Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: GoodSAM Foods Founder Heather Kelly On The Path To A Regenerative Economy

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability in Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Today we're going to talk food. Chocolate, coffee, nuts and fruit: These are just a few of the everyday foods that we take for granted. But behind them is a global story of smallholder farms, fragile ecosystems, and political decisions that can make or break livelihoods. And that system is under stress as climate change reshapes where crops can grow and how people can live. Trade disputes and tariffs threaten to cut off supply chains overnight, and too often, the people growing our food are left with the least power in the system that provides our food.

So our guest today has decided to flip that equation and put people and regenerative agriculture at the heart of a growing food company, GoodSAM Foods. Heather Terry is the founder and CEO of GoodSAM, which sources 90% of its ingredients directly from smallholder farms in Latin America and Africa. She's one of the few women in regenerative consumer packaged goods to raise significant capital, having recently closed a hard-won $9 million Series A after 18 months of pitching and walking away along that path from misaligned investors.

Heather is building a brand that doesn't just put a green label on a package. GoodSAM's supply chain eliminates middlemen, reinvests profits in farmer communities, and prioritizes soil health, biodiversity and fair pay. Their chocolates are made in Ghana by local employees. Their fruit chips come from women-led farms in Colombia, and they're developing biodegradable packaging from pineapple leaves that would otherwise be burned.

At a moment when tariffs on cacao and coffee loom and climate volatility is the new normal, GoodSAM is a case study in what it takes to build a regenerative business without compromising your values. So we're going to talk trade policy, climate risk and what the US food system stands to lose if smallholder farmers are pushed out of the global market. We'll hear why Heather says she'd rather shut the doors than take the wrong money again.

So you can learn more about GoodSAM and shop at goodsamfoods.com - GoodSAMfoods is all one word, no space, no dash: goodsamfoods.com. We'll dive into the global food system right after a quick commercial break.

Welcome to the show, Heather, how you doing today?

I'm good. Thanks for having me, Mitch. It's great to be here.

Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to have GoodSAM on the show. Love the regenerative work you're doing. You know you've said in the email exchanges before we scheduled this, you were talking about your fundraising, and you said you'd rather go out of business than take the wrong money again. I'm curious how your past experiences as a founder shape that philosophy and have for GoodSAM since day one. And I'm curious what was the bad money?

Everybody wants to know what the bad money was. Um, no, early in my career, I took money from a misaligned family office. And I think that happens to a lot of companies, right? You're desperate, you want to grow, or you've been told you need to take money and you take whatever comes your way before you really understand the implication of that, right? And I think a lot of companies do it and it can really hurt, especially on their way out, right?

I know lots of founders, especially from my early days in the natural products industry, who took bad money, didn't walk out with very much. In the end, it was just a very extractive, you know, capitalistic model that also, like, doesn't really work anymore, right? It's - this is a hard landscape to sell that in, because everybody wants profitability.

Investors now, I think, are prioritizing keeping founders around, because that's the vision, that's the North Star, that's the heart and soul of a business. And I think, you know, it was just a misguided time. I think it was just one of those times where VC and PE and family office thought they can kind of come in, scoop up companies and run them, right?

So I think it was the time, and I think it still happens today, but I think that lesson over a period of time, right, Mitch, taught me that because it was so painful to watch that happen to something I had fostered and created and that we were working and running, it reshaped my mindset in terms of who I really wanted to work with and understanding that when you move into those kinds - and when you start to take money from investors, that you have to really make sure that you are fundamentally in alignment from a principle perspective, from a moral perspective, from an operational perspective, and from a future visionary perspective, right - that has to be there for me.

A lot of family offices will speak to the fact that they're interested in impact. Was this a case where somebody represented themselves as interested in impact investment and then really weren't? Or was it just, oh, that was for those days?

Yeah, that was - that was, you know, 15-16 years ago, when I first took that money. So it was a little bit of a different time. It was when, like I said, PE, VC first started coming into the natural products landscape, and I think they were treating it like tech. And food is not tech, right? Food, beauty, beverage is not tech. You're not looking at a tech play here. You're not going to turn around hundreds of millions of dollars in three years.

And I always, I always laugh in those conversations, because there are still VC and PE people out there who will get on the phone with me and be like, "Okay, so are you going to sell it in three years?" And I start laughing. I'm like, "No, we're not going to sell it in three years. That's not the point." And by the way, food is a slow process. It is razor thin margins. It is very complex networks, even when you're only in one category. So if you can imagine what it's like for GoodSAM in four categories, it's a very long lead time.

Even the largest acquisitions, most of those businesses have been around for - you know, if you look at even something like Lily's, they were around for over 10 years, right? So I think it was 12 years at that point before Hershey's acquired them. So businesses, food businesses, typically have to be in the game a long period of time, really building a business and a brand and a presence in order to get to that metric.

