On this episode, we have Samuel Taylor who is the Founder and CEO of Long Table.
Long Table is supporting regenerative agriculture with their pancake and waffle mixes made with regeneratively grown heirloom grains.
In this episode, we learn how Samuel went from actor to CPG Founder due to the combination of a pancake obsession and an acrobatic love interest. He details how the brand went from the farmers market to appearing on Shark Tank, and he shares why regenerative, stone-milled, heirloom grains are a game-changer in terms of flavor, nutrition, and environmental impact.
Lots of great stories in this one folks! Samuel didn’t land a deal on Shark Tank, but he scooped up the next best thing: “the best pancakes I’ve ever had” compliment from all the sharks and a million-dollar sales bump. A little over a year later, he’s looking to build out this brand both online and in retail while being a key purchaser supporting the regenerative grain shed of the upper Midwest.
Episode Highlights:
🥞 Next-gen pancakes from regeneratively-grown, heirloom grains
🎪 The acrobatic love interest that inspired the brand
🍿 Inventing popcorn flour pancakes
🦈 Going on Shark Tank with David Schwimmer
🤯 Doing $1M in sales the 6 weeks after Shark Tank
🌾 Building supply chains with the Artisan Grain Collaborative
🤤 Why stone-milled, heirloom grains are better
📈 Capital-efficient, omnichannel growth
🏅 Working towards Regenified™ certification
💰 Why regen brands need more investment
Links:
Anthony Corsaro - 00:00:33 On this episode, we have Samuel Taylor. Who is the founder and CEO of Long Table. Long Table is supporting regenerative agriculture with their pancake and waffle mixes made with regeneratively grown heirloom grains. In this episode, we learned how Samuel went from actor to CPG founder due to the combination of a pancake obsession and an acrobatic love interest. He details how the brand went from the farmers market to appearing on Shark Tank and he shares why regenerative stone milled heirloom grains are a game changer in terms of flavor, nutrition, environmental impact. Lots of great stories in this one, folks. Samuel didn't land a deal on Shark Tank, but he scooped up the next best thing. The best pancakes I've ever had compliment from all of the sharks and a $1 sales boost.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:01:14 A little over a year later, he's looking to build out this brand both online and in retail, while being a key purchaser supporting the regenerative grain shed of the upper Midwest. Let's go. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The ReGen Brands Podcast. Very excited today to have our friend Samuel from Long Table with us. So welcome Samuel.
Samuel Taylor - 00:01:39 Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Kyle Krull - 00:01:41 I feel like, dare I say 19th century Samuel as he just, informally introduce himself to us. I mean, super pumped to have you on the pod. I was not familiar with the brand. Sometimes I like to, like, almost not do research to see it at first, and you kind of be surprised if we saw episode at pull up your website, and I'm salivating. The imagery is phenomenal. So I'm really excited to to share the story with our listeners, but for those who are on familiar with Long Table, like, give us a lay of the land. What sort of products do you produce to work and our listeners find your your product today?
Samuel Taylor - 00:02:11 Yeah. So Long Table is next gen pancakes from heirloom grains rooted in love is really what we do. And Let's go. Love that. Yeah. We do heirloom grains because they taste better and they're better for you and they're better for the earth. And there's just so much variety of flavor that has been lost in the last 100 years where Grains really kinda got pretty off track and kinda earned a poor reputation for many people. And, you know, we're bringing some new stuff to the party as well. We are the only people in the world who do popcorn flower. We pop popcorn and then mill that into a flower. That's the backbone of our best seller. It's delightful.
Samuel Taylor - 00:02:42 It makes a really fluffy delicate pancake that is whole grain, high protein, high fiber, checks all the box And then we've also got a gluten free. That's more of a diner cake style that is, if what a diner cake wants to be when it grows up, got a little bit of a test seats in there for delicious. And then that then that leaves sort of, if one is brunch and the other is diner, the last category to hit is really my personal favorite. That's the blue horn pancake. That's a blue corn buckwheat, the hazelnut meal and rye. And that's, that's really in your lumber jack zone right there.
Samuel Taylor - 00:03:12 And that'll that'll that'll that'll stick to your ribs, get stuff done, kind of a pancake.
Kyle Krull - 00:03:27 I said, no. I gotta say I've been going out to breakfast for a big portion of my life, but I've never been so enthralled listening to somebody talk about varieties of painting as I just was that last, like, 2 to 3 minutes.
Samuel Taylor - 00:03:39 I mean, this is the whole thing about heirloom grains is that, like, we we got, you know, one thing that we grow mostly in country for bread and pancakes and everything else, and there's so much more out there. And there's just, like, it's all waiting for you. It's so so delicious. Stop me. I'll I'll talk again.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:04:00 And I I grew up on just, like, basic regular, whatever, like, mainstream pancakes were. And so this is I'm, like, especially ready to try these products because I'm I'm sure it's totally different.
Samuel Taylor - 00:04:10 Well, in some ways, yeah, and in some ways, like, what we wanted to do is we wanted to really hit the places where the people want this is okay. There's nothing wrong with traditional pancakes. From an eating perspective. They're delicious. They're joyful. They're wonderful. They bring people joy.
Samuel Taylor - 00:04:21 More more pancakes in the world is a better world as far as I'm concerned. Right? There are a handful of drawbacks to, like, traditional pancakes. 1 is that roller coaster they put you where you're super jazzed to eat pancakes and you're super happy you're eating pancakes and then you are super full and then you are super sleepy. And then you're super hungry again. And all of that takes 1 hour. Right? Yeah. So, We do things a little bit differently.
Samuel Taylor - 00:04:50 We want you we want this to be a breakfast that does its job. Right? Like, I come from Chicago. We work in this city. We wanna hire breakfast to do its job. And if breakfast is not doing its job, it's a tough world out there, find a new home.
Samuel Taylor - 00:05:04 Like, we gotta do it right in this house. So we do things that are high protein, whole grain, high five fiber, they will last you. Now the popcorn flower pancakes in particular do hit that spot that the old sort of child of the pancakes do. And the reason they do it is because the pop the air that gets in the popcorn when it pops stays in through the pancake all the way to the finished product, and it creates a lighter weight, more delicate, fluffier whole grain pancake than really anything else on the market.
Kyle Krull - 00:05:42 Okay. We're recording this episode at 8:50 AM, and I'm genuinely upset that we did not all prepare pancakes. Like, for this conversation. It's, I'm, like, kicking myself for not having done this before. Also, it it does say heirloom grain pancakes plus waffles. So I'm assuming we can use any of these mixes for waffles in addition to pancakes. Is that correct?
Samuel Taylor - 00:06:04 Yeah. Of course. Waffle batter is not rocket science from pancake batter. You add a little bit more liquid. And if you real fancy, you can do some stuff, like, add a little bit of sparkling water to it, and that'll give you a little bit brighter lighter weight, more, sort of crispy or texture if you like a crispy waffle. But that's only if you're real fancy. If you're not real fancy, you just add a little more liquid to the love it.
Kyle Krull - 00:06:30 That's wax mustache waffle versus regular waffles.
Samuel Taylor - 00:06:35 If it is a wax day, then, you know, break out the seltzer water.
Kyle Krull - 00:06:40 Yeah. Right. Right.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:06:43 Well, we know that this comes from a place of love and kind of a story background. So we'd love to have you fill the audience in on on kinda how this this pancake business came to be.
