Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

regenerative agriculture

Tech-Powered Regenerative Chicken Joint ‘Mt. Joy’ Opens Second Restaurant in Seattle

This week, Seattle-based regenerative restaurant chain Mt. Joy announced it’s opening its second location in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The new location – Mt. Joy’s first brick-and-mortar location after opening a food truck this fall – will be nestled next to Seattle’s only Sweetgreen on the corner of 11th and Pine in a brick building formerly home to the Stout Brewery.

A new restaurant opening usually doesn’t cross our radar, but what makes this one particularly interesting is the grandiose vision of its founder, Robbie Cape. Cape, who made a name for himself first at Microsoft and then as CEO and cofounder of health tech startup 98point6, has plans to open a nationwide chain of tech-forward regenerative chicken sandwich shops. While several big restaurant chains have made small moves to burnish their regenerative bonafides (small enough that some have labeled these efforts a new form of greenwashing), Cape has made it clear that his chain – and especially his chicken – will be built entirely around hyperlocal, extremely transparent regenerative sourcing practices.

“When I say regenerative to every component of the supply chain and bringing joy to all the constituents, I really do mean it,” Cape said when The Spoon sat down with him this September at his food truck opening. “And I know it’s audacious. And I know we’re not going to get it right on every one all the time. But we’re going to try, and we’re going to keep trying to get better.”

Cape knew when he came up with the idea that creating a fully regenerative-focused chicken sandwich chain would be a heavy lift, particularly for someone without any previous restaurant experience. Because of this, he started cold-calling restaurant folks, including Seattle-famous chef and restaurateur Ethan Stowell, to soundboard the idea.

Above: Mt. Joy CEO Robbie Cape with Company’s Chief Agricultural Officer, Grant Jones

“The first lesson that I learned when I was starting to get feedback from people in the restaurant business about this cockamamie concept that I had around building a restaurant around regenerative is the food has to be great. Someone told me, ‘You got to know Robbie, no matter how good this story is, it won’t matter unless the food is the best,'” said Cape. “And so that was one of the reasons I set out to try to meet Ethan Stowell, which was not easy. He’s a celebrity, and I didn’t know that I had any connection to him. It turns out I do. But I reached out via the ‘Contact Us’ form on his website.”

As it also turns out, Stowell liked the idea and came on as cofounder (as would Stowell’s former executive pastry chef, Dionne Himmelfarb, who ran point on designing Mt Joy’s menu). Once Cape had his chef(s) on board, he set about building the rest of the team, including bringing on a marketing person, a farmer with experience in regenerative farming practices, and a tech person. Surprisingly, for a tech entrepreneur, it was this last hire – chief technology officer – that Cape initially had the most reservations about.

“I sat down with Ethan and said, ‘I’m a little reticent about raising this with you, but I think that we need a technologist on the founding team because we want to build a new way of interacting with the restaurant.’ So I started to pitch it like, ‘I think we need a technologist,’ and Ethan’s like, ‘Robbie, absolutely, we do. 100%.'”

And it’s this part of the Mt. Joy equation – the customer interaction piece – where Cape’s (and CTO Justin Kaufman‘s) technology background shines through. When I visited Mt. Joy’s food truck installation in the fall, there was a QR code that showed me the way to the app, and once I ordered my chicken sandwich and fries, I got a text notifying me when my food was ready.

That’s all pretty standard stuff nowadays, but Cape sees the digital order flow as a way to create new and interesting personalized experiences tailored around preferences and past order history.

“When you come to restaurants, they never know who you are,” Cape said. “They don’t know what you ordered last time. They forget about you, like every time it’s new. When you go to Google, Google knows you. When you go to Apple, they know you. We need to know you.”

While I wasn’t as convinced by Cape’s belief that he could differentiate around digital ordering interfaces as he was, I figured he and his CTO would develop some interesting ideas. However, I was convinced about his effort to source every single ingredient through local farmers and food companies, something which was already evident in the menu. Every ingredient listed the source and the mileage it had traveled before being put on the menu. About the only thing that traveled over a hundred miles were spices like paprika which aren’t grown in the Seattle market.