So it shocks me a little bit, right Mitch, that like still in this day and age, that there are still VCs and PEs out there being like, "So you're going to sell in three years," and you're like, "Yeah, no, that that's like, have you read the same book?"

You know, they all read the book.

We're not playing the same game, right? We're not playing by the same rules. So I think there are some really great VC and PE offices that have changed their mindset around that when it comes to consumer goods and when it comes to food, in particular. I think a lot are still in a weird trend-setting pipe dream that is really rolling the dice. It's a huge gamble, right, to take a chance on trendy brands.

And then I think there's this other subset of investors that we were able to find. So our story in terms of the investment, right Mitch, was that I went to my old network of PE, VC, family offices that are focused on CPG, and they all looked at me like I was crazy for the model that we're running. And then I shifted to a new network of impact investors, and they said to me, "No, this is the future of investment. This is the future of the world. This is the future of food, and we believe fundamentally in what it is that you're doing," and that's the difference.

Between bending yourself - so for founders who are listening to this podcast, if you ever feel like you're bending yourself, or you're bending your mission, or you're bending the principles of your business, you're talking to the wrong people. You're talking to the wrong money people. If you feel like you are in a collaborative situation, where investors understand what you're doing, they might have some suggestions on how to do it better. They're coming with a more collaborative attitude. They're coming with the spirit of partnership. And you feel your intuition go, "Wow, this feels good. It feels like somebody's here to, like, lend that hand," then you're in the room with the right people.

Having been on both sides of that table, that certainly rings true to me. But let's talk about the range of foods that you offer and where they come from. How do you identify your sources and vet the supply chain so that you can say with confidence that people are being treated well, that the least environmental damage possible is being done and so forth?

Yeah, that came really early. We had a retail partner who had a larger stake in the company at the time and was driving a lot of metrics through the system in terms of data. Now that I'm - you know, I've been in this game for 16 or 17 years now, and I like data a lot. I like to follow the numbers. I like to see what customers are buying before I just randomly put a product out to market. That's something that over the time of me being an entrepreneur and being in many different food companies, I've learned to really appreciate that data. Now sometimes you decide to throw the data out anyway, but having the data and understanding the data is really important.

So we followed data and trends and commodities primarily, mostly data and consumer data and spending behavior from consumers. We're in a heavy, commoditized business, right? To sit there and say, "I'm going to go into coffee, chocolate, nuts and fruit" - you know, it's commodities. It's not - this is not groundbreaking stuff, right? We have some innovation on the fruits. But other than that, we're selling high quality commodities that are principled, right? Principled, by quality commodities.

So the data was really important in terms of what are consumers buying? Why are they buying it? Why should we put another offering out there? Where's the white space on the shelf? What is private label offering that we don't want to touch because it's too big, and what are they not touching? And where's the opportunity? And that was kind of how every SKU was born, right? And some of them worked and some of them didn't work.

I think when it comes down to, you know, countries and supply network, as we call it, that was harder, right? We were building this thing during COVID, and it was literally like flying a plane and building it at the same time, right? We didn't really know, and we were dealing with a lot of - you know, we have very seasoned CPG people who work for us and who've been in the game for 10-15 years, leaning on a lot of our networks, leaning on a lot of people that we really trusted to know what was happening. Lots of special visas, lots of empty flights to places like Africa, which was completely trippy and bizarre, but you know, we got there.

And part of that system for us, Mitch, is that we get on the ground. We're vetting, we're asking a lot of questions. We're continuously testing the system, we're continuously supporting the system, but our team spends a meaningful amount of time on the road every year, right? It's for us as a business, that's a big part of our P&L is where we spend our time, and how much of our time we spend there, because we understand how important it is to have that connection with our farmers on the ground.

Well, we're at the dawn of an era of provenance information. And you mentioned your passion for data. What does the data say about how consumers are engaging with that information? What are they telling you about their interest in knowing where their food came from?

You know, this is such an interesting moment. Because I think if we were in a different administration and there wasn't so much chaos, I think that we were trending toward people wanting to understand more about their food. I think the MAHA movement supports that. And I think there's a big interest in what is in our food. I still don't think there's a big interest in where our food comes from.

But why do we do it, Mitch? I want to kind of back out of that a little bit - like I don't - I'm perceived as a do-gooder, but I'm also an American and I'm a capitalist, and I have to make money in this business, right? So why do we do this? Yes, we do this because it's the right thing. We do this because we're all passionate about this. That's a given. Nobody gets into this work without really believing in strengthening supply and doing the right thing.

But when I think of it from the capitalistic lens, when I put that hat on and understanding that this business has to make money, all of that aside, I'm looking right now - me and my team and our board are looking at right now what the next 10 or 15 years look like for commodities and for crops. And the problem there is that it keeps getting worse. We're having weather events, whether they be drought or flooding or wrong temperatures or rising temperatures, whatever it is, or disease that is created because the correct environmental conditions are no longer available in multiple ecosystems.