Samuel Taylor - 00:06:52 Yeah. I am a manic And I was, eating pancakes 5 days a week for about 2 years just with no glimmer in my eye. What's ever of starting business. I was a Shakespearean actor and a pup tier, here in Chicago, and I just fell into a hole, a pancake hole. And while I was in that pancake hole, I met and fell in love with an Acrobat. And I wanted her to come over my house, and I wanted her like me. And I wanted to cook for her. But we we were doing a show together. We were doing a circus adaptation of, Alice in Wonderland at Looking Glass Theatre here in Chicago.
Samuel Taylor - 00:07:30 And, we were working in the evening, of course, so I couldn't impress her with my dinner cooking. So I thought I'm unreasonably good at pancakes, come over my house. And I knew that, you know, she was in the air 6 hours a day. Right? We had an a 10 mile commute on a bike to work, and then we were doing really strenuous work all day. And so I was like, okay.
Samuel Taylor - 00:07:48 These better these better be high protein. They better be whole grain. They be complex carbohydrates. If you're a real nerd about this stuff, I aim for a 3 to 1 ratio of complex carbohydrates to protein, which is sort of what Endurance athletes favor But if you're not a real nerd, they just sort of you don't get hungry before lunch. And so that was when I invented popcorn flower. Was I was like, I I want to feed her what she needs, but I also wanna really impress her.
Samuel Taylor - 00:08:17 And so I started putting popcorn in a blender and, created those pancakes.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:08:32 Popped popcorn.
Samuel Taylor - 00:08:34 Yeah. And that's that's crucial. So Yeah. Popcorn meal is widely available. You just put popcorn kernels through a a mill. You wind up with a corn meal that is made up popcorn. Sweet is delicious. It's really good. If you pop it first, it becomes a fairy dust that is magical and delightful. Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 00:08:54 I can just imagine your blender being kinda confused. Like, am I what am I even blending here?
Samuel Taylor - 00:08:58 You know, there's, like,
Kyle Krull - 00:09:01 what what's what's happening?
Samuel Taylor - 00:09:02 Yeah. So I, yeah, I I invented that so that so that she would be impressed. There was a lot going on in our love story, and it was a small part of our love story, but it was enough a part of our love story that when we got married, we gave out pancake mix as wedding favors. Okay. And that was around the time that that we started a farmers market stall. To start selling the pancakes as well.
Kyle Krull - 00:09:30 It's fascinating. I can I can listen to you wax for what Ike about breakfast and pancakes in this story all day?
Samuel Taylor - 00:09:35 Well, let me tell you. I feel like there's I feel like there's 2 very different kinds of food founders in the world, and I feel like one of them worked at Kellogg for 20 years and sort of poached a team of four or five people and raised $2 and launched in Target or whatever. Right? Like, that's one. And it's like from a business perspective, a real smart, good solid way to do it. Yeah. The other way is my lane.
Samuel Taylor - 00:09:52 And I feel like the world is just full of absolute lunatics who started food businesses with no idea what they were doing. And I cannot overstate to you the degree to which that is true for me. I literally had never heard CPG before I started a pancake business.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:10:20 Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:10:20 But there's kinda 2 founding stories. That's one. That's the that's the founding story of the farmers Right. My wife and I fell in love. We love pancakes. We started selling them because we had our careers in the theater, and we didn't wanna wait tables or what have you put away some of our our peers were. So instead of working in that industry, we worked in farmers markets. And then in 2020, of course, every live theater in the world shut down overnight, which, you know, for for every industry, it was a huge deal. Yeah. For the theater, it was really the apocalypse, like it was just gone. It was not gonna go remote. We were not gonna have staff meeting on Google Meet.
Samuel Taylor - 00:10:50 Like, it was just gone. That was terrifying. And we had an eighteen month old kid, and I was learning more and more about regenerative agriculture at that time. The world was freshly revealing at off every day is breakable. And I thought to myself, you know, my kid, he was eighteen months old at the time. I thought this kid is gonna be sixteen one day, and he's gonna look at me, and he's gonna he's gonna be smart enough and old enough one day to to understand.
Samuel Taylor - 00:11:19 Like, dad, you knew about climate change, your whole damn life. Like, what did you do about it? I I want a I want a good answer for him when he asks that question. And that was really the defining moment for me when I decided, okay. I'm gonna go time on Long Table. And I'm going to I'm gonna really do this and try to build something that is scalable and much larger have a much larger, more important impact than I can by, like, recycling.
Samuel Taylor - 00:11:45 You know what I mean? And that's why the brand is called Long Table, incidentally. You know, we we sit at the table and we hand food down from from one generation to the next. We also had a world down. Right? And we wanna hand the best food and the best world down that we can.
Kyle Krull - 00:12:15 How are you? That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, that that That hit. That, like, hit home when you said that. I don't have a child. My dog's not gonna have the same sort of intentionality with that question. But that that was that was like a moment. I really appreciate it. I don't wanna deviate too far, but I also can't not ask this question from a curiosity perspective. When you were thinking about making the best pancake, why did you decide to blend popcorn. What was it about popcorn that was like, this is what I should put into a pancake.
Samuel Taylor - 00:12:44 Man, this brand has got too many stories, and this is another fun one. I didn't think I was inventing it. I thought that I had that as a kid. I thought that my friend knows dad, Barry Kirk, wonderful man. I thought that Barry used to put popcorn flower in pancakes and waffles. And they were he would make he's a he's like a chef. He's a ridiculous. Have you ever got the chance to eat at his house? You took it.
Samuel Taylor - 00:13:01 And I was like, those are the best ones. I gotta figure out how to do that. And then I I did it in the blender, and it didn't it struck me. It's like, oh, that's cool. But then when we went to farmers markets, I needed scale it up modestly. Right?
Samuel Taylor - 00:13:15 And I I talked to 7 or 8 different millers around, and they all told me, this is impossible when you're crazy, you get out of a shop. So I built a machine I I built a machine by hand that that, you know, is able to do that. And I was able to achieve some modest scale with it. I called Berry. And I was like, Barry, I figured it out. Figured out how to make popcorn flour, the stuff that you used to use to use. And berry stone cold goes was popcorn flower.
Samuel Taylor - 00:13:36 He'd never he'd never heard of it. It was a fantasy that was buried in some lizard part of my brain as a child that became real. I don't know. It's it's it's it's like magic. I don't know.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:14:02 That's incredible. What what during the pandemic or during the time off from the theater, like, what was the regenerative moment? Like, you said you were learning more about regenerative agriculture. How did that all start? Where did that come from?
Samuel Taylor - 00:14:16 It really started through getting introduced to, the artisan Grain collaborative in its early phases through some of the farmers and millers that I work I got turned on to heirloom grains and stone ground grains when I was working as an actor at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:14:35 And
Samuel Taylor - 00:14:35 I I biked five miles down to the local stone mill and I've I met Gilbert Williams, and he's a real pioneer in the field. And he just, like, stone cool. I was just trying to buy £5 of flour, and he, like, gave me a whole education and stone milling versus roller milling and the differences and and really reorganized my head about flour. So I started buying flour from him and from the farmers. He was working with. And he turned me on to the work of the Artisan Grand Collaborative. And the Artisan Grand Collaborative is an industry group of farmers, millers, bankers, chefs, dealers, brewers, producers, writers, dedicated to a regenerative grain shed in the upper Midwest.
Samuel Taylor - 00:15:07 And I started getting curious about the farms I'd already been ordering this stuff from. I started getting more educated. I started learning about it, and it totally blew my mind because I can't overstate how big a deal this was to me at the time. Like, the world is broken and breaking. And really kind of scary when you think about what does it look like a 150 years. You know?
