Regenerative farming is a system that should be practiced by more CPG brands. Philosopher Foods is doing just that! With regenerative farming, they are sourcing from regenerative organic certified orchards. The founder, CEO, and Owner, Tim Richards, believes in teaching people about the importance of sprouted food and how it can help you live a healthier life. Join Elliot Begoun as he talks to Tim about the importance of regenerative farming. Discover how he does it over there at Philosopher Foods and what benefits you can get from it. Find out how he is trying to change the CPG industry to make it more organic and healthier for people.

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Listen to the podcast here

Behind The Regenerative Process Of Philosopher Foods With Tim Richards

I am here with Tim. We are going to talk about all things nut butter, regenerative farming, sprouting, and being cool overall. Before I turn it over to him to have him introduce himself and tell a bit about his brand, my normal couple of commercials. Start with the TIG Collective. The reality in this industry is that the journey is a tough one.

Being surrounded by people who can help you avoid some of the pitfalls and minefields, who can open a few doors, and knock down a few walls, can make all the difference in your route to success. Additionally, it makes it a little less lonely. More importantly, if you learn early on how to effectively extract the most value you can from advisors and eventually, board members, you will be able to tap into and leverage that wisdom to force multiply the business.

The TIG Collective was established to do that for early-stage entrepreneurs but also while simultaneously providing an opportunity primarily for women in BIPOC and LGBTQ+. Also, middle-aged White dudes like me who want board opportunities and to learn and hone the craft of becoming a board member, taking their hard-fought years of knowledge and wisdom that they’ve gained along the way. Putting it to use to help and empower others. The Collective gives them that platform to learn about things like governance and fiduciary responsibility and helps entrepreneurs prepare to be more effective with their advisors.

Everybody shares, and all the advisors share in the aggregate upside of the Collective. It’s a cool thing. If you are somebody who’s got a lot of experience in this industry and wants to give back, learn, hone the craft, and position themselves to be a potential board member, please reach out to any of us at TIG Brands. If you are an entrepreneur and want to have the support of amazing advisors who can make shit happen, do the same.

Commercial number two is the TIG Venture Community. Here’s the reality, the bottom line is this, I love venture funds. I appreciate the typical VC but what I see happening out there is, let’s find that grand slam or maybe even more so, let’s find that walk-off grand slam in game seven of the world series. In search of that one brand that can make it all happen, most are stepping over countless brands that can become EBITDA and cashflow positive, grow to optionality, and fill a need or void in the marketplace.

There’s a way to fund those brands. There’s a way to fund those entrepreneurs that not only helps those entrepreneurs get to self-sufficiency or at least optionality, and by optionality, I mean having the opportunity to either choose to go venture, become bankable, self-reliant or maybe have PE come in and take a majority stake.

You have to get so far to have those options. You have to fund those brands that get there. TIG Venture Community is all about doing that. We are about the singles and the doubles. We are about putting money to work to help brands bridge that chasm that gets them somewhere between that early stage and optionality and does it in a way that shows LPs the kind of return that they would want and expect from an investment.

We do it creatively. We do it through a rolling fund, which allows LPs to subscribe and change their subscription levels on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It’s inherently flexible for LPs. It’s friendly for entrepreneurs. It makes a difference and makes money. If you are interested in becoming an investor in the TIG Venture Community, reach out to any of us at TIG Brands, and we will be happy to chat more. My commercials are done. Everyone can wake back up and shake off the cobwebs.

I’m going to turn it over to Tim Richards. He’s going to talk a little bit about his journey. It has been a different one. He has been doing this now for a while. He’s passionate about it. He has been willing to truly do the heavy lifting and the hard work because he wants to see brands and products come to market that is done right by people, the planet, and profit. Tim, take it over. Tell everybody a bit about you, your background, and Philosopher Foods.

