Meet the founder: Zane Adams of FedUp Foods on his advocacy for regenerative supply chains

What I mean by that is in order for us to begin to think holistically and in a way that carries both this awareness of what’s happening and the resolve to respond to what’s happening, is a cultivation of an inner soil that values all human life. Manufacturers like me, utilize systems that are closed loop within our facility that are using the best that we can to conserve water and energy and in the making of the product.

Each of those components are working together in an ecosystem and I think that is what makes up what I would call the sociological or the community soil. When you add all of those together, you then begin to have what I would consider a regenerative landscape and that helps build the pipeline for more products in particular, like if we took for example raspberries, which are a perennial crop, they help nurture the soil.

So if you nurture the soil where those raspberries are grown, with the inputs that are appropriate- that are not just about a monocrop but actually dealing with the multi flora and species that make up the ecosystem where those raspberries grow- you do well by the planet, you do well by that resource and it will give you raspberries twice a year from now until forever. It has been commoditized and as it’s been commoditized, it is all about how much can you get me and how much lower priced can you make the product, so we were we were and the whys of why we do what we do is we looked at the food system, and notice that the people who had the most amount of money had the most access to pick up really high quality food, period.

In order to do that, and in order to create a food system that gives access to high nutrient dense foods, we have to work from the soil up. We think that will make a systematic exponential change in the way growers are growing, meaning that they would have more business that’s asking them to grow better food at a level of scale that will help really shift their lives.

It’s not like ‘well, I only pick up organic since I can afford it’ but this becomes more of a way of life and the only way to make it accessible and affordable is that we get more of those inputs in the system. And the reason for that is that I think more and more people are becoming aware that food is medicine.

We have to think about those inputs that are coming into our food system and into our bodies, and have added even more an acute sense of awareness as they’re becoming limited. We’ve spent our 14 years alongside growing our business, with educating the sector around kombucha and the awareness of it. My focus was particularly working in and around those individuals who are similar to food actually, when you think about it, that we’re really good at their craft, and leverage those capabilities to build resorts from single family residential to multi unit developments.

So we were thinking about the food that was served, we’re thinking about how traffic. Infrastructure was moving through, let’s say our 30 acre development into the places where people lived and how they gained energy, all the way down to my role of the actual furnishings and merchandising in each of the places where people live. We were able to kind of create a bed and breakfast experience in this part of the world that had been locked away for a very long time, with the idea that people can go in and learn about the food, learn about the culture, and be immersed in this really traditional way of making wine.

But moving forward, I knew that in order for us to have a really resilient business, we needed to own the real estate and so what we did was different than other manufacturers. And as a result, we continue to buyout property around our facility when the time was right as that gave us the ability to develop the product or develop our real estate in a way that made sense.

So you can leverage some of that frozen asset that’s been growing in the bank for you over time or you can sell your business. Still have your real estate and let that continue to grow and you can choose to liquidate that or keep it in perpetuity and find other ways for that real estate to generate income for you. ZA: I’m a big believer that if you if you are stewarding something that you have domain and a relative sense of control, it allows you to make really good decisions around how you want to grow a business or take a lot of risks.

ZA: If I had a magic wand and I could wave it, in an ideal world, I would love that a business like ours was the standard, that no matter what store you went into, you were buying really nutrient dense food that was grown by well intended producers using great practices that manage to get to your shelf in the most efficient and climate friendly way ever. The greatest impact I think we could make is that that we have created a conversation that continues to grow into a big dialogue that continues to grow into this global initiative, where firms are no longer okay to simply produce and to make profit on the back and the labor and the goodwill of our planet because of a self driven sense of awareness.