Samuel Taylor - 00:15:37 And most industries, and most people, I think, have this apocalyptic sense in the back of their minds that kinda haunts them even if we don't like to talk about it. And and most people are trying to fight that with, like, how can we prolong that that timeline? How can we do a little bit less damage than we are doing now? Regenerative agriculture is different. You can actually flip the whole thing backwards, and you can actually say, we can actually, in this little corner of what we do in the world, we can actually turn this into a net benefit that actually starts to reclaim, and I'm prove on ground that that, we've lost in the last 100 years. I don't I know precious few things in in life that that are like that and and have that kind of promise and, you know, it's by itself is not gonna is not gonna make the world livable for the next generations.
Samuel Taylor - 00:16:28 It's part of a it's part of a patchwork you know, 5 or 6 things, we really have to get right in the next 51100 years. But it's one of them. And And if if my mania of making pancakes 5 days a week for 2 years can be a small part of a movement that is that fixes a crack or 2 in the world, it's worth it. It's worth my time.
Kyle Krull - 00:17:09 Yeah. Yeah. Same with that. That really resonates for me. And I had a similar a moment where as a consumer, there's a long period of time where I was like, okay. I need to do less harm. Maybe I'll stop eating beef. I'll stop you know, supporting the seafood industry, the the very harmful industries. And then when I realized you can support systems that not only do less harm, but can actually have, like, a net positive and made positive change. That was a light switch moment for me. I was like, this is what I wanna spend the rest of my life trying to figure out.
Kyle Krull - 00:17:31 How do we support this? So that that totally resonates with me. And, glad that you had, as, you know, same kind of moment on your end.
Samuel Taylor - 00:17:43 It Yeah. I mean, I was It was in, my folks lived in this crazy space in Chicago that we used the back half of it for a warehouse for a long time. And I was upping what used to be my mom's sewing room. She had had a lung transplant and nearly died. It was like the whole world's falling part. And I was sort of in there just in a deeply deeply bleak and hopeless time. And here come here along comes this thing.
Samuel Taylor - 00:18:01 It's like we've got this little business it has a regenerative supply chain. It's this little tiny hopeful thing in a world that that at the time was hard to find anything hopeful. And it gave me a sense of purpose through that whole long dark time. It was those couple of years before the vaccines, it it really gave me a sense of something to work for and something to do that that pointed at something hopeful. And, you know, there's there's no there's no amount of gratitude for that. There's too much for me.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:18:43 I wanna I wanna try and understand the commercial arc of all that a little bit better too. So
Samuel Taylor - 00:18:48 It's a it's a wild one. It's a bumpy ride. I'm just typing
Anthony Corsaro - 00:18:52 Let let me try let me try and top line it if I if I'm following correctly. You're doing the farmers market thing. COVID happened. My guess is you went, like, e commerce, like, you know, something that route. That's great. The Shark Tank inflection point was like 202023. And now you're doing omnichannel kind of retail and you know, brick and mortar retail and e commerce. Take us kinda through that evolution, I guess.
Samuel Taylor - 00:19:15 Yeah. So we were predominantly in farmers markets holiday gift markets, that sort of thing. We had a little bit of an online presence, but, mostly so that our existing customers could could order from skin. When 2020 happened, you know, everybody started panic buying pantry items, and we were no exception. And so we sold out of what we thought was 6 months worth of supply in about a week, which was a modest amount, you know, by anyone's standards, but guess what? All of our suppliers were also going through the same thing. And so we actually were unable to produce anything for about 7 months. We didn't like, we had to wait for the harvest. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:19:49 And we got back online, and I started going a little bit harder on Instagram and just, like, straight up sort of micro business hustle. And I was able to build the business to $90. Oh, yeah. Totally, totally tiny, by real business standards, but it was meaningful for our family. You know? And I then started getting a little bit better educated. I took some, like, founder education courses, some accelerator programs.
Samuel Taylor - 00:20:15 And I started thinking about I started realizing, oh, if you wanna really build a business and play in this world, you're gonna need capital. And I was in the middle of that thought process when who should who should call my phone, but David swimmer, America's friend, Ross, from friends, He is a fan of the pancakes. And a friend from Looking Glass Theatre where my wife and I are, artistic associates, and he's one of the founding, ensemble Wow. Okay. And he's he's loved the pancakes for years. And, it's always very nice every time I see him. And he called and he said, like, hey. How are you doing?
Samuel Taylor - 00:20:56 What if I posted about your business on Instagram?
Kyle Krull - 00:21:09 And I
Samuel Taylor - 00:21:09 was like, quick. Find out how many followers David Schummer has. It's a lot. Yeah. I was like, I don't think we have inventory for my man. And we got into a longer conversation, and he said the thing that every small business owner in the United States hears five times a day, which is you should go in Shark Tank. And every other time I heard that, I was like, Fine. Just take a number. Sure. Next. But he said you should go to Shark Tank, and I could probably get the casting director's phone number. And if you go on, I'll go on with you.
Samuel Taylor - 00:21:35 There's a whole different one. Wow. So wow. We applied and, We went through a very rigorous application process, which there's a very robust NDA that restricts for me for talking about what that process is like. But we went on and swimmer came on with us to say like, hey. These are great.
Samuel Taylor - 00:21:57 And all the sharks on that show said these are the best pancake I've ever had. Wow. There's a real feather in my cap that they did not say these are the best healthy pancakes I've ever had. These are the best whole ring pancakes I've ever these are the best high protein pancakes. We're at just like full stop. These are the best pancakes I have ever had. Oh, yeah. So we saw huge consumer response to the product. My wife came on the show. She did acrobatics.
Samuel Taylor - 00:22:18 It was a wild time. And the smart money told us, you know, if you if you really do it, if you really do well on this show, you'll walk away with a quarter $1 extra sales. And if, you know, that'll be it. If you did that, you rang the bell, you did it. You were on Shark Tank.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:22:46 Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:22:47 We did a quarter $1 in sales before the 1st commercial break. Wow. Wow. This categorically different response than wow. Food Brand C. It was kind of a perfect storm. And We had we had prepared a half a $1 worth of inventory, and we had leveraged every bit of our inheritance to do so. We had really put everything into that. And we sold out of that within 24 hours. Wow. And over the course of the next 6 weeks, we did a $1 in else. So I went from doing $90 in 1 year, and that was the most I'd done in 7 years. Yeah. To doing a $1 in 6 weeks.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:23:30 Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:23:31 If you can picture every supply chain problem that somebody would have, in that situation. I had. Yeah. And guess what? I had to figure out how to solve those problems. Because I didn't I didn't I was just me. It was just me in in my living room trying to sort it out. Miraculously, we survived. We were out of stock for 3 months. People were very patient and understanding. And we got back on and since then, you know, we were able to retain a lot of that business and generate new business.
Samuel Taylor - 00:23:59 We closed out last year at 1. Nice.
Kyle Krull - 00:24:12 Incredible.
Samuel Taylor - 00:24:14 Thank you. It was one of the most stressful wild times I'm having. Let me let me put it this way.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:24:21 When did the episode aired, Samuel?
Samuel Taylor - 00:24:23 It was in January of 2023 that aired.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:24:25 Okay. So it was, like, right at the beginning of the year. Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:24:27 Let me put it to you this I used to make a living as an actor, one of my gigs, I would fall off an eighteen foot ladder into a trap door on stage back words. Wow. Shark Tank was wilder and scarier than that.
Kyle Krull - 00:24:46 That's crazy.
Samuel Taylor - 00:24:47 And and
Kyle Krull - 00:24:48 nothing against David Swimmer, and nothing is Ross, but you didn't even have the best friends character because Joey would have sold more pancakes. You know?