Thanks, Elliot. I appreciate your thought leadership in the industry. I somehow got your email list back in 2014 after Expo West. I have been reading and loving your mind’s productions ever since then. I’m happy to be working together now in your Tardigrade program and helping us take this thing to the next level. I’m Tim Richards. I’m the Founder, Owner, and CEO of Philosopher Foods.

We got into the CPG business way back in 2013. It’s interesting. I was talking to another CEO that has been at it for 40 years and he said, “The first ten years are the hardest. It doesn’t get any easier.” I can relate. Year nine has been the hardest one yet. It’s the first year we haven’t organically grown over the prior year, at least not to date. A lot of big challenges, a co-packer failing, and a lot of turnovers with sea-level staff. We have been in it this year. We are here to metamorphize into a tardigrade, weather the storm of the downturn that we have been in, and come out the other side resilient, capital, efficient, profitable, and nimble.

You are all those things and have been. First of all, you don’t make it nine years if you are not. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of 2013. Why did you start this? What was the genesis of the idea? Why did that idea germinate? How did you then take from an idea? Why did you take it that either of those is fine, from idea to reality?

I was essentially in between careers. I was 25 years old, trying to figure out my life and how to make money in the world in a way that aligned with my values and my vision. I was in the environmental activism world previously and worked in environmental nonprofits. You wanted to make a living in a way that was more effective than what I was seeing at the governmental level and the nonprofit level.

I was studying to be a Holistic Health Coach of all things. I learned about sprouting as a part of this program and how it makes any nut screen seeds or beans that you sprout. It makes them more digestible, more nutritious, and even sometimes sweeter. I remembered that I had been doing this in college.

I was a raw foodist. I used to sprout almonds, dehydrate them, make nut milk, and things like that. I busted out my dehydrator and sprouted some almonds again. It was the best almonds I would ever have, super sweet and crunchy after dehydration. I thought to myself, “This would make an amazing almond butter.” I ended up grinding it into nut butter.

Indeed, it was the best almond butter I had ever had in my life. I started making it for myself and my housemates and perfecting the recipe. I was eventually forced into becoming an entrepreneur when my housemate shoved some cash into my hand and said, “I want to buy your almond butter. You need to make this a business. This is the best nut butter I’ve ever had.”

I felt some chills. I was like, “This is something here.” Long story short, year becomes 2013, California passes the Homemade Food Act. I realized that I could start this business in my home kitchen for $150. That’s exactly what I did. I announced it on the email list. The next day, I got a bunch of orders. They’ve never stopped coming.

When you confronted that realization, when you confronted that, “This could be a business,” there’s usually a gap between that thought being impregnated in your brain, and it becomes a reality. How long was that? How did you take that from, “They are right. It could be a business. How do I turn this into a business?” What was the time lapse there? What was the process like?

To be honest, I never thought about the business aspect. I’ve made my first batch of sprouted almond butter in September 2012. I launched the business in April 2013. It was only about seven months of germination period. What did it do for me? I gave you the worldly version, the piece that I left out is the Cosmo vision that I had. I was in this deep questioning about how to align a career with my vision and values. Up to that point, I had three major threads in my life being a thinker. I was a Philosophy major in college, an activist, and also a foodie. I was meditating for a year on how to tile that together into a career.

One night, I was meditating next to my bed and got a download from the universe. It was like, “Your life’s purpose at this time is to start a sprouted almond butter company, to teach people about the importance of sprouted food, and also, to change the way that food is grown from degenerative monocultures to regenerative polycultures.” I had this three-hour what I describe as a download from the universe. I could clearly see the next five years of my life. I got all kinds of visuals and visions of it all unfolding. I almost got operating instructions. Not a business plan, unfortunately, but a trajectory that I saw. I felt strongly that I knew the next day that I had to act on this. I literally started acting on it the next day.

