Organic Food Revolution

Speaker 1: hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Sandy cronic is the founder of happy dirt and a leader working to build a sustainable organic food system in the Southeast region of the US and North Carolina what started as a small business committed to helping organic tobacco Farmers diversify happy Dirt has paid hundreds of regional organic farmers millions of dollars and supported many farmers transitioning into growing organic vegetables she has given hundreds of workshops about the sustainable food movement integrity and transparency in the supply chain as well as all aspects of the happy dirt business model including financing marketing Employee Engagement and grower ownership thank you so much for joining us today Sandy you are one of the leaders working to build a sustainable organic food system in the Southeast region of the US in North Carolina share with us more about who you are and what you did before launching happy dirt and how you came up with the idea to launch it I actually love this story because it really is quite random and I always hope it inspires people to like invite the unusual paths because you don't never know where it'll lead so I started this work when I was an undergrad I participated in a Cooperative dining program which was an option to opt out of the campus dining service it was really fun and it was student L but it was run through a lottery so after two years of intensive leadership and awesome work I was no more eligible than anybody else to get into the program because the lottery and so when I didn't get in I applied for like a regional coordinating position like one of the campus-wide system projects I applied for compost coordinator or local food coordinator and I would have been happy with anything as long as I didn't have to eat the cafeteria food and happened to get the local food coordination job so what it meant is that I had a staff I had a team of people who owed me hours every week and I assigned them routes to go pick up product from Mostly Amish farmers who didn't do any driving or emailing or phone call it really a great challenge of learning the basics of communication not being bashful the biggest challenge for me was how do I make this incredibly convenient for college students so I had to make sure that the timing of my offering was beating the lational availability list that they were looking at and offering recipes so I think that was the year that I really learned how to her cats I felt really empowered after that so I could have gone in many different directions environmentalism has always been a part of who I am when I moved to North Carolina after undergrad it was very clear to me that there was a booming Farmers Market scene with small farmers very Diversified crops that were fabulous at doing their own marketing they would stand behind the booth and tell their stories and bond with their customer in just the most incredibly powerful way but I knew that when I would go to the grocery store there was nothing local on the shelves certainly not organic either and so I just fished around for a few weeks and landed a job with somebody who within the interview was like I'm going to write a grant so that you can do the work that you're clearly meant to do because there are a lot of tobacco farmers in the state who need an emerging crop and so if you can help them sell collards and kale that's what they need to move forward and that's what the markets needed as well so that's really the path to launching this it was always a very publicly minded group we got a tiny amount of seed funding through the state legislature through a gr so it was lovely and gentle actually so interesting you learned how to create and run a business through the program in college and you just took it out of college and turned it into a business which is so fun and have you always been interested in health and wellness and eating healthy and eating organic foods yeah you're reminding me that it's worth mentioning I never took a business class in my entire life either anything about management Etc but yeah wellness and feeling really empowered about making my own decisions has always been a core part of who I am I happened to become a vegetarian when I was 11 years old I'm not a vegetarian anymore I think I did that for about 10 years so right around the time I was working with local farmers I was more open to eating more meat and things like that but I've always been really passionate and it's important to me to talk to younger audiences because I really think it's important for them to know that no matter what they want to do in the world you have to take good care of yourself or else you can't achieve your goals the best way that anyone could try to make the world a better place is actually just be away of what helps them feel good period that doesn't mean subscribing to any particular eat this or don't eat that but it's just being curious about do I feel tired do I feel more alert do I feel grouchy or do I feel more open to face the challenges and and opportunities of the day it's so true and with all the technology coming at us today taking care of oursel and to your point eating healthy just makes us feel better you have given hundreds of workshops about the sustainable food movement and integrity and transparency in the supply chain can you share with us why that is so important yeah we have a huge population that does care about feeling a certain degree of trust with things that they put in their body or with things that they spend money on so for some people it has nothing to do with personal wellness and has to do with being a conscious consumer in terms of dollars so there is a way that we can actually Bridge all of these things together and Empower people to make great choices that are good for you are good for the kind of community