Samuel Taylor - 00:24:58 That's that's a fight you're gonna have to pick with David.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:25:01 Well, we just we just lost a chance at a big donor for the new nonprofit. Thanks to Kyle's comment right there. I appreciate
Samuel Taylor - 00:25:06 that, buddy. I think I
Kyle Krull - 00:25:07 think David was a great guy. I think I think he would agree that from a character perspective, Yoy would have been the best character to sell pancakes. Now I will have that talk with him if he wants to have it, because I think, anyways, he wants friends would agree.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:25:21 I think that's probably correct.
Samuel Taylor - 00:25:25 What was I gonna say? I was gonna say something. Oh, I was gonna talk about, like, it it was transformational in so many more ways than just, like, the revenue that came in the door. We were able to really input, like, the 1st round of packaging and the round of packaging that I took on the show, like, I had literally designed by myself. And it was not great. It didn't tell a lot of stories. It was had no kind of positioning for retail at all. So we're able to invest in in a complete rebrand with a really great group here in Chicago called Sedows. They won an award for it recently for the rebrand.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:26:05 Nice.
Samuel Taylor - 00:26:07 And between between the stamp of approval from Shark Take and that rebrand, people take our phone calls now. And as anyone out there listening who who might be in a brand founding position, you know, that people taking your phone calls or not taking your phone calls. Is it I don't know. Let's call it a good 60% of, like, what gets you in the door? What gets you on the shelf is like Right. Will you even talk to me? And so that's the enormous huge gift that that gave to us is that people talk to us. Banks would talk to us.
Samuel Taylor - 00:26:33 Retailers talk to us. You know, the caliber person we're able to hire is is raised because of all that. So I'm it's absurd. And it's it's a reality television show. It's crazy, but it changed our lives, you know, and and we're enormously grateful for that opportunity.
Kyle Krull - 00:26:58 I I think it's a fantastic story so so far, and I don't wanna skip out on one of our favorite pieces to talk about, and this is, like, the agronomy. So let's get into, like, why heirloom greens are different from non heirloom grains. I love to spend a little bit of time on, like, why stone ground is different than traditionally milled just kinda get into the weeds there, if you will.
Samuel Taylor - 00:27:18 Well, I think those are 2 very different questions. Stone let's take stone ground first. And I struggle to communicate this in a succinct way because it requires a little bit of context. But stone ground is really about the quality of the product that you get. Any grain can be stone ground. It doesn't have to be grown in any particular way. The way most grains that are on shelf now are produced is, in short, pretty much most of what's good for you and tastes good about the grain is removed. And then a kind of synthetic version of those vitamins and minerals are put back into the grain. They're shelf stable.
Samuel Taylor - 00:27:48 So you get flower with a shelf life of 4 years. This is a trick and it's about convenient. It's about supply chain convenience. Right. Stone ground grains are very different without really getting into the technical differences between the mills. What goes into a stone mill comes out of the stone mill.
Samuel Taylor - 00:28:08 So you're getting a whole food. That has got all three parts of the grain, the brand, the herb, and the endosperm. The germ is the part that is responsible for a shorter shelf life, but also carries the fats which carry flavor and and has it has the flavor and it has the fats carry the flavor. The fats of the parts have a shorter shelf life.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:28:36 Interesting.
Samuel Taylor - 00:28:36 And then, of course, the brand, which is where the fiber is. Most of what can be called whole grain in this country is, some of the brand is added back. It's poorly regulated as to how much of that brand is put back. And the germ is removed and you get vitamins and minerals pumped back in. These are very different categories of food. So that's that's stone milling.
Kyle Krull - 00:29:01 Give me a quick you said you mentioned when you have the germ still in in the end product, it's got a shorter shelf lab. You mentioned 4 year for traditional What is it like when you have the drum stolen? Is that 6 months? Is that 1 year? What does that difference look like?
Samuel Taylor - 00:29:14 Yeah. We set it at about 7 months for manufacturer, and we're currently doing, scientific testing on a variety of levels to understand, is that really the correct length of time? Because, obviously, I want as long shelf life as as we can get for for the same reasons other people do. But we're that's a pretty conservative market where we're putting that. Put it in the fridge. It'll last a whole lot longer. Also, it doesn't go bad in a way that hurts you. It just, like Yeah. It starts to taste a little off.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:29:42 I mean, but that's also a significant competitive disadvantage business wise. I mean, so, like, that's the reality of that.
Samuel Taylor - 00:29:48 Yeah. Stuck is huge.
Kyle Krull - 00:29:50 Especially, like, reeducating consumers who have had pancake mix under pantry for a year or 2 or 3 to to then be like, oh, I need to put this in my fridge. Need to eat it faster. That being said, it sounds like they're so delicious consumption rate should be through the roof. You know, people will go to eating pancakes 5 days a week.
Samuel Taylor - 00:30:08 Yeah. We resized the package to be a little bit more convenient for a family to use up the whole package in 22 batches as well for that reason.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:30:16 Nice.
Kyle Krull - 00:30:18 Okay. Well, I I super appreciate the high level recap between traditional and stone ground milling. Let's get into the heirloom and regenerative grains versus traditional wheat.
Samuel Taylor - 00:30:29 Yeah. So, essentially, in the mid 20th century, we got real efficient at designing weets that would have a huge amount of yield. And this happened with all sorts of grains. Corn it happened most affiliated with, but we we can talk about wheat and corn and those are sort of the 2 big ones. It turns out that when you maximize only for yield per acre, you may be losing some other things. And you you lose a lot of things. Heirloom grains are harder to harvest. They stand taller. The the equipment that you need is a little bit, more finicky and takes more labor.
Samuel Taylor - 00:30:57 The yield per acre is less. The size of the actual grain is a little bit less. So commercially in a commodity supply chain where all you can compete on is price, they don't do as well. Which is real shame because you can get a wide variety of different flavors, baking performances, textures, out of these grains that you just can't get out of a regular grain. The difference between heirloom grains and conventional grains is the difference between an heirloom tomato and a conventional tomato. They just don't compare as far as taste and texture. Right?
Samuel Taylor - 00:31:28 How that happened is the story of chemical farming in the 20th century, and commodity farmers not having any connection to their consumers. If you as a farmer can only compete on price, your only incentive is to grow the most account. So we're trying to reestablish a connection between the farmer and the consumer, to give farmers a market for the stuff they wanna grow because heirloom grains, like heirloom tomatoes, there's a ton of varieties of them. You've got different tastes, different textures, different baking performances. And they're naturally more resilient to pests and disease where monocropping and and cropping just one kind of wheat or corn year after year, you really have to rely on some pretty high octane stuff to keep pests at bay and so forth. Heirloom grains have a lot more natural resilience particularly when you rotate them.
Samuel Taylor - 00:32:30 And when you rotate different types of things through the soil, you need less less fertilizer or no fertilizer in the soil. You need less best chemical pesticide control. It's really a whole sort of natural system. Most of the baking mix aisle in particular is really not set for that. And that's what we really bring. We are bringing farm to table sourcing and heirloom grains to the baking mix aisle, which really nobody else is doing.
Kyle Krull - 00:32:59 I love that tomato comparison for a variety of reasons, and I think it's it provides from an efficiency perspective. You know, tomato growers were optimizing, like you mentioned, yield and inability to bruise. Right? How do I get this transported from a to b without bruising so I can still, you know, sell this at a price? And what suffered was taste and nutrition. And if you end up with a big red thing filled with water, it doesn't taste like thing. Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 00:33:20 And what gets me excited about that analogy is if I think about that concept, and that's what regular pancakes are. It's a big empty watery tomato. I would love to try the heirloom version of a pancake that is full of flavor texture and quality. So that's that's a really exciting comparison.