That’s remarkable and rare. A lot of people are sent signals, I believe. It takes slowing down, being willing to receive those signals, and listening to what is being sent to you. Also, the rarer of things is then still willing to act on them. I’m going to change topics slightly and say you have been doing this for several years. If you could go back to the early days and give yourself a piece of wisdom, a little bit of advice, something that would have been helpful along the way, can you think of something that you would’ve liked to have known?

I probably would’ve liked to have known more about the food business. If I did, I might not have acted swiftly. I was following my inspiration and my heart. You can’t fault me for that if I had maybe taken an MBA course or some food business crash course. I have been good about the mission, vision, and values, making the best food, and trying to make the most delicious, nutritious, ethical, and ecological nut butter on the market.

I believe I’ve succeeded in that but didn’t always focus so much on the nuts and bolts of the business. Either studying that myself or bringing on a cofounder who had that MBA-type skillset, more analytical side, financial side, and managerial side would have been useful. It has been a long learning curve. I feel like I’m better at it now. I still need to learn that no margin, no mission.

You can’t save the world unless you have a sustainable business. That’s hard. I also think the reality is that I have been doing this now for many years. I will say in complete honesty, and have often, that I still spend far more of my time as a student than I do as a teacher. That’s natural. It’s difficult to arrive at a place where you feel like you understand, 1) Because there’s so much to learn in this business. 2) As you begin to get close to it, things change.

Consumer behaviors change. New platforms, channels, and new ways of transacting business appear, and always being a student. You have been taking a crash course. It happens to be a nine-year-long crash course. How did you first get passionate about regenerative ag? Was there something around where you are living? Was it something in family history? Why did the passion land there?

For me, it started with permaculture. I was studying permaculture back in 2010 and essentially learned how to try to design human systems modeled after natural systems, making those two systems meet in a more harmonious and mutually beneficial way. The word for regenerative ag back then was permaculture. I was calling it permaculture orchards at the time. I wanted to create a supply chain of permaculture orchards. I was living in Davis. Davis is central to the monoculture almond world.

There are lots of orchards with rows and rows of almond trees with nothing else growing, bare soil, pretty chemically intensive system. I was seeing that all around me and was aware that that was a template that was designed by the human mind to work well economically but it was not designed with regard to the way that nature and ecology or even biology operates.

We are wanting to take more inspiration from the living world in the way that we design our human systems, our economic systems, and our agricultural systems. I joke that I had an almond tree outside my window where I was living when I got to download. It might have had something to do with me receiving that whole transmission.

I was passionate about environmentalism. Sustainability was a big thing back then before regeneration. That was all part of it. Also, I grew up eighteen years on the standard American diet. I had no idea about any of this stuff. In college, I started unraveling the fact that I hadn’t known about chemical use in food or artificial sweeteners, preservatives, dyes, and sugars. I didn’t know any of that stuff until I was eighteen.

In college, I started to learn about all that. I changed my diet. I describe it as the portal to the transformation of my consciousness. As I was changing my diet to be more organic, I started noticing differences in how I felt, how I looked, how I thought, and how I saw, both literally and metaphorically. When I was having this dietary awakening, it was profound for me. Growing up, I didn’t know anything about food. Part of our mission is no dye foods. That’s something that we trademarked because I believe that everyone in America should have the privilege of having the cleanest, most nutrient-dense food that helps them thrive as living organisms. I didn’t.

It created a lot of health problems for me. I was overweight. I had acne. I was depressed. All that started to shift when I changed my diet. Part of what we are trying to do for people has unlocked a new level of flourishing for them through diet. Also, by extension, flourishing for the planet around us through the agricultural systems.

As you changed your diet at that age, was it a hard left? Tell me the evolution of that. Is your diet now the same as it was when you were eighteen or is that evolved, too?

It’s evolved. I accidentally went vegetarian when I first got to college and noticed I felt lighter and clearer. I was like, “Interesting.” I became organic. I felt better as well.

Organic and vegetarian or just organic?

