat. There's a difference between absolute high numbers and um and quality of protein. It's like the balance of the gluten in the Grio in. Um and the best way that it was explained to me that you probably can all get on board with.

Edd Lees - 00:46:47
It's the difference between the guy in the gym who's done loads of steroids and the weightlifter in the Olympics, you know, like one is like real strength and one is uh like puffed up muscle marys as we call them. And um and, and I think conventional uh milling wheat is often, you know, that the latter, a lot of things sprayed up for fake protein. So the processing was tricky in France. We, we, we had our own mill. So we came to the UK, we were like, right, we're gonna sell grain and everyone else can buy their own mills and that was a pretty short fit of the business plan. And um and so we, um and so there was in, in, in that, um that summer of um uh the, the COVID summer we, um, we called every Miller in the country to say we, we had like 100 tons of wheat or something.

Edd Lees - 00:47:24
We like, will you mill it for maybe even less than that. And we said, will you mill it for us? And everyone, we sort of fell between the, like the real old school artisans who like it was more than they could do, uh, or the, or the real big industrial ones who just laughed at us and, um, and wouldn't do anything for us. And then we, and then we found one guy who was an amazing guy and he, um, and so we had a shortlist of one and we all got in the car to try

Anthony Corsaro - 00:48:12
to drive vendor evaluations on a list

Edd Lees - 00:48:16
of one,

Kyle Krull - 00:48:18
tons of leverage for that negotiation too.

Edd Lees - 00:48:21
He was really nice. Yeah, exactly. And, um, and so, and so we, we built a really good relationship with him and as we got bigger, we sort of, uh, diversified a little bit our processing and now we're working, we're at a scale now where a lot of people want the mill with us and we're working with AAA partner, um, pretty close to London who's got the, the newest sort of biggest mill in the country. And, um, uh not biggest but the newest big industrial type mill. So, again, we went through a period of everything's got to be stone ground. But again, what we're trying to do here is effect land use change at scale. That's what Wildfarmed is about is scalable land use change. It's not about artisan bread. That's obviously a big part of our history.

Edd Lees - 00:48:55
And we want those guys are a massive part of our community and we embrace them and we love them and we appreciate them and respect them. But unless they're going to sell bread to the millions of people in cities, then we're going to be waiting a long time. So the processing there was um it was, it was a slow process of doing it on a similar story. We, we grew some grain in the US. Uh this year it harvest 2023 and um we're again, II I was meant to be living in the US by now. Um building a well farmed US and I'm, I'm not and um and uh and, and in looking for processing partners in the US, I found a stat and I think it goes, I don't want to get it wrong.

Edd Lees - 00:49:34
Let me come back to you after the show and you can put in the exact number, but I think it is 100 years ago. There were 50,000 mills in the US maybe. And now there's like 100 and 50. It's

Anthony Corsaro - 00:50:03
something crazy like that. Yeah. It's something insane. I've heard it before.

Edd Lees - 00:50:07
Yeah. It's a wild number. Um and, and so to, to stay on point finding a milling partner was extremely important, a processing partner. And then it reads across with, you know, bakery products that we're doing. Now, uh We're fortunate that our uh head of, we're gonna get the wrong bit there. You can edit that out. Ok. So milling partners in the US is a big focus for us. Um And I think we'll go through a similar story. We'll probably start with artisans and then you scale up into um into larger um larger players. Have you ever had um Kevin from Ken Spring on?

Anthony Corsaro - 00:50:41
No, no, we have not but I've heard and others.

Edd Lees - 00:50:46
Yeah. No. So this is a cool story and um I can take some credit for this. So um so uh and it, it might tie into a thing we're gonna talk about later. So the, the challenge in the US around small scale processing is way higher than it is anywhere else it exists in all developed countries, but in the US even more so for understandable reasons. Um But again, it's this focus on yield weight size scale. We focused on one thing for good reason, you know, we came out of the second World War and globally there were what 2 billion people with a pretty clear route to 6 billion uh by the seventies, eighties. And it was like, OK, we need there isn't enough food, you know. So all of this uh you know, chemical agriculture that we like to bash these days. It came out of a pretty noble intention of, we need to feed the world. But it was all tested.

