“You will never see me sell a bone broth on the store shelves made from a concentrate or a powder.”
This one of many statements I made to the MBA students at the University of Texas this week.
I was honored to be invited by Marissa Epstein as a guest speaker for her class, Nutrition Entrepreneurship.
I had the opportunity to share not only how to grow a business with integrity, but how to scale that business with nutritional integrity, too.
Most bone broths on shelves today are made from a concentrate or powder that is reconstituted or rehydrated. In many cases this is done with vegetable broth, or, water and spices are added in. This act of making a concentrate, and reconstituting it or denaturing the bone broth and rehydrating it for you in a package, may make for a better profit margin, but it also shifts the product from a whole food to an ultraprocessed food.
By contrast, our bone broth is made with a 1:1 ratio of bones to water slowly simmered in stainless steel kettles, strained, bottled in glass and shipped to your door or favorite grocery store. That’s it. Our fats line is much the same; dry-rendered in stainless steel kettles, never deodorized or bleached, all of our products are always made with the highest quality regenerative ingredients.
So many times when businesses scale, artisan and quality processes are abandoned for more “efficient methods” and less costly ingredients. Sadly, and not surprisingly, the farther we move away from a whole food and the more it is processed, the more difficult it becomes for our bodies to absorb it.
I am so proud that we have scaled FOND Regenerative with nutritional integrity.
What is so interesting about this moment in time is customers are really driving the need for transparent high quality products. When 3 out of 4 Americans are navigating a chronic illness (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), they are for the first time asking really important questions. How does what I eat impact my health? How is what I am eating made or grown? Where is it grown? How long does it take for it to go from the farmer to the grocery store or processing facility? Is the way it is processed good for me? What does it mean for the nutrients of the food? How do I feel after I eat it? They are voting in store and online for what matters with their dollars.
FOND is far from the only company who has scaled with integrity. There are many brands that we are inspired by, Gaia being one of them, who have decades of experience scaling well.
One of the final things I shared with the students was, at FOND we are not building a rocketship, we’re building a root system. The two have vastly different goals but their impact is equally profound. One looks only to the destination, doesn’t care what it takes to get there, or sometimes even if they blow up along the way. It is the epitome of Wendell Berry’s “Exploiter,” mindset.
A root system by contrast is about foundation, about resilience, about restoration and regeneration, about reinvesting what was taken so abundantly more can come. It is unassuming, and yet it is plentiful, abundant, and bountiful.
We have invested in systems and refused to compromise. That takes commitment, it has taken courage and after 11 years, it has become a competitive advantage.