It’s both. I went down the vegan route. I went down the raw vegan route. I kept experimenting with my diet and noticing different effects with every type of diet that I was practicing. Eventually, after about four years on the vegan diet, I started to feel depleted cognitively. I started eating fish again and noticed that when I ate the fish, I had this feeling of euphoria. I felt my brain literally electrically light up and realized that I was possibly starving myself of some key Omega-3 fatty acids that our bodies can’t metabolize on their own naturally.

To this day, I’m 100% organic. I try to eat as locally as possible but am much more of a conscious omnivore than any particular type of diet. As long as it’s organic and has no refined sugar, I try to avoid gluten. That’s pretty much where I’m at. It’s working well for me. I don’t think I could do this journey without that kind of fatty, protein-heavy animal food. That’s where I’m at with it.

We’ve tribalized diets in many ways. To some degree, that tribalization of diets is a chicken and egg thing. I apologize for that analogy to my fellow vegans. The reality is, by tribalizing, we’ve mobilized consumers, whether we did that first to mobilize consumers or whether the consumers mobilized the tribalization on the shelf.

If you step away from that, most people look at it like you, their fingers pointing at the moon. There are a bunch of different ways to do it. Michael Pollan is the one who simplified it the most and most accurately, which is, “Eat whole foods. Mostly plants. Not too much.” If you fall within those guardrails, you are likely to be okay, especially if you are eating organic.

One of the heavier weights on the shoulders of the brand for you is that you are not only educating about the brand and the nutritive benefits of the brand, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you are also educating consumers that one of the best forms of being an activist is being choiceful in the food that you eat. One of the biggest ways we, as consumers, can make an impact is through our diets, in terms of an impact on the climate or social justice.

An impact is through our diet because we do it every single day, at least three times a day. We can have a big impact on everything. That’s a lot for what you and the brand stand for. That’s a heavy burden to shoulder. How do you have that conversation through the brand? How are you hoping to have that conversation through the brand?

We are focused on communicating the message of our many value ads. It’s a lot to talk about because there are a lot of them but it boils down to regenerative farming and craft processing. Those are the two main methodologies that we are employing to value add for our products. On the farming side with regenerative farming, we are sourcing from regenerative organic certified orchards, which is a new certification that’s 1 of the 2 gold standards for regenerative agriculture.

It has USDA organic as a baseline, and then it goes beyond that to include measures of soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. It’s organic, soil, animal, and fair trade all wound up into one certification. That has profound benefits for all kinds of stakeholders. One peer-reviewed study that we are aware of concluded that regenerative almond farming might move the needle on several global planetary issues, including climate change, human health crises, farmer community decline, human health decline, and nutrient decline. It’s the solve for pattern system for a lot of our global crises that are converging. It can move the needle on all of them. We want to start getting that message out, that research out and helping people understand the science behind how this is holistically better for everything.

That’s the battle. You and I have to figure this out as we grow. How do you do that on a shelf when most consumers are making decisions 3 feet in 3 seconds? It’s interesting to me. Many people are aspirational eaters. You talk to most people, and few of them say, “I don’t give a shit about the climate. I don’t care. I’m going to eat what tastes good.” Most people say, “No, I eat healthily. I try to eat environmentally friendly. I’m all that stuff.” They have that conversation, and they pull into the drive-thru at Raising Cane’s or stop and get some type of processed food that does nothing.

How do you do that? I’m sure that’s the question that keeps you up at night. “How do you effectively lead that conversation?” You are not going to necessarily be able to move the masses. It’s about trying to find the evangelical few. “How do you find and reach those evangelical few?” I’m not asking for you to answer that question because if you could, we would be doing it. That’s the question we keep asking ourselves collectively. “How do we do that effectively and affordably?” They are there.

They want that. Not all consumers but those activist-minded consumers want it but in a way, the industry conspires against it and makes it harder because our price points look different, our messaging, and our velocity are different because of all those things. Yet, those consumers want it, and those retailers say they need it but when we look at it and take it away from all of that and say, “Here’s a product on the shelf. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t work like the other products.”