Samuel Taylor - 00:33:38 And there's so much variety in tastes like spelt tastes different from rye, tastes different from acorn, tastes different from purple barley, tastes different from Emma Wheat, tastes different from wheat. There's, like, there's so many turkey red is a short run we just did. There's so many different kinds, and that's just wheat. There's so many different kinds of heirloom grains out there. That just brings so much more variety and delight to the table than something that somebody grew because that is what grows the most per acre. When you have the full of chemicals.
Kyle Krull - 00:34:09 Right.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:34:09 How have you decided what to use in products? Because I you're you're I think almost everything you just said. I feel like I've seen on an LOI of your of your packaging. Like, was it because the collaborative said, hey, our group of farmers are all growing this, and here's, like, a good mix, and this type of, like, biodiversity they wanna have? Like, was it working really intimate with one of those farmers? Like, how have you do how have you translated the agronomic need to the actual product innovation, you know, pipeline or whatever.
Samuel Taylor - 00:34:35 1st and foremost, it's culinary. Right? It's about achieving a balance that is satisfying and complex. And one of them really ticks the sort of brunch category. The other really ticks the lumberjack category. And those I ported over as recipes from that time that I had spent for 2 years eating pancakes 5 days a week. I came up with a bunch of recipes. Those were sort of my 2 favorites, and I retooled those for for bigger production batches. You know, for example, the popcorn flowers really gives it a depth taste and and savoriness and and really is a magic trick for the texture. The oat flour that's in that one brings real natural sweetness and mellowness to The wheat flour, it provides its structure and gives it its nostalgic taste.
Samuel Taylor - 00:35:10 The almond flour adds a little bit more sweetness and the fats in their health health flavor carry through. So that's how I built a lot of our products. That's for our core line of up SKUs. I'm really excited about the short runs that we do. So for the short runs, they're direct to consumer only because they're we do them in small batches, and they're not really suited in that way for retail, but we'll go to one farm and we'll interview that farmer and we'll go out on the field where that grain was grown. We'll do one grain from one regenerative and will feature the flavor of just that grain. So we did spell. We did a dark rye.
Samuel Taylor - 00:35:44 We did a Kernzilla pancake mix with Willdan Hughes at Wisconsin, and the perennial Promise Growers Cooperative. Kerns is a whole other cool story that we've talked about. Yeah. We did a turkey red wheat, which is the strain Turkey that everyone in your family tree going back 500 years has eaten if your family lived in a part of the world with 8 feet. And those flavors are really cool to just sort of showcase one at a time. And my hope is to get enough traction going and enough, enough sort of weight behind the brand, enough staff on hand to really crank those out and feature 25 different, you know, cranes in the 2 years.
Samuel Taylor - 00:36:16 My dream is to be able to go to a farm and say, great. We wanna buy out your whole crop. Of buckwheat rye had wheat because these things are seeded at different times and harvested at different times. We wanna tell the story of crop rotation through a series of different flavors that our customers can get on board for. We're not quite at the scale where we can really buy the whole crop from a farm in that way, but that's my dream.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:36:56 In in the weeds operational question, how many mills are you sourcing from? And is that, like, very important area kind of centralization for you to have that diversity of of ingredients.
Samuel Taylor - 00:37:08 Yeah. So mills are really the choke point of supply chain for anybody dealing in grains. Yeah. And there are 2 really excellent mills that we work with, quite heavily here in the Midwest. 1 is Chaney's Mill, which is an organic mill down in Asheville, Illinois, and the other is meadowlark, which is another organic mill, and farm They're they're both farm and mill operations, actually. And that one, Meadowark is in, Wisconsin. There's a real dearth processing and storage in particular, for heirloom grains. Because guess what? Pests don't like conventional modern grains.
Samuel Taylor - 00:37:32 They prefer the heirloom grains because they taste Wonderful.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:37:53 Yeah. Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:37:54 So there's a there's a real problem there's not enough milling and there's not enough storage, particularly cold storage for the for the existing farmers that wanna be growing these kinds of grains. If I could, Kyle, I wanna touch on something you asked about that I didn't really cover. Which is which is what are the some of the farming practices that go into here? So heirloom grains typically, have better root structures that feed that feed carbon and other nutrients into the soil than other types of grains do. There's a lot of other stuff that our farmers do that is in the regenerative lane. So they are cover cropping. They're using composting. They are not using pesticides.
Samuel Taylor - 00:38:25 They are using low or no tillage. That's really all, like, every farmer I talk to talks about soil and how do you build and maintain Yeah. Soil. And the best way that I found to talk to customers and and people at large about that is, like, you need a very diet to do
Kyle Krull - 00:38:54 well. Right.
Samuel Taylor - 00:38:55 Same is true for plants. Plants need a complex web of micronutrients and and biological sort of, you know, microphone in the soil in order to do well in order to be at their best and to give you what you need for your complex gut bio. Right? So if you were to only eat protein powder and vitamin pills, how do you think you would feel?
Anthony Corsaro - 00:39:16 Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:39:16 How do you think that would go for you? Right? Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 00:39:18 Right.
Samuel Taylor - 00:39:19 That's what we're doing to most plants. And so our farmers who are growing these more complex plants with more complex soil who are rotating them in complex ways are really creating the kind of food that your body is crying out for. And it's because they're giving the plants the kind of food that they are crying out for.
Kyle Krull - 00:39:38 I love that. And, yeah, I think the analogy and you sort of alluded to this is, like, The soil is the external digestive system for the plants. And if we don't treat that microbiome environment like we would our own gut, like we we can expect similar levels of sickness for the plant that we would in in ourselves.
Samuel Taylor - 00:39:56 Yeah. Turns out complexity and diversity is is the bedrock of health. Both for us and for the planet.
Kyle Krull - 00:40:02 Yeah. Totally. And I think as a as a society, we have spent so much time focusing on efficiency as a byproduct capitalism that we've ended up in this world where efficiency has trumped everything else. And I will fight you.
Samuel Taylor - 00:40:15 I will fight you. Here's the amazing thing. We've, like, when you when, you know, okay. So this is an analogy, Wildan Hughes gave me about conventional farming versus regenerative farming. Conventional farming is a gas tank. The soil is a tank. You put fertilizer in. You pull plants out. You put fertilizer in. You pull plants out. It gets empty. Right?
Samuel Taylor - 00:40:32 The problem with that, and this is why so many conventional farmers are starting to turn to farmers like, Harold Wilkins from Janie's farm and mill is that there's nothing left in the ground. The the yields are starting to go down and down and down on conventional grain farming in particular. Right. And so as a means of increasing yield, farmers are starting to turn to more regenerative practices. This is the long term solution to our yield problems. The long term solution to our yield problems is not more nitrogen. Right. Fight me if you want. Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 00:41:13 I'll I'll join you in that fight any day.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:41:17 Yeah. We we agree. It's like there's there's a lot of different pathways in Regen, but ultimately what's gonna stick long term is always gonna be about higher farm productivity and profitability. It just might look like a different toolkit than how that's really defined today. I mean, that's what we've seen in countless episodes and kind of what we've seen in the in the movement. I wanna pivot back to the commercial side and kind of bring it to present day of, like, What has the brick and mortar, landscape look like? How have you attacked that? Did you start regional and you're about to go nationally? Where are you at with brick and mortar? How does that playoff of ecom?
Anthony Corsaro - 00:41:45 And how does, like, the regenerative story tie into all that? So
Samuel Taylor - 00:41:58 Yeah. One of the benefits of having a had a sort of long ramp for me as a founder is that I have had time to see a lot of mistakes. And I had time to learn a lot. And there are a lot of different valleys of death where that are littered with brands, in in this space. And I'm trying to construct a strategy that is as thoughtful as possible about those. And, one of those valleys of death is chasing doors and running out of cash flow. Correct.