Edd Lees - 00:51:23
It was all. Or the, uh, what he called, the guy who came up with it. I forgot his name now and, and he, he came up with it in, heavily degraded soils in Mexico, you know, and it was, uh, and it's ok. Well, it wasn't from very fertile soils

Kyle Krull - 00:51:48
but this is the Green Revolution.

Edd Lees - 00:51:50
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, um, and everything that scaled alongside the scaling with it. Um But what I'll say is we need more people like Kevin from Cair Spring in the Pacific Northwest. He had a relatively small milling setup that he's designed himself. He sells to a bunch of really high profile bakeries across the US and he was struggling with, to get the right capital to scale the thing. Um, until he looked at a blended capital model that was sponsored by a great friend of mine who I know you'll know ac called Dan Miller who um, has a business called Stu. Yeah, exactly. And I introduced Dan to Kevin and they, I believe it's maybe closed recently. And this financing has come from the fact the pure numbers on a spreadsheet can't take account of this whole thing. We need to be finding ways and we need measures because it also can't be charity and too vague and too hippy, dippy either.

Edd Lees - 00:52:33
But we have to find ways of making the spreadsheet, you know, take account for the externalities or internalizing these externalities. I've forgotten what the question was that I answered it. But processing in the UK was a challenge. We got started. We're about to face the same challenge in the US and it's bigger like everything else.

Kyle Krull - 00:53:06
I don't wanna talk about

Anthony Corsaro - 00:53:08
work. You're good. I was gonna say I

Kyle Krull - 00:53:10
want to talk about sort of the um we, we alluded to this a little bit before the podcast, but you know, there's, there's the potential that there's gonna be some branded product coming out in the near future for wild farms. Uh Before we touch on that, I, I want to call out because we, I don't think we've talked much about the Green Revolution and I think it's important to touch this because all of the soil studies you were talking about like started with degraded soil and it really treated the ground as a substrate rather than a life giving entity, right? So those studies look fantastic for the 1st 235 years because they're adding that synthetic nutrition and the plants are, are booming and growing where they couldn't before. So it looks really good. It was like cool, let's do this everywhere, right? To your point with great intentions of feeding the world without really realizing what the long term arc was going to be for soil health. And then the chemical addiction to synthetic inputs that we now rely on today, um which causes all sorts of illness and, and problems.

Kyle Krull - 00:53:47
So, to me, it's really important to like call that out and explain that regeneration is about not using the soil as a substrate, but really the life giving matter to plants.

Edd Lees - 00:54:14
That was his name. And I, and you know, and there happened to be quite a lot of nitrate knocking around after the, was it 19 9, before the first world War? It quite a lot of uh nitrate knocking around. And um, but I think that's the point is when you focus on one thing, only whatever it is in life, there are unintended consequences and we've just focused on yield for a very long time at the expense of everything else and built a highly complex system around it. And then the other things that you're talking about Kyle that we're trying to now bring into the equation are incredibly difficult to quantify a measure. Hence why all the sort of science based advancement on this again? Ac and I, I think said this before is if we could just get some of the dollars into the, into uh regenerative agriculture that have gone into clean energy and electric cars. That's parts. Yeah. Yeah. Moon dust. Exactly. Exactly.

Edd Lees - 00:54:53
Then, and we can start thinking about it, but it involves a level of humility of, we don't know everything we know levels are out, we the, the chemical agriculture you're talking about, they get hooked on it and then it's like if you say, oh, I've got a headache and you can take a pill for your headache and then, then that gives you a stomachache and you can take another pill for the stomachache and then it makes you liver ache and then you got a liver ache and before you know it, like you, you were just trying to get rid of the headache and you're taking 25 pills every day.