You said it best when you said we are trying to sell Ferrari in a Hyundai dealership when we are trying to sell our product on the stores of most grocery stores with the exception of the Erewhons, the Jimbos, and maybe some Whole Foods accounts like that. We are ultra-premium. We are four times almost the price per ounce of the category leader, Justin’s Almond Butter. Our challenge as a brand is to say, “We are never going to win on price per ounce. It’s not going to going to happen. It’s too expensive to do all the value ads that we are doing.” What we need to do, I believe, and this might be naive, is quantify other things per ounce.

How about the nutrients per ounce? For example, with regenerative almond farming, it has been found that the magnesium content is, on average, at least 13% higher in regeneratively farmed almonds than in conventionally farmed almonds. We have X amount of magnesium per ounce compared to Justin’s. How many jars of Justin’s do you need to eat to get an equivalent amount of magnesium from our product? If we start, for example, quantifying nutrients per ounce, and this has to go beyond the nutrition facts panel, we have a whole diatribe about that. Essentially, that’s only telling us thirteen macronutrients that we need to survive.

It’s not getting into the thousands of micronutrients and phytochemicals that we need to thrive. We are not fighting a fair fight in terms of even the nutrition facts panel because it’s not telling the full story. Often, it’s not even telling the story about the product that’s inside the jar. It’s simply reporting national averages for a given type of crop like almonds.

Also, it continues to reinforce this concept, in my opinion, of us being reduction oriented. In other words, we reduce the impact of nutrients as separate from the whole. The truth of the matter is that most phytonutrients work in a holistic system. They work as the sum of parts and extract them. When you read the fact panel, you think, “All I have to do is hit these macros. I can do it independently.” That’s true. From a consumer standpoint, being able to educate them on the nutrient density, the benefit, and what they are doing is about surviving and thriving but it’s not just them. It’s also our plan.

It’s both sides of it. It’s also talking about the fact that if we don’t shift the way we grow our food, farm our food, and get our food to the way that’s more compatible with our planet, then we are not going to have a planet, let alone food. That parts one aspect of the message but then you’ve got the retailers to convince, too, to give you the shelf space to put something on the shelf.

Often, and I’m going to use this as a teachable moment for those reading that we have to remember that the consumer message and the reason why are sometimes different and often different than the retailer’s reason. We come and talk to retailers about why consumers want this product but we have to also tell the retailers why they do.

One of the reasons they do, in my opinion, and for all of you that are doing things like Tim and philosophers, is that it’s accretive to the category. Those activist eaters, whether they are activists from a climate standpoint or are activists because of their health or both, they are not going to buy anything in that category. They are not going to buy Justin’s. What they will do is walk by. When there are products like yours on that shelf, then suddenly, you are giving them something to buy, which is a creative incremental to the category, a new opportunity, a new consumer. That’s music to the ear of a retailer.

Plus, putting a product that’s 4X the average nearest competitor is appreciably more gross profit for that retailer per purchase. The reality is that you can sell four times fewer units than Justin’s and still make the retailer the same penny profit. We have to learn how to advocate both sides of that story. We must learn how to talk about what consumers want, hope, look for, need, demand, and aspire for.

We also have to talk about the economics and the things that matter to the category managers and the retailers. Shifting focus a little bit, one of the things that you have been involved with over this journey is raising capital. You are raising capital again for something that looks different than a functional beverage or the next salty snack. You are raising something that has a considerably different ramp-up and so forth.

We are about halfway to our goal. We launched on Wefunder, which has been helpful towards accelerating our goal. It has been an interesting fundraising journey because, so far, all the money that we’ve gotten has been from Angels, impact investors, customers, and people on Wefunder. It has been a tough sell to the CPG investors to date.

It’s interesting because, as a regenerative CPG company, we are straddling two different worlds of investors. There are regenerative-minded investors. Interestingly, in that realm, we are falling between the cracks too because most of the regenerative investors are looking at either funding the farmers directly, which makes total sense or funding more climate tech to accelerate regenerative practices.