that you want to be a part of and that are helping other people further down the line but we really can't do that if we don't see some degree of transparency or labeling within the marketplace and so it can be very overwhelming and it's overwhelming for me and I live and breathe this every day for decades there are ways that you should know what to look for and what not to look for and it's all based on your own values like everyone has to make their own choices and I think it's important that people have choice and that's the thing we're trying to improve upon is if you don't have choice or if you don't know that you have Choice then you are participating but it's probably something that's continuing to work against you as a company we're trying to help other companies we're B2B we try to help other companies achieve their values by making it easier we're like broker of that relationship and it's a privilege it's an intense responsibility there's a lot of cleaning up that sometimes needs to happen in the middle but nonetheless if we can make it more convenient for an industry to be able to execute their values and hand those options and opportunities on to their customer then are customers happier and more successful their customers happier and more loyal and we get to continue to do the good work that we want to do in supporting Farmers that's so true and I think consumers and customers can always learn something new during Co we started cooking so much more you can make an incredible meal sometimes saving money with really good produce and sometimes you think oh I might not be able to do that unless I go to a restaurant and we learned that now we our food at home almost just as much and it's been a really fun thing to because it forced us to slow down our busy life exactly slowed down where we had a little bit more time yeah and it really is an important way to spend time together or spend time by yourself there's nothing better than putting on some music and shopping all the things and I I discovered I really love to clean up while I'm cooking now and there's certain things that are just become a part of your nature what I really loved about that process of people in or rediscovering cooking is also the challenge that can come when you're working with something that you're not familiar with psychologically humans when we are in a supermarket we are the biggest creatures of habit we look at exactly the same things and we ignore all the same things the positive thing is that it led people to be a little bit more Curious in the kitchen and find new things that they might like that they would not normally have experimented with before and generally that leads you to a lot more healthier options as well like the things that you're more comfortable with unfortunately in society tend to be the things that might not be as nutrient-dense or have all the same vitamin or freshness properties I hope that that that's a trend that sticks is that we spend more time in the kitchen we spend more time slowing down connecting with our food there's some scientific data that shows that things are healthier when we're actually eating in a more mindful process my husband started to cook dinner because it was a nice stress relief and then my daughter and I were bored around the house and so on we started to do Sunday brunches and so we would start looking at different recipes and to your point using different food cuz I'm sure if you look at all the tracking right from the grocery stores that you're right we are buying a lot of the same things but on a Saturday night my daughter and I would put on music and a prep for the next day and then it would all be prepped for the morning and put on music it just became a wonderful thing you know for our actually it's such an important antidote to stress is that bonding time and that plan you think about it in advance what are we going to make and then you're there in the moment you're like well we're really going to live this up and I do Wonder as a mom as a woman as a Healer you know I want to I want to participate in thinking through these things and it's like why do we need to wait till there's desperate times to give ourselves these things that are treats or why do we even consider it to be a treat why am I even calling it a treat it's entirely likely that your daughter is going to remember that forever and when she thinks of Co and all these other really scary and hard things that were happening there's this one light that was shining or probably many others but so I do Wonder like why don't we figure out how to maintain things that are delicious and not just mean tasty but that are really good for us when things are cut other cruising altitudes so yeah and when giving me food for thought yeah and when you think about cooking sometimes you think oh it's going to take so much effort and it really doesn't and it also doesn't take that many ingredients to make something truly amazing yeah the most delicious is the most simple yeah the happy JT business model includes finan marketing Employee Engagement and grower ownership tell us about your business model and why you created it like that I love talking about this because it was really a happy accident but I think it's one of the major industry distinguishers for us we are in an industry that's tends to not be owned by women and tends to have one person in charge and the farmers are generally especially because they're working with a perishable product they're dealing with something that's going to rot it is a phrase in our business sell the stuff before RS that's what you need to do and so the farmers have a very weak negotiating position our model all along was how do we lift up the farmer how do we give them the security of fair pricing in terms of packaging or labeling or certifications food safety I always like to talk about Wellness