Samuel Taylor - 00:42:23 And so we are taking an approach to, retail growth, which is obviously the future of the business because people buy food and grocery stores. It's quite an odd and flattering thing that so many people are willing to buy a pancake mix online from us. But I understand that's not where the bulk of where we need to be is. Right. So what we are doing is we are we launched in fresh time markets, all 70 of them here in the Midwest. It was doing well in there.
Samuel Taylor - 00:42:51 And we are really learning the ropes of how to how to get consumers to notice it on shelf, how to merchandise it, where it needs to be, how to really follow through on that. And that's all. There's a lot of learning curves there, particularly when your background is in Shakespeare and puppetry.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:43:15 So it could be a distinct competitive advantage. Like, I mean, are we demoing pancakes in a Shakespeare outfit? Like, what what are we? How are you leveraging that?
Samuel Taylor - 00:43:24 Boy, that's a great question. So we are taking a we're taking a thoughtful approach to building a blueprint. For success. And so we we launched in FreshTime. We are stabilizing there and learned a lot from there. We are about to launch as soon as they can get the product from our next production run, we're about to launch in central markets in Texas. Nice. And those are 2 of our biggest, sort of clients. We are also growing in the kind of, like, boutique, bodega style business. That's a little bit easier and a little bit less cash flow intensive to sort of gains some customers there. Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 00:43:53 So I I think for us, you know, we are trying to bring as many customers to the party as possible. So we're focusing on really heavily for the next year or 2. And as we focus on that, we're building the base of people that's gonna be brand ambassadors. Excited about the product. It's gonna move it. It's gonna tell our friends about it. We're gonna launch and steer them.
Samuel Taylor - 00:44:14 And we're really syncing the data about where our customer ZIP codes down to where are they requesting us on shelf and what are the chains there that we feel we can actually support and how can we get enough of those together to open up a distribution center in that area? So for us, it's not 2 sales channels. It's one strategy. Right? Like, you need the customers and the data to understand where you can launch and how you can pull through to the people who already love your product. This is a this is a strategy that I think, you know, Grazza recently has done really well.
Samuel Taylor - 00:44:45 And and I think we've we're trying to lift a page from that book. The thing that I think is not suited to where we are at right now, as a country and as a movement with agriculture is the, like, burn through stacks of venture capital to get big fast. You know, I thought there was some really interesting data that came out this last spring that said, you know, of people of people surveyed. It was a pretty big survey. Something like 11% of people had any idea what regenerative agriculture was. Mhmm.
Samuel Taylor - 00:45:16 But of those 11%, I think it was 57% of people said they structured their surrounded. So this is a picture of a small and committed movement. Right? This is a picture of people who care and are willing to make choices differently based their values. Those people are the people who are gonna tell their friends about things. Those people are the people who give these products as gifts at holidays, at birthdays, at file say, Mother's Day. Those are our core customers right now.
Samuel Taylor - 00:45:41 There are not enough of those customers right now, to support a brand whose margins take a hit on higher pricing and whose cost is higher than their competitors on shelf. At Target. Right. There's just not enough of those people right now. So we're trying to stay with where the demand is and where the customers are. And right now, a lot of those people are D2C, and they're starting to move into place with with the advent of new certifications and so forth.
Samuel Taylor - 00:46:11 They're starting to move into Sprouts. Whole Foods, some of them sort of regional chains like a like a fresh time, like a separate markets. So we wanna follow where that is. And I I think the the we're at an inflection point where that's gonna start to grow a lot more quickly than it has in the last 5 or 10 years. But we don't wanna get ahead of that and tank the business because we ran out of cash.
Kyle Krull - 00:46:44 I think it's a super smart move from a, strategic perspective. I love what you said about starting regionally, gaining stability in those marketplaces, sticking with DTC, is it, which is a higher profit margin channel to fund some of that expansion when and where it makes sense. The intentionality, I think, is spot on. And and as a first time founder, I think you're doing a really great job in that capacity. Thanks.
Samuel Taylor - 00:47:06 I that we take I take a lesson actually from Broadway in that, which is that a number of years ago, Broadway casting directors started asking what's your social media reach and ad auditions. And, that's because you're auditioning for a a big banner Broadway show, you're not gonna get any bad actors in the door. Right? They're all gonna be cracker check. It's they're awesome. It's New York City. It's the center of the theater right, so what producers look at is who can put more butts and seats. Right? Right.
Samuel Taylor - 00:47:27 And I think retail buyers are doing the same thing. They're looking at brands and they're saying like, sure. Your product is great. There's lots of great products out there. How are you gonna move it off my shelf? What's your d what's your DTC following? What's your social media following? What's your what's your ranking like on on.
Samuel Taylor - 00:47:42 So we we understand we have to fund and and bring a lot of that to the party before we're really gonna be able to compete in in bigger retail totally
Kyle Krull - 00:47:58 makes sense. And you and you touched on this a little bit with certification you had mentioned certification a moment ago, and it's another one of those key, you know, attributes and or certifications or verifications during these conversations with buyers in senior, what are you doing differently than the rest of the category? Why are people gonna buy your product over something else? So talk to us a little bit about where you're at with certification and why you decided to take the route that you're taking.
Samuel Taylor - 00:48:19 Yeah. It's been really interesting to feel like I was 5 years ago, I was in the wilderness out way out front of where the movement was. And now I feel like, oh, dang. I gotta run to catch up. And that's an awesome feeling to feel like there's that kind of momentum and that kind of wave happening, which is really cool. I think the certifications are really key for establishing differentiation. They're really key to combat and greenwashing, and I think they're really key to building the kind of visual marker on shelf, the person who's got a two year old who's losing their mind in their grocery cart. To be able to sort of see and recognize quickly.
Samuel Taylor - 00:48:55 Like, you know, super key because it's a complex conversation and once someone has taken the time to understand some of the complex for generative agriculture. The reality of shopping is that you need an indicator you can you can trust in within a second. You know? So I'm really excited about all the new certifications coming out. We have certainly settled on the certification that we are gonna suing. We have a memorandum of understanding as far as shifting over our supply chain to regenafied. It takes a little different approach.
Samuel Taylor - 00:49:22 And I think the biggest one that has made the most noise in the space has been, you know, regenerative organic certified. I think they're 2 subtly different, approaches to, yeah, to regenerative agriculture. And I think there's space for both. I think they're both super valid. My value system and how I view systemic change pushes me towards one more than the other. And I feel like building on top of organic certification is a great marker of of, top of the line quality and tip of this beer as far as, like, we are the stand standard bearers for the highest, standard.
Samuel Taylor - 00:49:53 It doesn't create an easy on wrap for farmers who have been farming conventionally and wanna do the work. They have they see quality of their soil degree, and they have kids, they have these concerns. They wanna get on the boat. REGENIFY is a really interesting structure in the you can get on the boat and start using the certification when you have started that process. And in order to keep the certification, you have to continue improving until you have really arrived at where you wanna go. And if you backslide or if you don't make progress, you lose the certification.
Samuel Taylor - 00:50:36 This to me is a really compelling model for bringing more and more and more acres into the system more swiftly. I think there's room for both and both serve a function. The thing that I really hate to see would be for the conversation to focus only on consumer health and wellness. I think there's folks out there now who are talking about regenerative as a means of, as as kind of a a health optimization and wellness phenomenon only. I think in the same way that, like, non GMO foods are safe to eat, even if they're frequently tasteless and not very good and so forth, but they are safe to eat as a person. The problem is not that they are unsafe. The problem is that they are evil.