We are missing the boat on that camp of investors. In the CPG side, it’s also interesting because we are more of a craft product. It’s inherently less scalable in its current iteration because it’s a small batch, higher touch, stone ground, sprouted, and dehydrated. All of these value ads make it way better, in my opinion but also way more expensive with each extra lift. We are not exactly attractive to either regenerative or some impact investors.

You are caught in no man’s land. It’s interesting. One of the arguments that I make when it comes to those impact investors or regen investors is that while it’s wonderful to invest in the supply side, the farmers and the tech. If they don’t also simultaneously help the demand side grow by creating and supporting the brands that are reaching the consumers that are going to value those ingredients and inputs that are grown regeneratively, then you are not creating a market for those farmers. You are not creating the incentive for them to continue to do it. Again, it’s one of those things where we can’t look at things as an independent. These are all dependent variables.

They all need to work with some type of homeostasis and collaborative approach. If we are going to change the way we grow and feed the world, we have to educate and motivate all sides. Again, not an easy lift. One of the things I want to take a few minutes to do is because there are a lot of folks reading here. They are founders, investors or retailers. We are notorious in this industry. We are talking about shit like regenerative ag and not slowing down enough to explain what it is. You are able to speak in plain speak and explain it. Let’s take a minute. How would you explain to those reading the difference between regenerative and ag practices?

It would be helpful to use an example. Regenerative is going to look a little different in each crop that it’s practiced in but there are some overlying principles that go for any agricultural system. One of those principles that’s one of the most important is no-till or minimal till of the soil. The overarching thing about regenerative agriculture is that you are building the health of the soil. The health of the soil is key to the entire agricultural system.

The revolutionary piece, the Copernican Revolution of regenerative is, focusing on that soil as the source and sustenance of the entire system. There are billions and trillions of little microorganisms in that soil that are doing all kinds of important things. Chief among them is up taking nutrients from the soil symbiotically in exchange with plants.

If your soil doesn’t have any microbial life that it’s enriched with, it’s a lot harder for your plant to access the minerals and the soil. There are certain minerals that plants can’t even access without microbial help. If you are constantly tilling your soil every season, if it’s an annual crop or if you are clearing all the plants between the rows of your trees, if it’s a perennial crop, you are disturbing those microbial communities and preventing them from doing their symbiotic job to help the plants get nutrients.

You are essentially impoverishing your soil life, which impoverishes the health of your plants and the nutrient density of the products that they produce. In regenerative ag, we try not to disturb that soil. We need to let those, especially mycorrhizal fungi communities, when you pull a plow through literally get torn apart. We don’t want to do that.

We want to let them do their thing, exchange those nutrients underground, and do the economy of life underneath the soil. Another key benefit of regenerative is carbon sequestration. When you have that soil organic matter under your soil, it’s by default storing carbon underground. It’s extracting it through the plant from the atmosphere. That’s being fed into the microorganisms.

They are doing their thing. They are living, dying, and pooping, and it’s building that soil organic matter. The more soil organic matter that we build, the more carbon that we sequester out of the atmosphere into the soil. Soil is one of the biggest carbon sinks on the planet. It’s where we want to put the carbon out of the atmosphere rather than in the ocean where most of it is going now or in the atmosphere itself.

The other piece is that when you build that soil organic matter, you can retain far more water in your soil. For every 1% increase in soil organic matter, you are storing an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre. Zooming into the almond example, almonds are often lambasted for being highly water intensive. It’s true. When they are conventionally managed, the average is 3.2 gallons of water per almond. In my opinion, it’s not an inherent quality of almonds that they are that thirsty. It’s how they are being managed.