Cape wasn’t flustered when I told him his list of sources for each ingredient was impressive, but replicating it beyond Seattle would require rebuilding the supply chain in each new market.

“It’s true, it’s hard, a little more expensive, but it’s mostly like that’s an intellectual game,” said Cape. “So you have a team who’s going to have to really be thinking about sourcing, and we’re gonna have to build these relatively local supply chains. But as it turns out, there’s a lot of products. There are a few areas where we might have a few challenges, and our answer to that is we’ll be transparent.”

If you’re in the Seattle market and want to find out what a fried chicken sandwich sourced from regenerative farming practices tastes like, you can visit Mt. Joy’s newest location starting December 1st.

We Must Still Define Regenerative Agriculture

This guest post was written by Nate Crosser, J.D., is a food and agriculture technology investor.

Imagine a sandwich that actually made you – and the world – healthier by virtue of making it. This dream is held by hard-nosed ranchers, coastal vegans, corporate types, and hippy homesteaders alike. The term they often use to describe the dream is “regenerative agriculture.” Leo DiCaprio even has a venture capital fund that evokes the term. Surely we can’t all want the same thing for once, right?

Nobody knows because there isn’t a clear or agreed definition of what regenerative agriculture means, putting it at risk of being yet another term greenwashed into meaninglessness, like “humane” or “free-range”, 1984-style. Regenerative agriculture has been used to describe a plethora of agriculture practices: Cover-cropping, no-till biodynamic farming, organic permaculture, sustainable agroforestry, the three sisters, but, most frequently, livestock grazing. These forms of farming aim to restore the terribly depleted soil, which harbors microorganisms and fungi that naturally sequester carbon and nitrogen, fight pests, and reduce erosion and pollution. 

However, the term is capriciously and liberally used by marketers, and is mostly used as a synonym for traditional ranching. Though “conservation” or rotational grazing is surely better than modern conventional factory farming, is that really where the bar should be set?

Some forms of ranching can improve soil health compared to certain baselines; animal dung has undeniable fertilizing qualities (and isn’t made of fossil fuels like most fertilizers). But, regenerative farming should do more than heal the soil, it should heal both human and non-human communities (i.e., societies and habitats, respectively). Our conception of re-generativity should take a systems-level view, rather than focusing on a single measure, like soil carbon, which can be deceiving and incomplete measures. 

There are a few early efforts to create meaningful standards for regenerative practices, most notably the Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) certification for textiles, food, and personal care products that is backed by Patagonia. ROC goes a step further than most frameworks, with a focus not just on soil health but also the welfare of farmers, ranchers, workers, and animals. ROC is an important certification program, but is more of an “extra organic” stamp that doesn’t fully capture the possibility of regenerative agriculture; to heal the world through agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture should not just be an appeal to a pastoral food system, but instead should ask what agricultural practices help us move towards better systems, holistically? Can organic rotational ranching actually help us stop climate change and fertilizer runoff, boost soil biodiversity, reverse industry consolidation, reduce rising obesity rates, address environmental justice or land grabbing, and improve animal welfare? Can it do so better than processing feed crops directly into plant-based meat alternatives and re-wilding the excess cropland? Should regenerative even inherently mean organic and non-GMO? These are empirical questions that can be studied, but only if we engage in the requisite research and debate as an industry. 

What about novel practices that are not even tied to the land itself, such as urban indoor vertical farming, precision fermentation, or meat cell cultivation (which has recently been cleared for sale for the first time in the US by the FDA and USDA)? These sound highly technological but might actually serve the goals of regeneration, so let’s not immediately give into the naturalistic fallacy and instead look at the data – regenerative means restorative, not rustic. Just because wild grass-eating cows existed does not mean that grass-fed beef is categorically good. Neither does it mean that non-GMO crops are inherently good. Both grass-fed beef and white rice can be huge methane emitters linked to human health conditions. One peer-reviewed study found that cell-cultivated beef could have almost 90% lower GhG emissions than conventional. Whereas grass-fed beef may actually be the single worst food you could eat, from a climate change perspective, and yet many conflate it to regenerative agriculture, but not so with cell-cultivated meat. 