Kyle Krull - 00:55:36
Yeah. And it reminds me we're going way down a rabbit hole here, but that's like the, the wrong circle to be in you. You talked a lot about these circles, right? These concentric circles and that's the wrong circle to be in um versus, you know, the, the alternative is the right circle. And I want to talk about, you know, optimizing for one thing and this is something I think we talked about on a few different episodes. But like what, what kind of scared me a while ago about the regenerative movement? And this is still probably relevant today is like that carbon tunnel vision like let's optimize to sequester as much carbon as we possibly can, which don't get me wrong. Like that's a great goal, but that's not the only thing that regenerative agriculture does. And if that's the only thing we prioritize, we're gonna miss the boat on water cycles, biodiversity and all sorts of other really, really critical and, and super important components of regeneration that we really need to focus on too.

Kyle Krull - 00:56:10
But as a culture, I think, especially in the US and you can correct me if I'm wrong, if it's the case in the UK. But like, we really want to optimize and solve for the one thing and just focus on that one thing and that's, that can't be what regeneration becomes.

Edd Lees - 00:56:33
Uh You, you've literally touched upon my like favorite like topic of the moment here, which is we, we create cos exactly to your point. We should just cover all the land with eucalyptus trees. If we're gonna do that, you know why, why are we even bothering trying to grow food if we're gonna do that? And it's this whole nature versus food argument. And uh in the, in the UK, you can get paid to go do nature on your land and rewilded or wild it, whatever you wanna call it. And you can get paid a bit to go around the perimeter of your land and put some flowers in the field margin, but you can't get paid anything extra to do it in the field where the crop is growing. And that's a huge thing that we're working on. And then all the here, I'm definitely going to upset some of your listeners with this but whatever like the, the, the Cobon thing is important and a lot of the schemes I see trying to sell and resell carbon remind me of the CD OS in 2006 in Florida probably.

Edd Lees - 00:57:11
But it's, it's all, it's wrap it up and wrap it up and wrap it up and I'm like, oh, I don't really like anything to do with this. Um And, and the, and the last thing I'll say on it that I think you probably won't want to edit out as much is um uh the reason I wanna know what's going on globally in this biodiversity thing is important. It's not just birds and butterflies and bees in the, it's so important that is how the land will be able to continue to feed us. And an example that I give a lot to people is we're here in the UK and we're trying to do our thing. But this international collaboration about what everyone's doing is important before the seventies, there was no such thing as gap accounting. So if you wanted to try and do international M and a like good luck with that, it didn't really exist.

Edd Lees - 00:58:03
And then like the big four or five accountancy firms came up with that. This is roughly what like general accounting, you know, accepted accounting principles are and all of a sudden that facilitated this amazing moment of comp you know, globalization and companies being able to operate in different spaces and the rest of it cos you kind of knew what you were buying otherwise you didn't know Oh, what this statement was or that statement. And I think we're about to hit that with sustainability. I see all of the big firms get invited in to talk to them. They're just nicking out homework so they can sell it to big businesses. I'm kind of cool with that. To be honest.

Edd Lees - 00:58:38
Cos if we try and sit there and own it ourselves, who's the hell's gonna listen to me? You know, like it's gonna be, they're gonna walk into the big businesses and say you have to get on board with doing this and they started it with carbon. So it's good that it's the first thing that's down there. They're putting it on the, you know, in their annual accounts, but it can't stop there because that myopia will be exactly as you said at the beginning, Kyle, like, uh it will be, it will be the hacking of the system, which will be a, which would be a huge missed opportunity.

Kyle Krull - 00:59:20
Totally agree. Well, we, we've gone way down weird rabbit hole ac U go ahead. I'm taking this weird directions. No, it's ok. It's a fantastic conversation.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:59:28
Yeah, it's all, it's all good. Um, you know, I think the carbon thing is really interesting because when you look at the small and the medium enterprises versus the large multinationals, the SME S are really focused on nutrition. To me, they're focused on the sustainability piece, but they're winning. The ones that are winning are winning with nutrition with customer makes sense. Right? And the multinationals are really focused on scope through reporting and supply chain resilience to really satisfy investors, not necessarily the end consumer that's buying the Cheerios or whatever the big mass produced product is. And I think that's really the greatest opportunity and I, I don't spend enough time in carbon markets to say, hey, here are the big problems, here's how we fix them. Here's what I think, you know, it's gonna happen in the future.