in terms of quality of life farming is incredibly hard incredibly stressful it's one of the most dangerous jobs in this country so if we want to be able to secure a stable supply of fresh food healthy food things that we need as consumers we need to do as a society what we can to make farming a more viable career the kind of career that one farmer is going to tell their children at the dinner table I hope if you do well at school and you work hard you can become a farmer too one day and when I first came into this business a lot of the farmers I was working with said no I told my kid to go get a nursing job in the city because this is not a good way to live and there's a a lot to unpack there but but that being said we want to help farmers feel dignity feel profitable feel healthy but we also we want to give them security like we are their partner and we're going to be waking up in the middle of the night worrying about something with them they're not alone farming is incredibly isolating also just being part of a network is resiliency which I think is incredibly simple but actually a very powerful thing it's very well understood that being a part of a network helps people participate and sustain through the hard times we launched and the whole year I kept telling everybody if this pilot experiment works at the end of the year we're going to want to launch it into a grower-owned entity and so it was just the fabulous luck of being so young and optimistic and I hired a consultant because I knew I shouldn't be neutral I should be able to have opinions and there was a lawyer and a CPA in the room and 13 Farmers showed up and we all left as owners of a company and I assumed it would be a co-op because I just thought that's what farmers do they form co-ops when we want them to be a part of an ownership model and the farmers were all like nuh-uh Sandy we need you to own this thing and I was like this is really important that the farmers own it because that will always be how we know that this company is sustaining itself in commitment to Farmers we cannot just go out there and care about the price of lettuce we have to care about who we're buying the lettuce from and we have to be able to offer our customers the safety that when they're buying from us they are fulfilling their desire to really support Farmers so that's our work to do and if we don't have you in the ownership model it'll be a much harder thing for us to execute as the company grows and evolves so we came up with this hybrid ownership myself and one other staff person are part owners in the company and right now there's 16 Farmers that are part owners in the company as well and that farmer pool elects a couple of farmers to sit on the board who are engaged in quarterly board meetings and things like that so from a governance perspective and a financial perspective farmers are Soup To Nuts engaged and everything we do which is really fun and Al sometimes annoying for them they just want to wake up and focus on their soil and their crops and their workers but at the end of the day they also really love knowing that they are participating in something that they believe in and something that they want to be there Beyond them for their children it's been really rewarding and I love that you say improving the desire for the profession and to become a farmer because we all have to eat exactly and is this is particularly interesting for me I'm sitting in California but my great grandmother came over to the US from Norway and they became farmers in Iowa oh and my family owns a farm in Iowa cool so this is really it's very interesting to hear this and then you think about how things have always been done but is there a different way now to do them better yeah and there's many ways that we want to actually be doing things how they were done back then honoring those indigenous traditions and things like that that because there was so much inherent wisdom and unfortunately we are incredibly disconnected from that the little tidbits that we have from grandparents or great-grandparents or whatever it might be it's not enough so there's still is this kind of desperate need to revive those teaching tools and tell more of the stories and with nod to the folks who really did the work all along which generally are not people who look like you and me and lift up that we're not Reinventing the wheel we're actually just trying to honor those who came before us and and acknowledging where that that information did come from yes and I learned that my grandparents my grandmother could have gone on to be a nurse which she always told me she wanted to be and I always said at 5 years old why didn't you and then my grandfather could have gone to flight school but I think they decided that staying on the farm was the best thing for the family at the time very interesting yeah I think these are the same exact things that a lot of people are dealing with today and it's coupled with how do I maintain this land because once farm land gets developed it's near impossible financially physically to put it back into farming any development it goes into whether it's commercial residential industrial Etc it's literally just not going to be able to go back into farming so there's a pressure sometimes often a family history pressure of how do I make sure to keep this going at the same time you're turning down other careers and things like that um sometimes things that you really want to do we have to be able to talk about this it's the most awkward thing ever for my Farmers but I bring up Mental Health on the regular because I know they're not talking about it in other environments and it really needs to get talked about and hopefully by talking about it we're taking the stigma away we're building more resiliency when you started your business and you say this in the beginning of your company video