To create a meaningful “regenerative agriculture”, we need consensus, and regulations, not just one-off certifications from private companies. Luckily, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has recently kicked off the first state-led attempt to do so, which could have repercussions not only for the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry but also for the entire nation. As the country’s largest state, both in terms of agricultural production and population, California often bends the nation to its will. Take Prop 12, the California referendum that imposed very basic animal welfare improvements for poultry and pork within the state. The meat industry went all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn the law, claiming Prop 12 would send ripple effects through the national market. The law was ultimately upheld in a decision penned by Justice Gorsuch in May as a clear case of voter-consumer sovereignty. Maybe California will lead the way again here, as it is in the field of cellular agriculture. 

As we weather another bad wildfire and hurricane season, we are reminded of the urgency of tackling the numerous global ecological crises. We must urgently change agricultural practices, which currently use half of the world’s land, emit over a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gasses, and account for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. We cannot afford to lose this chance to transform the food system, to give into greenwashing or Luddite tendencies. Let’s join together as producers and consumers around a bold, progressive vision for regenerative agriculture.

SIMPLi Is Building a Regenerative Agriculture Network Using Soil Testing

The Spoon recently covered single-origin ingredients company SIMPLi’s mission to increase transparency in the food supply chain. The Baltimore-based company is implementing sensory technology and tracking data from farm to cargo ship to retail store.

SIMPLi is also working to bring its international network of grain, legume, spice, and oil producers to a more environmentally friendly standard — and the key to achieving that goal is soil testing.

In identifying growing partners, SIMPLi considers both farming communities that currently use conventional techniques but would like to move toward regenerative organic agriculture, and communities that have already implemented regenerative practices.

“A lot of our farmers have been doing these practices for thousands of years,” SIMPLi co-founder Sarela Herrada told the Spoon in a recent Zoom interview. “It is driven by niche Indigenous practices, but the certification really empowers them and creates differentiation on the shelf. It allows us to create a stable market where we can go to the farmers and say, ‘we’re gonna buy your whole crop for the next two or three years, at a fair price and above-market price.’”

When SIMPLi teams up with farming communities to transition to regenerative organic farming, they start by testing finished products for pesticide and glyphosate residues. As the communities implement new practices, the company also routinely analyzes the levels of phosphorus, nitrogen, and other minerals found in the soil. And to understand the impact that the new techniques are having on the farms’ carbon footprints, the company also tests the soil to see how much carbon it’s sequestering. (All of the company’s testing is done by third-party, certified laboratories.)

This month, SIMPLi announced new Regenerative Organic Certifications for its quinoa and lupini beans, which are grown in Peru. The certification, which is overseen by the Regenerative Organic Alliance, is helping SIMPLi and its growers to communicate the impact of its practices to consumers.

To earn the certification, SIMPLi and its growers had to step up their soil regeneration practices even further: “We were working with companies that were growing quinoa,” Herrada said. “And that quinoa was rotated with maybe one other crop. But to get certified, it had to be rotated with at least three different crops.”

The company also communicates to consumers using social media, allowing potential buyers to see the difference that it’s making. “We have boots on the ground throughout the world, working hand in hand with these farmers on better practices,” company co-founder Matt Cohen told The Spoon over Zoom. “We can capture that with photography and videography.” The team is also exploring the possibility of using QR codes on product packaging to link consumers to content about that product’s journey along the supply chain.

SIMPLi sells its products directly to consumers via its website, and helps other businesses to source ingredients. Cohen said that the team is working to build more long-term, business-to-business partnerships with clients who are hoping to go carbon neutral or carbon negative. “That’s where SIMPLi adds value,” Cohen said. “We create fully vertical supply chains for our clients that are fraud-free, and that drive environmental impact.”

Regenerative agriculture and technology are sometimes framed as two opposing forces influencing the food system — but SIMPLi’s tech-driven approach to tracking and quantifying farming practices’ effects shows that the two can work hand-in-hand.

Image Credit: SIMPLi

Paul Lightfoot of BrightFarms Discusses the Trajectory of Carbon-Neutral Foods

In 2011, Paul Lightfoot founded BrightFarms, an indoor hydroponic farm for growing leafy greens. BrightFarms is alive and well, and this past August, the company was acquired by one of its investors, Cox Enterprises. I had the opportunity to catch up with the serial entrepreneur to discuss his latest passion and project: advocating for carbon-neutral foods in his newsletter, called “Negative Foods Newsletter“. Here is our conversation:

The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

Ashlen: Do you want to start by discussing what you’ve been working on and what your newsletter is about?