Anthony Corsaro - 00:59:57
But I do think from a food company perspective, you know, there's businesses being underwritten based on those markets, but we don't need to do that in this case, like we can underwrite good business fundamentals on winning consumers with the fundamentals, right? And so that to me is very exciting, doesn't mean it's easy, but, but it is very exciting and um and I wanna give you a chance to just talk about the, the capital stacking and the, and the investment today and I'm sure we can talk about that for a whole hour. So I'm just gonna let you take us where, where you want us to go. But um you know, blended, blended capital stacks in the US context means different types of capital with different return expectations and different timelines. So first let us know if that's what you mean when you use that phrase and, and what it means for the

Edd Lees - 01:00:49
Wildfarmed context. Yeah. No, that's exactly what I mean? And it isn't what we've done but it is to the point we were saying before about the money in moon dust and the money, you know, you know, we've, we've been funded entirely by, uh, I mean, people call it friends and family but the families have been pretty useless. Um, but the, um, we, we've been just been funded by my friends and followers and we're, and we've got, we're at that point now where we're talking to institutional capital and it's like getting a line like, you know, family offices is a classic area where they've got the alignment of the for profit, but they, they want, uh you know, a heavy purpose sort of filter in it as well. Um I think that's a really interesting investment theme for the next 1015 years. We've seen the zero rates tech, um VC Jacob, you know, crypto model of, of the, of the sort of last 1015 years is not saying it's run its course, but it cannot continue to grow in the, in the manner in which it's grown. And, you know, it, it's so, you know, it's sort of reached some level, it's

Anthony Corsaro - 01:01:52
a specific tool for a specific context, right? And so let's just use it for that and not try and shove it in everything

Edd Lees - 01:01:58
that exactly that, exactly that. And when I, um when I went to RF SI in uh Denver, not last year, the year before what I loved was and this is where Americans are so damn good at this. Like let's get everyone in the room who needs to be in the room and let's figure out who's gonna go do what. And uh and it was, I found it so inspiring to hear from farmers, from politicians, from brand owners, from family offices, from pension funds to all these different things. And how do we do this? You know, that the, the US tax code is set up for this kind of thing that I've forgotten the, the number that the charitable bit is that it wouldn't be the same thing here. Ok. Do you do a bit and it can be for profit or is it, um, I forgotten the term you have.

Edd Lees - 01:02:41
That is, but it's basically a business that's doing good in the world, but it's still a business and then when you get to a certain size public benefit corporation, there you go. That's right. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Like these things are the way it has to work. Um, over here it's different, you know, like we, we're getting going but a lot of the time it's just been a lot of individuals. We're very fortunate with our network. We're a bit older than the, have I lost you guys? No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Edd Lees - 01:03:01
No, we've been fortunate with our network. We're a bit older than the average founders. Um, and then we've got traction. So the fact that we've demonstrated traction and a lot of regenerative business models don't really have a route to profitability. We do. Um And I think that that's a, you know, that's an important part of it. You have to go in there and say, right, this is what we're gonna do. This is how we're gonna grow it. You know, you have to have more than one vertical.

Edd Lees - 01:03:28
I think small brands just trying to go into grocery, they struggle to get sales high enough to be able to cr create the sort of gross margin they need to pay for the teams and uh and all the stuff behind it that you need to be able to really compete and win. Uh And we're fortunate that we've got the ingredients business as you discussed. I haven't really talked about it much today, but we have a small bakery business in London, very London focused and we serve B to B customers who said I wanna vote while farm, but I don't make my own stuff. Can you make for us? And then as you touched upon next year, we are gonna be going live in nationwide grocery with fully farm branded products of our own, you know, across uh nationwide stores. So you know that we've got these three verticals, all of which can contribute to paying for the operational costs that you need.