When you are disturbing the soil, when you are spraying it with herbicide, pesticide, fungicide or fumigant, you are nuking the soil life. In turn, you don’t have the aggregate structures that you need to retain that water and carbon to get the nutrients to the plants. You are disrupting the way that nature works. The whole idea of regenerative is that you want to align with those natural, biological, and ecological processes to work with nature and help it do what it’s supposed to do.

Let’s be resource-oriented. For those reading, if they wanted to learn more, book, movie or resource, what would you recommend?

I would recommend, Kiss the Ground is a great one on regenerative agriculture. It’s a book. It’s also a non-profit that is dedicated to teaching people about regenerative ag. If you want to get deep into the science of it, I would recommend a book called What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery. He’s got over 1,000 peer-reviewed research studies in there explaining all the ways in which regenerative is a better way of farming than conventional. You can go to RegenOrganic.org, Regenerative Organic Alliance. They are the purveyors of the Regenerative Organic Certification. They explain a lot about it there. Those are three strong entry points into this world.

One last topic here, as you look forward to the future of the brand and the business, what’s your hope? If you and I are having this conversation, getting back together, and doing episode part 2, 5 years from now, what’s happened? What have you been able to accomplish, not only specific to the brand but specific to the whole region movement and the way the awareness and behavior of consumers have changed during that timeframe?

For the brand, I want to be able to make it a platform for regenerative farming and also for knowing your food. On the regen front, I want to launch all manner of different product lines that source from regenerative organic certified sources to help scale the supply side of regenerative through delicious, innovative food products sourcing from those regenerative systems.

I don’t want to be the nut-butter guy forever. That’s where we are beginning. Platformizing the brand into what I might call a regenerative hero brand, launching all regenerative product lines. On the knowing your foods front, I want to partner with some non-profits to create a no-dye foods foundation and dig into the research of not only how does regenerative farming affect your food quality but also how does sprouting, stone grinding, and dehydrating affect it.

We have science to point to, so we can quantify the nutrients per ounce, the antinutrients per ounce, the toxins per ounce, agricultural pollutants per ounce, water sequestered per ounce, and carbon sequestered per ounce. The consumer has more metrics by which they can make a purchasing decision. It’s not just these dollars per ounce, which is where everyone gets so hung up on but they can think about the world that they want to create through metrics and then choose between products based on that. I want to create a revolutionary true nutrition facts panel to holistically look at what is happening with this food choice that you are making.

It’s simple to say that in the next five years, you are not hoping to accomplish too much. Those things are all doable. We need people who have that heavier passion and resilience to continue to fight the fight. The audience of this show is your peers, fellow entrepreneurs, retailers, and investors. How could those who are reading help you accomplish this? What can they do? This is your opportunity to do what I don’t think enough entrepreneurs take the time to do, which is to raise their hands and ask for help. What help would you like?

I would like for every brand reading to think about how they can shift their supply chain to regenerative. It’s pretty easy. You can go to RegenOrganic.org, look at their ingredient database, type in a given ingredient that you use, and you will find regenerative organic certified purveyors of that ingredient. I don’t want to have to do the regen movement lift alone. I can’t. If every brand reading who feels curiosity about this wants to help the movement, start sourcing regenerative ingredients. The more of us that do it, the more we scale the movement, and then we create the healthy and regenerative food system that we want and need.

I want to work horizontally with other brands to help move this movement forward. I’m an activist, first and foremost. I have to make the business work but I would be happy if every single CPG brand became regenerative, and then we’ve done our mission. Justin’s is completely regenerative organic certified, Maranatha, Fix & Fogg. Every single brand in the category is baseline regenerative, and then it’s like, “Our work is done. I will go retire and live in my orchard.”

If people want to learn more, want to engage with you, want to talk with you, want to follow the brand, what are the ways to do that?

Our website, PhilosopherFoods.com. Check it out. You can email me at [email protected]. Check us out on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Invest in our Wefunder to help us build this regenerative food system. Let’s create a movement here in CPG. We have a unique position in this industry to be able to promote the flourishing of all organisms and ecosystems on this planet. We can take serious responsibility to nourish people with our business and have some pretty profoundly positive impacts, which is unique for the industry. Not every industry can be this good for everything but we have a special opportunity here.