Paul: The thesis for the newsletter, and for my future book, is that the food system is responsible for, depending on who you ask, about a third of global greenhouse gases. Food, however, is unique. It’s unique in the sense that we all have to eat constantly to survive, but it’s also unique that food can be grown regeneratively, crops can be grown in a way that doesn’t release carbon into the atmosphere, and can actually draw carbon down out of the atmosphere. So if, as a society, we continue to make changes so that we eat food that draws carbon on a net basis, the food system can actually be a lever to reverse climate change. Food is sort of different, and I would say it’s better than energy let’s say, or transportation. You can eliminate your emissions with energy, with things like wind or solar or hydro, but it doesn’t actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere and that’s what is sort of magical about food, that it can, I think, can be a lever to go backward on climate change. So that’s what I’m working on and that’s what I’m excited about.

Ashlen: Could you briefly describe the process of what it might look like to go carbon neutral? I know that’s going to look different for a lot of different crops and companies.

Paul: I’m going to answer your question two ways. The first part is, with respect to a particular category of food, and the second is with respect to society, our society in America, I’ll use, beef as an example, and I like to make this example because it’s pretty well studied and well known and because the stakes are so high. So industrial meat, in my opinion, although it’s, I would say it’s a fact, it’s true, but industrial meat is the worst actor in terms of climate in our food system.

It’s grown in a way, typically that releases incredible amounts of greenhouse gases. Part of it is that we’re generally feeding grains like corn and soy, to our cattle, and the fertilizer for those, those grains are generally made from natural gas. And often, a lot of those grains are grown in places that used to be carbon sinks and the worst parts of those stories are like the Amazon rainforest that’s burned down to grow corn and soy for cows in the United States.

It’s a disaster, not only did we burn down 1000s of years of stored carbon, but every year there’s not more carbon stored in that case. The cattle themselves, of course, release methane, because they’re eating the wrong food. And so you’ve got those three reasons why there’s an enormous amount of greenhouse gases released with industrial beef. 

Now, on the other hand, there’s beef that can be grown regeneratively and people might think of words like grass-fed. This is truly having pastures, and a low enough density of animals per space and pastures, that the grass itself is the product, and the beef is sort of a byproduct. The grass itself is grown naturally in a way that on a net basis results in more carbon being taken from the atmosphere than released. So, if people convert their beef, eating away from distribution toward regenerative beef, they’re actually making climate change, better. 

It’d be fine if you got rid of all beef compared to industrial beef as well but you can actually become a lever for good. 

So that’s one example, and we could give examples for perennials, like olives and lots of different ways as well, and even examples in row crops like wheat, but I’ll move on now to think about how do we do this as a society, right. And, I think that consumers will be a big part of what changes things and I’m pretty optimistic. I think that when consumers have more understanding of the carbon footprints of their food choices, they will make choices, such that foods with a lower carbon footprint, which will have a competitive advantage. 

I say this based on recognizing that over the last 20 years, consumer demand for organic skyrocketed. People paid more and people bought more organic foods, even though there wasn’t really clear data that organic was better for the environment, or for your health. And that gives me confidence that when they understand foods are better carbon footprints, they’ll be willing to pay more and choose those foods. I think when that happens, when consumers start choosing foods that are carbon negative or carbon-neutral, you’ll see this massive shift in consumer demand, and then you’ll have farms and food companies racing to meet that demand and that’ll result in changing the practices to more regenerative practices.

 So I’m excited about that. The one thing that’s missing, by the way, is that knowledge for consumers, I do think we need to get a paradigm in a place where there’s some standardization, about what labels being what and where you can give consumers knowledge about their foods carbon footprints.

Ashlen: I think you make such a good point about the organic movement. I was in Whole Foods actually the other day and I saw a box of cereal that said it was made with regenerative grains, and thought whoa, I have not seen that yet.  