Edd Lees - 01:04:21
That's a pretty

Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:28
big bombshell to drop here in our, into the interview that you guys are going national with, with your own CBG line. So I know a lot of that's still under rabs. But what, what can you share

Edd Lees - 01:04:36
there? Yeah, what's super exciting is we've been cobra across a bunch of products so far. But this scalable uh change of land use is gonna come by customers being able to say I voted Wildfarmed by engaging with it. We've seen a ton of brands break through by doing something different. Um in a, in a very well established slightly dusty area of the supermarket. We can think in the U si Love Liquid Death. Like I think it's an amazing story of uh you know, where every everyone's told the same story in the same way since forever. I think you gotta come in have a point of view, have a story to tell and uh and be at a price point that is uh is higher than you used to, but it is still a thing that everyone can afford and give people a reason to um to feel that they're buying a product to demonstrate that they a it has to be higher quality. B it's gotta be good for health as we discussed. Um But I think also this thing about flexing like virtue signaling almost with the, with the, you know, with the, with the bread you buy in this case.

Edd Lees - 01:05:30
But then all the other products that are gonna come after, I guess the thing, the thing that's relevant. Is it one of the nationwide retailers has really got on board with us as both a grower and then to really push. So they've joined our community as one of our smaller growers, but then to push um us as a, as a start up brand. Um I think it is amazing that, you know, this is what this is big business being a force for good. And I'm a, I'm, I hope we're the first brand they've really done this with and they really want to get into it as a regen thing. So hopefully it will be a huge success, not just for us but for them and then that will encourage others cos wear is not the last word in this. We're just a member of a international community. That's really cool.

Kyle Krull - 01:06:21
And so what is the actual product going to look like? Where will people be able to find it or is it still two under wraps to like get that detail

Edd Lees - 01:06:26
oriented? No, no, it's not. No, it's, it's gonna be um all in bakery. It's gonna start with a couple of sliced loaves, think Dave's killer bread but Regen and for, you know, 2024. Um and um uh and while farmed, it's, it's gonna be the, the packaging you won't be able to miss, it's gonna be full of life like everything else. Um And then it's gonna be some like also also some like sour doughs and that kind of stuff and baguettes and like in store bakery. But then we've got a pretty long tail of new product development that comes after it, but it's kind of bakery focused at the moment. Yeah, I'm trying to see you nationwide. 350 stills.

Kyle Krull - 01:07:05
Amazing. Number one. I almost want to make a trip to the UK just to buy your bread when it comes out, um, and check out all these different bakeries and it could be a tour which would be fantastic. Um You, you mentioned the tail and like the potential innovation like my natural CPG grocery brain wants to dive into that to better understand like how are you determining where you want to be? You mentioned looking at stale categories, is it? And we don't have to get into the specifics of what you're going to manufacture. But I'd love to learn about the process. Like, are you looking at, you know, everything that you can make with wheat? What categories are stale, like crackers, for example?

Kyle Krull - 01:07:27
Or is it all gonna be within breads? You know, you mentioned a lot of bakery focus. How are you all thinking about innovation in the future? We

Edd Lees - 01:07:44
started with sliced loaves. Why? Because they've got a 98% household penetration in the UK. Um And then the tail we have a team of sales people going around every single bakery in the country all the time seeing all the trends that are happening, not just in the UK, but in Europe, in the US. So we have um we, we have a lot of ideas coming from there. We have our own small bakery in London, which is a sort of test and learn NPD type center. So we can see if things work in a, in a, in a very small retail setting, but then it's a slightly bigger but still quite small um B to B setting. And then if these things are landing, that's what's gonna feed through to be. Give us a sort of mass distribution that co manufactured by someone else according to our recipes,