Samuel Taylor - 00:51:33 In the same way, I think there's a complexity to the regenerative question where they those foods are better for you and do have better nutrients value, and do avoid all sorts of toxic chemicals and things that we don't want in our bodies. Mhmm. We also don't want those in our in our global system. Right. So if if the movement is unable to address things systemically, then then we will carve out a new and interesting way wealthy people, being able to sort of further their health advantage that they have over less advantaged people. If on the other hand, we get the bigger players involved and we create an on ramp for cargill for Monsanto we create an on rep for farmers who've been farming in that way for the last generation, we stand a chance at really leaving the land a little better for the next generation.
Samuel Taylor - 00:52:17 On a systemic level.
Kyle Krull - 00:52:35 Thank you, spot on. And we've talked about this a lot on the pod. You know, just, depending on who you ask, you know, December will change, but it's roughly 98.4% of and in the world is not organic. And to your point, if you if you set the bar that in order to become regenerative, you have to start at organic, you're gonna make a fraction of that you know, less than 2% of of arable land better. And from an impact perspective, like, it's not gonna help that many people. It's not gonna help that much You know, and I think that you're thinking about this the way the AC and I think about this. This is a movement, and it's about transitioning the acreage rather than making an extra ultra premium for the very few who can afford that. Right?
Kyle Krull - 00:53:06 So
Samuel Taylor - 00:53:15 I think the thing that the thing that complicates that for me is the people who are on that leading edge are effectively the incubating chamber, that educates the rest of the world about that kind of agronomy. Right? Like, we wouldn't have this conversation about being able to translate huge amounts of hectares to to, regenerative if in this in the early sixties, people had said, like, it's not worth it to invest in organic farming. It's, there's no knowledge. It's just such a tiny sliver. Like, we need those people out on that front. We also need much faster quantities of of of farmland to to convert if we're to make any difference for our great grandkids. Mhmm. Yeah.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:53:58 It's a both hand. You said it really well. Right? And there's even more than those 2 certification programs that we feel like
Samuel Taylor - 00:54:04 you're gonna see at
Anthony Corsaro - 00:54:05 the table and and have value as well. And, ultimately, you know, translating it into consumer claims is not always equal to just doing that positive work on the ground not all the net positive work on the ground needs to get translated into a consumer claim. Yeah. And we also need to protect the consumer claims that are legit and meaningful to those businesses and those farmers and those supply
Samuel Taylor - 00:54:25 So This is exactly the conversation I have with my farmers.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:54:29 Yeah. It's it's dense. Right? And it's multifaceted and it's complex. I will push back
Samuel Taylor - 00:54:36 on the
Anthony Corsaro - 00:54:37 wellness thing just
Samuel Taylor - 00:54:38 real quick. Please do. Please do.
Anthony Corsaro - 00:54:40 Which I you're I I agree with your your overall point. And I think it's it's, once again, a both end of like, what do we know works right now? We know premium products that have a health and wellness benefit Like, that is the playbook. And that's the play we need to run with because it's the playbook that's gonna allow commercial success that we need these enterprises to have so they can continue to source this way. And it might not be what gets us all the way home. Right? So
Samuel Taylor - 00:55:03 yeah. I think this is where my sort of heart nose business sense starts come in, which is that people buy products because it's better for them. Right? People buy products because it tastes better because it's healthier for them. That is a really important angle, and it's true. About regenerative agriculture foods. Right? The only thing I don't wanna I just don't wanna lose sight of the fact that it is you and it is the people who don't yet live on the planet, but will. We need to be watching out for both of those far.
Kyle Krull - 00:55:34 Mhmm. Yeah. And if if the gateway in is the self interested market attributes, and then there's that loyalty piece after the fact where you also learn because you you've you're making your pancakes, you're in your pancakes, the Long Table bags, sitting on the table, you know, whatever. And you're reading, like, oh, this also has an environmental impact in a positive way. Like, that's really hard to give you that loyalty piece once they've gotten to, trial. Right?
Samuel Taylor - 00:55:56 Yeah. So let me, you know, I feel like I particularly in this kind of environment where we're talking about region, it can sound like our, like, long tables of brand is all about region. This is all that we do. In fact, Like, you kinda gotta go 1 or 2 layers deep into the brand before you really get to this stuff. You gotta be on our email list before you really get And even then, you're gonna get a short blurb about that. And if you click through to the blog entry about that, you're gonna get more detail. If you wanna listen to the in interview with the farmer, that's accessible.
Samuel Taylor - 00:56:17 To you. But, listen, it's not really the front of the bag. The front of the bag is whimsical is delightful, gives you a sense of craft quality, tells you how much protein and how much fiber in there. I know that that's what people are buying when they're looking at the front of the bag. What I wanna make sure is that when they flip the bag over, if they go into the rabbit hole, we want them to understand that there really is something because those are the people that are gonna talk about it to their friends. So it's a it's a staged sort of response and, you know, We did not get an investment on Shark Tank and Mark Cuban went out because he said, you're too focused on the values and not enough on the business.
Samuel Taylor - 00:56:46 And and I'm gonna I'm gonna at you right now, Mark Cuban. The the only way to achieve the values of this business is to be commercially successful and to grow very big. And I think that the values that I have that makes me care about more than just financial return on this business they actually they don't they don't divert my focus. They they create a stronger sense of focus on how does this actually move and transform? And the way that it moves and transforms is clearly by being a better product by solving a problem for a customer and to speaking to their values.
Kyle Krull - 00:57:32 And for being the most delicious pancake makes that anybody on that show's ever tried. Right?
Samuel Taylor - 00:57:37 More than just that show, my friend, more than just that show. I made over a 1 tiny pancake in farmers markets in the over the years. So I got to talk to a lot of customers. And my favorite response was always people, like, taking it and going like, I'm gonna try this. And then going, What? What? What's in that? Like, I would love it when people would get mad about how good it was. Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 00:58:01 So so we've talked a lot about how we got to where we are today. You've also mentioned all these different varieties available in grains, and I'm just curious from, like, a future perspective. We talked a little bit about, you know, such a market coming on board, a little bit of strategy there, but what is in the immediate future, for long tailwind? Is it more SKUs? Is it focusing more with corrugating distribution. What are you focusing on for maybe, like, the next 1 to 3 years?
Samuel Taylor - 00:58:25 Yeah. Great question. We're gonna continue to rotate in new grains partly as a testing ground for which of these do best and which of these might be suitable for retail.
Kyle Krull - 00:58:34 It started to interrupt you immediately, but when you say you wrote it in Newgrange, is that changing the existing formula, or is that, like, bringing in, a seasonal, rotational SKU. What does that look like?
Samuel Taylor - 00:58:42 That's it. So we have a short run program where, we've done about 3 or 4 a year for the last couple of years where we go out to the farm and we feature the work of one farmer and one grain from that farm. And we tell that story, and we we showcase that flavor in that story. That's a really great incubating ground for us to understand what are the next products that people really respond to, what are the next products that we might wanna bring in retail. And so that's that's kind of our incubation lab there for new SKUs in the Pink and Waffle department. We see a lot of avenues for growth long term for us, the short term goals of growth for us are the most critical to get right in order to make it possible for us to expand in the long term and other things. Long term, you know, there's no reason why we can't move into other types of foods. It's who, ready to eat snack foods.
Samuel Taylor - 00:59:23 They're be they'll still built on heirloom grains etcetera. In the meantime, there's a lot of runway left for us in our core skews that we already have. We've actually got a ton more retailers asking us when we can launch, then we can afford to support now. We've we have just barely begun to scratch the surface of what's possible to do on Amazon. We have just barely begun to scratch the surface of what's possible to do like, paid customer acquisition, really advertising and marketing in that, like, real, hard nosed ecom way. In order to do all that stuff, it's time for us to to bring capital in the door for the first time.