Paul: That’s interesting, I wonder what brand it was. Maybe General Mills. It’s such early days for that, and if you stop 100 People walking through that aisle in Whole Foods, I think 90 of them won’t really understand what your regenerative is, which is part of the challenge today. I think there’s a risk that if we don’t define it, it could get sort of watered down in a way like the word “natural” is now, which would be a real shame. But it’s great to see that big food companies are not in, you know, in my pattern recognition famous for innovation, or for cannibalizing their existing portfolios of brands, but there have been some massive investments and announcements made by big food companies. Maybe my favorite is that Unilever intends to roll out carbon labeling voluntarily, pretty soon on 1000s and 1000s of products. I’m hoping that is the rest of the industry.

Ashlen: Many companies are making claims and pledges to go carbon neutral. What should look for, and should we trust all of them? How do we avoid greenwashing as consumers? 

Paul: I don’t judge companies or people by their motives, so I don’t think to myself, this company is bad because of what they’ve done in the past, I judge them by their actions. I do think that there are good people working at Unilever and General Mills that want to do the right thing. It’s hard to change big companies. It’s hard to cannibalize your revenue stream, it’s hard to innovate. PepsiCo was, I remember famously, would say, we’re making our food so much healthier, “Look at the reduced calories” when they were just changing the unit sizes and their products. That’s one of these cases where I think that’s B.S. that’s not making food healthier. 

So I do think we need to worry. I do think that the consumer demand for regenerative food and carbon-friendly food is so strong, that there will almost certainly be claims made that don’t bear out. So I think we should judge people less than what they say and what they’ve done in the past and more on what they do. I’m pushing the world to get good labeling and pushing the world to get good definitions and standardization. In the meantime, we probably have to be a little bit circumspect and really analyze what companies are doing and say.

Ashlen: Are there certain foods and beverages that are easier to make carbon-neutral? I’m thinking along the lines are animal-based products more difficult to make carbon-neutral than say cereal or something.

Paul: Yeah. Oh, such an interesting question. I think the starting point by the way is that eating whole and unprocessed plants is almost certainly way better on a Planet basis. Right, so the carrot is not screaming for attention on the shelf, but if you’re eating a carrot, that was, you know produced thoughtfully, especially if it was produced without synthetic fertilizers which generally would be if it was organic. You likely have a very small carbon footprint, certainly, relative to processed food like cereals or relative to meat that’s grown in CAFOs, or in any sort of an industrial system. 

There are some rules of thumb that you can follow, you can go back to Michael Pollan’s old “how to eat” phrase, which is “eat real food, mostly plants, and not too much”, that probably goes a long way and of course, when he said food he was implying that it was real food and not processed. With that being said, this is a nuanced topic. Like I said with beef, it can be produced in a way that’s climate positive, what I would call it negative food. It’s just not what you generally find in supermarkets today, so it’s unfortunately, a little bit complex for consumers right now.

Ashlen: As you said, this is still very new, we’re still figuring out a lot and it’s exciting to see it unfold. 

Paul: It’s new, but it’s pretty urgent, so I feel like there’s a little bit of a race on, and we got to get people thinking about it, talking about it more. 

Okay, so I’m thinking of a Pennsylvania grocer called Giant, it’s like the supermarket in Pennsylvania, they have a big push for regenerative sourcing. I hope that retailers have an important role to play in this. I think we all need to be out there, getting people to understand this, and holding them accountable for any greenwashing as well.

Ashlen: Do you want to just briefly discuss some brands and companies that you like to support? 

Paul: I’d love to. Yeah. So, one that I just learned about was at the regenerative food systems, investment forum in Oakland last week, which was fun, and there was a beer brand at a cocktail party from Patagonia Provisions, Patagonia’s food investment group. Basically, they’re sourcing the main ingredients like wheat that were grown regeneratively to get a regenerative beer. And I thought that’s awesome. I don’t know that I can buy it here in New York yet but I’m going to have someone, you know, drive a truck across the country for me so that’s one of my favorites. 

There’s a beef company near Asheville North Carolina called hickory nut gap. And that’s a multi-generation family-owned business that buys regenerative animal products from farms that are following certain practices, run by a guy I trust and with a good brand and I think that’s an example of one of my favorites.