I agree with that. If people even want to be mild activist, the place to start that activism where you get the biggest impact is in food choices because you can drive a lot of change. I put this in an article, I can’t remember where it was but I was on a walk with a good friend of mine who’s usually super positive. He was feeling discouraged about all the stuff he can hear, see, and read.

We are all confronting. He asked me a simple question, “How are you remaining positive? Usually, I struggle with that sometimes. I can go to the dark side.” My answer and I mean this sincerely, and you are representative of exactly this, “If you want to feel good about the future of our world, society, and country, spend your days hanging out with entrepreneurs like Tim. These are people that are being the change they want to see.”

It’s freaking inspiring. I admire people who don’t just sit on the couch and complain or lament but find ways to take action. It’s one of the things that motivates me to try to make sure that we are doing our best to help, too. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Thanks for being a part of our community as well. It makes our community even richer.

Thanks for all of you joining and reading. Make sure to reach out to us if you have any questions around the TIG Venture Community, the TIG Collective. Please, support Tim’s Wefunder campaign. It’s important that we, as an industry support the people that are trying to move it forward. That’s it. Any last words of wisdom?

I will leave you with two quotes. One is from Josh Tickell, the author of Kiss the Ground. He says, “Our food choice will make or break our civilization.” Paul Hawkins says, “No industry has a greater potential to impact climate change than the food industry, both as a source of the problem and also as a potential solution.”

Way to leave it. Way to roll at home. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next time.

 Important Links

• Philosopher Foods

• Wefunder – Philosopher Foods

• Kiss the Ground

• What Your Food Ate

• RegenOrganic.org

• [email protected]

• Instagram – Philosopher Foods

• LinkedIn – Philosopher Foods

• Facebook – Philosopher Foods

About Tim Richards

Philosopher Foods™ is promoting the flourishing of Earth’s organisms and ecosystems through the Consumer Packaged Goods industry. We produce craft coconut butter, sprouted almond butter, and chocolate versions of both intended to regenerate people and the planet. We operate in the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, presently known as Santa Cruz, California.

I founded Philosopher Foods as my way to tie together three of the dominant threads of my life: being a thinker, activist, and foodie. As a philosophy major, I thought a lot about the world’s problems, and more importantly how to solve them. As an activist, I worked on ways to implement these solutions. As a foodie, I had to re-learn how to optimally nourish myself to engender my holistic health, and then teach others to do the same by being a Certified Holistic Health Coach.

Know Thy Foods™ is our slogan because if you are what you eat, then knowing your food is knowing yourself. I grew up on 18 years of the Standard American Diet, which was extremely detrimental to my mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health. Lacking knowledge of and connection to my food and how it was grown and processed caused me serious harm, which I’m still working to repair at age 35. I’m passionate about holistically educating people about their food so that they can thrive, and so can the rest of Life and the Earth.

Stone grinding in small batches makes for the highest quality, most delicious, nutritious, ethical, and ecological nut butters available on the market. All of our ingredients are all Certified Organic and are also Fair Trade where available. We create peanut-free nut butters in a dedicated production facility. We offer the First and only Regenerative Organic Certified™ coconut butters and Glyphosate Residue Free certified nut butters.

Sprouting makes almonds sweeter, more digestible, and more nutritious. Research shows that sprouting increases the polyphenol content of the almonds, boosting antioxidant activity.

Dehydrating preserves the enzymes, flavor, and nutrition of sprouted almonds, without generating the carcinogenic acrylamide that results from roasting, as most nut butters are and contain.

Stone-grinding is a low temperature, slow speed, ancient technology for food processing that avoids the oxidation and heavy metal contamination of modern high-speed metal food processors that produce most commercially available nut butters.

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