Samuel Taylor - 00:59:57 You know, I I I started the business with $5000 and that's the only capital that's really ever gone into the business outside of some debt. So and we, you know, we're fortunate to have grown from that to a one $700 brand. Right? Yeah. But the time is now and the time is right for us to to take on bigger opportunities that are that are profitable, but not cash flow positive for a while. Right? So I'm in the middle of my first ever round of fundraising, which is this is an exciting and mentally bruising process. Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 01:00:26 And that's that's a big avenue for runway. Another really big avenue for us that I'm really excited about is brand partnerships with like minded brands who are working in the same space, and being able to bring, you know, co branded products and and product packages that are, you know, one thing from us, one thing from another person into the direct to consumer space, bring people a little variety, a little bit more for them to order from us, introduce them to a a like minded brand whose products are also gonna love. That's gonna be great for us. And then The other thing that we will continue to do, and I hope we get to do with more speed and turns into a proper subscription program is those short run programs. So featuring the work of individual farmers really telling their stories, documenting them, adding complexity and depth to the for people who want it about regenerative agriculture and for people who just want more variety and flavor in their life, deliver you that too. There is, I think, a food service play that's possible for us, but probably not in the immediate near future.
Samuel Taylor - 01:01:29 You know, popcorn flower is such a magic trick, and we're the only people who do it, that we'd be mad not to consider at some point. Putting that out into the world as a thing that you can make in your diner as a thing that you can make in your brunch spot. Logistically, the minimums that we have to hit in order to make that commercially viable, quite high. And you need somebody on staff who really speaks that language who can really push sales in that We're a team of 3 people right now. So that's one of the valleys of death chasing shiny objects for founders. There's like, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do the other Right.
Samuel Taylor - 01:02:03 We're gonna focus on what our customers want, which is variety, and we're gonna focus on, what the retailers want, which is consistency and moving option off.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:02:19 Super, this has been an awesome episode, man. Love what you're up to. Super informative, super fun. Lots of great stories.
Samuel Taylor - 01:02:25 I'm such an admirer of what you've built in terms of bringing people together to have complex conversation about this and provide a space to really connect the dots between the values that drive a really necessary movement. And the things that people can buy to be a part of that movement. They they are so intimately connected and it's it's so hard to connect those dots. And I I think you guys have done a really amazing job doing that for people. Thank you. Thank you. Super
Kyle Krull - 01:02:50 appreciate that, man.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:02:52 Good good segue into the final question. And really interesting to say this is episode 80. So we've had quite a few answers to this one at this point, which is crazy to to to think about. But we'd love to get your take on it, which is how do we get regen brands at 50% market share by 2050?
Samuel Taylor - 01:03:12 What a beautiful goal. An amazing thing. I think we are in the opening moves of a chess game, and the opening moves have to do with brands like Long Table and other brands that you've had on this podcast being a lot more successful than their years. And I think that will attract the attention of the bigger players. And we really need to get those bigger players on board, and we need to prove that they should get on board by outpacing them. In order to do that, there's probably a a complex web of things that need to happen. 1 is processing and and supply chain sort of developments that are happening and need to be better funded and better organized. Another is better financing for regenerative brands.
Samuel Taylor - 01:03:52 I think to put it bluntly, the people who invest are rich people, Yeah. And I genuinely think that rich people wanna sleep at night too.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:04:21 Yeah.
Samuel Taylor - 01:04:21 And I think we need as brands to present to them the strong case that it is not a choice between return on investment and being able to sleep at night. We need to give them both, and there needs to be a better community of, of interconnected values minded founders out there. Who are giving each other introductions and who are passionately making that case to one another. That's, I think, where we're at now. That may be my my experience of that may be colored by the fact that I'm in the middle of a fundraise. It may not be the most critical thing. But we live in America, baby. And America runs on money, and money is the juice that makes the engine go.
Samuel Taylor - 01:05:01 We need more of the juice in the engine, and we need this. The supply chain is the engine. Supply chain and brands are are the engine. And we need to fund them properly, and then we need to get faster and better and tastier than the competition, and then they'll take notice. And then they will catch up. And then it will be on shelf at Walmart And Costco because That's where people spend the money on the food.
Samuel Taylor - 01:05:26 It was Walmart in Costco.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:05:36 Yeah. Yep. And you're right. On the financial pieces, I mean, that's basically what we're gonna try and work on with Regent Brands Capital, which we'll share a lot more about here soon. But, yeah, it's been a huge been a huge theme hyper validated by all the episodes and all the conversations we've had that the the capital is not there and also the financial products are not there for brands. That are gonna lead to the outcomes that we all desire. So it's it's yes, that community and that capital and is also the financial products and the strategies that we're using, because right now, they're not you know, they're not working.
Samuel Taylor - 01:06:11 Yeah. And I think, you know, the financial instruments that exist right now can be repurposed into this world in in a way that work for everyone. But they are, you know, the the tech boom and the and the sort of app boom taught investors how to think about investing in a way that's fundamentally disconnected from food. Right? Like, it's disconnected from reality.
Kyle Krull - 01:06:35 Especially regenerative food.
Samuel Taylor - 01:06:37 Yeah. It's like you can't you can't do that stuff overnight the way that you can scale the number of users you have on an by sliding a an advertising budget up. It just doesn't work that way. And the financial instruments all assume that it does. And so there are poor fit there's a lot better minds than I out there who who understand how to work those financial instruments in in a better and deeper way. I feel the struggle talking to investors about mismatched expectations. I am not the person who's gonna give you that solution. I am the person who will use that solution.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:14 Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Krull - 01:07:16 Wait a minute. Super appreciate the time. This has been fascinating. I I've really enjoyed conversation. Wanna point all of our listeners to longtablepancakes.com, where in the middle of the episode, during one of your I don't wanna call it a monologue about pancakes, but one of your your your pancakes Soliquis. I would say That's it.
Samuel Taylor - 01:07:38 I will take Aria as well if you wanna suggest Aria.
Kyle Krull - 01:07:41 You know, I honestly don't even know what that means, but I'll I'll take
Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:43 a look.
Samuel Taylor - 01:07:43 I've never heard that word.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:07:46 Kyle and I are our
Samuel Taylor - 01:07:47 uncultured, Samuel. We're not, you know, fun fun projects. Look look it up.
Kyle Krull - 01:07:51 We're we're not fermented. But long story short, I bought the variety pack while we were on the episode, and I was thrilled that via Prime, I get it delivered tomorrow. So I'm gonna enjoy these pancakes over the weekend for the first time, and I'm also gonna buy shout out to one of my best friends, Taylor, who he is a pancake feed. I cannot wait to send him a package, to to hear what he has to say. So, long term mickey.com, check it out.
Samuel Taylor - 01:08:18 Here's our mark for quality. Sure. It's good. Would you service your own mother on mother's day? If it's that good, it's good enough to go in a bag. It's not that good. We don't ship it.
Kyle Krull - 01:08:30 Oh, yeah.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:08:31 Oh, yeah. Thank you, Samuel. This has been awesome, man.
Samuel Taylor - 01:08:33 Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Anthony Corsaro - 01:08:38 For show notes, episode transcripts, and more information on our guests and what we discuss in 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 5 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, or all of our episodes with both video and audio. The best way to support our work is to give us a 5 star rating on your favorite podcast platform subscribe to future episodes and share the show with your friends. Thanks for tuning in to The ReGen Brands Podcast, brought to you by the Regent Coalition an Outlaw Ventures. We hope you learned 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.