Kyle Krull - 01:08:32
totally makes sense and, and to touch on the comment earlier with the incumbents, I actually think it's a brilliant strategy. Uh find the stale, the stale old category with 99% household penetration. And how can you disrupt that market? Because I think it's ripe for disruption coming from somebody who sells talk about a stale category, you know, 10 years ago, you know. So I think it's right for disruption and there's tons of opportunity if you can communicate that value proposition to that consumer. Um to your point, the opportunity to make impact on land is massive. So I think a great move

Edd Lees - 01:09:06
your sign off for me

Anthony Corsaro - 01:09:09
and you're underpinning that with a brand that isn't hyper premium. So it's not inaccessible. Like a lot of the return of products are today when they enter the market. And you've done all this leg work through the B to B customers to get affinity for the brand name and build. Hopefully this really nice funnel for trial that many, many new brands don't ever have, you know, those two resources. So I think that's really powerful. Yeah, so good job Edd. We're proud of you, man. Yeah,

Edd Lees - 01:09:35
thank you. I got you guys. Just give me a slide in my next pitch. That'd be great,

Anthony Corsaro - 01:09:43
man. This has been, yeah, this has been so fun. Um I appreciate you. Uh spending some time with us, man. I know it's late in the afternoon, kind of early evening over there. But um let's, let's take it home with, with the last question that we ask everybody, which is how do we get region brands to have 50% market share by 2050?

Edd Lees - 01:10:02
Uh How do we get uh I mean, OK, so we involve everybody in the supply chain. We, we, we even out that supply chain, we, we give it, we get the farmers, we get the businesses and we get the customers to work together and then if we create that virtuous circle that we've been talking about, it will just happen. Mhm But getting to the challenge is getting to that critical mass. But yeah, the first bit

Anthony Corsaro - 01:10:34
human relationships, that's what you said earlier that I was like my best. It's like we can, we can talk about all the numbers on the spreadsheets we can talk about all the accounts, we talk about all the things. But what we can't really measure and what you've clearly showed throughout this whole show is like there's this massive underpinning of human relationship that like undermines all of it in a really powerful way.

Edd Lees - 01:10:55
There you go. And they, yeah, they, yeah, that's right. The collective power of a group of individuals is, is never to be underestimated spot

Kyle Krull - 01:11:03
on man. You know, I share a recent experience. I, I was recently at a holiday party and we did a white elephant gift exchange and I brought Alexander family farms regenerative Dairy in Crescent City, California. I brought their eggnog as my gift in in the white elephant exchange and everybody got to try some and like the the the aha moment for everybody in that room to be like this is the best eggnog I've ever had in my life. Oh my God. It's generally farmed. What does that mean? You know, like that's the human relationship component here and nobody's going to look at a spreadsheet or maybe not nobody but most people shoppers are going to look at a spreadsheet and be like, oh I'm going to support this brand for these XYZ reasons. There's that emotional connection that's really gonna move the needle. So I completely agree with what you're saying. Um And I just really appreciate the time and your perspective is super unique and interesting just from the UK perspective from the finance perspective. Amazing brand story.

Kyle Krull - 01:11:36
Um I, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate the time.

Edd Lees - 01:11:54
Likewise. If you guys are anywhere near London, you hit me up. I'm gonna fill you full of bread. This

Anthony Corsaro - 01:12:00
was super fun, man. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it, man.

Edd Lees - 01:12:03
No, it's been great. It's been great talking to you guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Kyle Krull - 01:12:07
Absolutely

Anthony Corsaro - 01:12:12
for show notes, episode transcripts and more information on our guests and what we discussed on the show, check out our website Regen-brands.com, that is Regen-brands.com. You can also find our Regen recaps on the website. Regen recaps, take less than five minutes to read and cover all the key points of the full hour long conversations. You can check out our youtube channel ReGen Brands Podcast for all of our episodes with both video and audience. The best way to support our work is to give us a five star rating on your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe to future episodes and share the show with your friends. Thanks for tuning into the ReGen Brands Podcast brought to you by the Regen Coalition and Outlaw Ventures. We hope you learn something new in this episode and it empowers you to use your voice, your time and your dollars to help us build a better and more regenerative food system. Love you guys.