I do like the olive oil story, that’s Corto, that is the company that I covered in my newsletter. I actually made one of my kids a fried egg, in their olive oil this morning. Maybe another company is not a food brand itself but it is sort of a platform is in Northern Virginia. There’s a company called for 4P Foods, and it’s this digital platform that’s connecting the buyers that care about this stuff so the universities, the corporate campuses, the school districts that have these mandates to source regenerative food, and it’s connecting them with the farmers that are growing regenerative food because those farmers are having a hard time getting through the bigger national distribution networks. And so far 4P Foods is creating a new network essentially because there’s demand out there, and they’re bringing the farms to these buyers. It’s not just online, they have warehouses and trucks so they’re really trying to be everything. And I think that’s a pretty exciting business as well.

Cooks Venture Raises $10M Series A for Its Regenerative Agriculture

Cooks Venture, which focuses on regenerative agriculture, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox. Cooks Venture had previously raised a $4 million growth equity seed round and secured $12 million in senior secured debt.

The company, founded by Matthew Wadiak (who previously founded meal kit pioneer Blue Apron), is starting with poultry, breeding and raising its own slow-growth, heirloom chickens. Cooks Venture is different from other poultry companies in that it’s vertically integrated, so the company raises chickens on its 800-acre farm in Arkansas and processes the meat at its own processing plant in Oklahoma.

Cooks Venture is also different in that it adheres to regenerative agricultural practices. As we described the process previously, regenerative agriculture involves “holistic farming practices that promote healthy soil, low carbon footprints and sustainable animal husbandry. It also skips artificial inputs like fertilizer and pesticide, instead trying to create a self-sustaining loop: the crops feed the animals, the animals create fertilizer, and the fertilizer grows the crops.”

Meat processing facilities in particular have become hot spots for COVID transmissions. Since Cooks Ventures runs its own, I asked Wadiak how his company has responded to the pandemic when I spoke with him by phone earlier this week.

“We have been very careful from day one,” Wadiak said, “We bought our own facemasks and PPEs.” Wadiak said they even bought their own COVID tests, since there has been so little testing support from the government. “We were zero cases until the Trump rally [in Oklahoma],” Wadiak said, and while there have been some cases, they are “nothing close to big meat numbers.”

Along with the funding news, Cooks Venture also announced a partnership with Food In Depth (FoodID), an organization founded by Bill Niman that aims to provide transparency and accountability in food by testing for antibiotics and “other adulterants” through a real-time proprietary process. With this FoodID partnership, Cooks Venture claims that it is “now the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified Non-GMO feed to its birds,” according to the press release.

Cooks Venture chickens are available around the country via a number of different online and in-store retail outlets. With its new capital, the company plans to scale up further as well as increase R&D into its breeding and regenerative practices.

Cooks Venture Raises $12M to Spread Regenerative Agriculture through Heirloom Chickens

Today regenerative agriculture company Cooks Venture announced the close of a $12 million senior secured financing round provided by AMERRA Capital Management.

Founded by Matthew Wadiak, the ex-COO of meal kit company Blue Apron, Cooks Venture is an agtech company selling slow growth heirloom chickens with the lofty goal of saving the planet through regenerative agriculture. As we wrote this spring just after the company’s launch:

Chickens are just the first step for Cooks Venture, whose end goal is to show how regenerative agriculture can slow — or even stop — climate change by sequestering carbon in soil. Next up, they’ll start raising and selling cattle, pigs, and vegetables, all sustained on the same plot of land as the chickens.

For now, Cooks Venture has a farm in Arkansas where it raises its chickens and two poultry processing facilities. Their heirloom chickens cost $15 to $20 and are available through the Cooks Venture website as well as FreshDirect (in the Northeast) and Northern California meat distributor the Golden Gate Meat Company.

On the surface, Cooks Venture’s process might not seem all that unusual. Create a farm that grows crops which can be used to feed chickens, all on the same land. What’s so radical about that?

What you might not know (as this author did not) is that the vast majority of American farmland is dedicated to growing crops — often in huge quantities — that are not destined to feed humans, but to feed animals or produce fuel. In order to grow such large quantities of a single crop quickly, farmers often have to rely on agricultural companies which sell seeds that require inputs like fertilizer and herbicides. That isn’t good for us, or the planet.

Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, looks at soil microbiology plan which crops to grow and sequester carbon in the process. Wadiak argues that it’s more economically viable than relying on seed companies for constant inputs of fertilizer, pesticide, and the like. “It’s a trifecta of wins: for farmers, for us, and for consumers,” Wadiak told me over the phone earlier this week.

So why isn’t everyone growing their food regeneratively? Corn and soy subsidies are partly to blame, but according to Wadiak, the real reason regenerative agriculture isn’t more widespread is because, well, people just aren’t doing it. At least, not at scale.

Wadiak is confident that Cooks Venture can demonstrate that regenerative agriculture is a viable option through its use of technology. The company employs heat unit mapping and data science to predict which crops will grow best in which soil.

Cooks Venture is growing quickly for company that only started a few months ago — they now have over 100 employees — but Wadiak knows that they have a long way to go. “We’re working on multi-multi-year systems,” he said, referring to the timeline for the company to install its regenerative agriculture plan.

That’s where the new funding will come in. Cooks Venture will use it to renovate and expand its 800-acre poultry processing facility to handle up to 700,000 chickens per week. It will also use its new capital to partner with agroecologists in order to develop new sustainable agriculture practices.

Blue Apron Founder Bets Chickens can Help Beat Climate Change

What with droughts, slash-and-burn agriculture, overfishing and factory farming, sometimes it can seem like our food system is careening towards disaster.

That’s why Matthew Wadiak, co-founder and ex-COO of meal kit company Blue Apron, decided to found Cooks Venture. Launched yesterday, the company will attempt to pull the food system back from the brink through regenerative agricultural initiatives, starting with… chickens.

But not just any chickens. Cooks Venture’s birds are heirloom and pasture-raised and have markedly better livelihoods than factory-farmed chickens, who are sometimes raised in cramped, unsanitary conditions and/or injected with steroids. Heirloom chickens, like heirloom tomatoes, also have more pronounced, unique flavor profiles than your average supermarket bird.

Poultry preorders opened today. The chickens cost anywhere from $15 to $20 each, depending on how many you buy. Orders will ship in July of this year, and a press release from the company states that it also plans to sell the birds via grocery store and restaurants by summer 2019.

Chickens are just the first step for Cooks Venture, whose end goal is to show how regenerative agriculture can slow — or even stop — climate change by sequestering carbon in soil. Next up, they’ll start raising and selling cattle, pigs, and vegetables, all sustained on the same plot of land as the chickens. The company operates out of an 800-acre farm in Arkansas and has two processing facilities in Oklahoma.

Cooks Venture plans to create a holistic system of ruminant animals (cows, pigs), “monogastric” animals (chickens), feed crops, and a variety of vegetables. The feed crops will sustain the chickens and cows, whose manure will fertilize the ground for vegetables, all of which will help trap carbon in the soil and take CO2 out of the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gases.

Cooks Venture is far from the only one doing regenerative agriculture. Small farms around the country promote this system as sustainable both for the environment at large and the farm itself, since this kind of closed-loop system keeps the soil healthy.

It seems like Cooks Venture’s role, then, is not really to prove that regenerative agriculture is good for the planet (it is), but to give it a higher profile. With Wadiak behind the project, it’ll likely be seen and heard about much more than the farm that drives an hour to sell free-range poultry at your local farmers market.

The big question — both with Cooks Venture and regenerative farms everywhere — is if this sort of uber-sustainable venture is economically sustainable. From a per-pound perspective, Cooks Venture’s birds are on-par with organic whole chickens from most grocery stores ($3.99/pound). However, at 20 bucks a pop, not everyone will be able to afford one of their chickens, just like most people can’t afford to buy 100 percent of their groceries from a farmers market. There’s also the question of whether farmers, especially ones dedicated to a single crop or animal, could afford to shift towards regenerative agriculture practices.

As climate change leads to higher temperatures and more droughts, regenerative agriculture might become less of a radical choice and more of the only choice. If so, we’ll be glad we have templates like Cooks Venture and others to lead the way.