it was said that the business idea was bold naive and wacky and look at your company growth and where you are today and your success what would you say to someone launching and growing a business who might come up against something like this continue to hone your own sense of intuition because if you believe in this idea when you're really grounded like if you believe in this when you're in a quiet place and you can entertain the challenges inside of your head or talk to other people about it it's because you're wanting to participate in it I cared about vegetables for many years because that's what I was eating and I cared about being able to support Farmers because I knew the farmers are good people and I trust that if putting their hands in the soil and they're eating that food it's less likely to have the chemicals in it that I didn't want in my body or that I didn't want in the soil and then I didn't want in the Farm Workers body it was easier for me to make it through the really hard days nights mornings middle of the night because this was something that not only did I believe in on paper but I believed in it literally in the sense of I'm doing this for other people like me yeah and we all have bad days but it's so much easier when you're so passionate about what you do when you use talents that just come naturally and the things you want to wake up and think about every day yeah it's been really helpful that passion has been like renewable energy for me I don't have to do much in order to be able to take out of that bank and I know that that's unique and I'm really grateful to be able to operate from that system yeah and you were helping to feed the world farmers are an endangered species Farmland is an endangered species there's so much risk even in one season if we fail a farmer by not moving everything that's edible everything that's nutritious out of their field within that season then who knows if they're going to not plant that same thing next year who knows if they're going to decide to go back into tobacco or into corn or something like that which is not horrible but we want to keep them growing like dark leafy greens or cruciferous vegetables or things with vitamin C all these different properties that are harder to come by I asked this question at the end of every episode because I believe bringing joy into our daily lives is so important Magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip you can leave with us today about how you find and live your joy I really love this question the tip that I have is to not be afraid to inspire people for me the joy comes from throwing ideas out helping the team here of amazing people who work here the farmers that we work with and the vendors that we work with they all work in very specific lanes and for us to be able to bring to them inspiration gratitude thanks to be able to say that I heard from somebody that that corn that they ate was the best thing that they've had in years and be able to pass that back to the farmer that currency of inspiration and gratitude is an incredible Fuel and so for us to be able to bridge not just transactionally but Bridge positive feelings for people is really rewarding anyone could do this I'm no different than anybody else but to be able to like sit in your seat of whatever your job is and make room for spreading inspiration will help you do a better job and help people who work with you to want to do better as well I love that and the advice to inspire people you know we don't always think about it so saying don't be afraid to inspire people really great well this month of March is a good time to remind people that especially women in business you know often we think that we have to get extra tough and that's okay there are moments when I have to get extra tough but it's also really important to lean into my own self trust and self-worth and a lot of my worth comes from helping to inspire people there's not an actual like dollars and cents currency to that but I know that there's a currency there and the funny thing is that we don't even know where it goes just like with our dollars we don't know when we invest somewhere where it goes you know you spend your dollar at this store and who knows how it trickles around the same thing happen with something you might tell your daughter and something she might pass on to her teacher and who knows but it's really important to parti ipate and unfortunately you need to have a certain degree of confidence but that's a muscle that we all need to exercise it's not like some people if you're blessed with it sometimes it means that you actually need to work on the other muscle finding that balance of confidence and humility and then spreading the inspiration out is it'll come back a thousandfold in the business world it's always worth it yeah and it feels so good I feel like I could talk to you all afternoon thank you so much for joining us today Sandy can you please tell our listeners how and where they can find you happy dirt is on the web and on social media certainly happy dirt produce on Instagram and we're happy dirt.com and you could find our products in a lot of supermarkets up and down the East Coast if you are new to Sheil it we'd love for you to join us we offer Community memberships masterminds Innovative virtual events and meaningful connections to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders please also check out our she belit shop curated products from women-owned businesses who put their heart and soul into their beautiful and Innovative products we offer Sheil tip business Consulting and the Sheil tip blog thank you to everyone around the world who joined today thank you to my editor Rich stalino please download And subscribe wherever you get your podcast and until next time together let's let nothing stop us from experiencing the life that We crave