When I look at that from a business opportunity perspective, and I think about the fact that GoodSAM purchases everything between 20 to 100% more than a commodities trader or somebody in the middle, right, or big multinational conglomerates, I start thinking about how yield is going to go down, and already has gone down. And when I'm a farmer and I suddenly have leverage, who am I going to sell that product to that I have?

It's the relationships that will matter.

It's relationships. So my point is like, yes, we have a do-gooder angle. Yes, we are deeply concerned for the planet. But even thinking of it through the lens of my competitors, or the big guys who have preceded us, right, the big CPG companies that preceded us, what I believe they're missing and what I believe some really extractive investors are missing is this conversation around: you will extract to the end of the earth, and you will run out of places to extract from, because suddenly, in a system where there is not as much yield available, farmers will have leverage, and they will go to the companies that have done right by them. And that is where the crossroads happens, right, for companies like ours and the big CPGs, who will have a difficult time moving forward in their businesses because they are much more short-sighted than we are.

So your consumer is willing to pay that premium, both for the quality of the food and what the food does for the people who grow and produce it right now? Returning to the question I asked, what do you think the role the consumer is, and once they know that kind of information and can value it, how can they make the change in the market that enables more companies like GoodSAM to take root?

Yeah, I think consumers have a big responsibility, but I also want to be sensitive to the topic, right Mitch, that our products are not accessible to everyone in the United States. That's not lost on us, right? This is a part of the leveling out of the market.

Look, in the United States, we've never purchased food at the correct price. The aggregate grocery store model is broken. It is razor thin margin. Consumers are used to very, very low prices. We are one of the most developed countries paying the least amount of money for our food in the world. That is - right now I'm watching that break, right? I think we're all watching that break because of tariffs, because of, again, low yields, and climate change and problems there.

You know, just look at coffee as a commodity, right? And how coffee is struggling from a planetary perspective, from a tariff perspective, and then getting into the hands of consumers, right, who rely on it. For better or worse, we're all addicted to coffee in the United States. Like that's a fact, and we drive a lot of revenue through coffee in this country.

So yes, our consumers that can spend more money have a responsibility to show up and to spend their dollars, to kind of put their money where their mouth is. For us as a company, though, we have to look at how, as we scale and we grow, we can make these products more accessible to lower income demographics, and that's something that is very much on our radar.

This is not - you know, sometimes people look at me and they're like, "Oh, you guys have created this, like, perfect company that, like, does all these good things," and then, you know, but I've been very aware since day one. And if you talk to the team that I have today and the team that I've - you know, team members who have come and gone in the last five or six years, they will all tell you that this has been a conversation since day one that, like, we understand fundamentally that our products are not accessible to everybody, and right now, with what's going on in the economic landscape, that is so present in our thoughts, right?

We understand that consumers are going to be hurting, and we're coming up with creative solutions to offer them these types of commodities coming into the new year at lower prices, and that's something that we're actively working on right now.

Is one of the solutions to that challenge to have more regenerative food grown in the United States?

One of them is. So we are working on that now. Unfortunately, because of the way tariffs work, anyone who's exporting is getting a reciprocal tariff, and that is also trickling into US pricing for US supply. This is - this is the big joke. This is the big economic joke when it comes to tariffs and it comes to the food supply, right? It's like our government is in a silo, and they're not talking to the right people about things.

And even when they talk to companies like Walmart, they're not getting the full picture, because Walmart cares only about its shareholder price. It's not considering in that conversation all the layers below it, right? So I think we're missing - it's like a disjointed business the way that the United States is operating right now. We're not talking to all the stakeholders, so we can't really understand the full implication. And I don't think we're going to see that full implication until January of next year. I think then we're going to really see what these tariffs do, and what climate change and the reduction of yield for products is going to do to the US economy.

We are in the last gasp of that economy, I believe, and I hope so too. About 75% of your products are already coming from regenerative sources. The rest, you say, are in transition. What are the biggest barriers to getting that last 25% gap closed?

It's crops like pineapples that need full sun and grow on the ground. And so planting cover crops and planting shade crops are, you know, really, really hard. And so there are other ways that we're tackling that, but for things like pineapple, it's a 10-year transition. It's a lot of experimentation. It's a lot of figuring out what's going to work and what's not going to work.

You know, one of the things that we started doing in those groves is that we - the farmers are planting avocado trees, and they're letting them grow to a certain height, and then they're uprooting them, and they're putting them then in their own place, right? So there's some experimentation going on there. Those farmers have already implemented practices like compost, working with different types of inputs that are moving them toward even USDA organic certification. They're all non-GMO verified, but they're still not quite there.

In addition to that, right Mitch, when we talk about regenerative, the cost for regenerative - to farmers to get certified is very, very high. And I think what consumers don't understand is that the brand pays for a regenerative certification, and the farmers pay for regenerative certification. There's a dual cost structure here, right? And not only is it the cost of the certification, which is quite high for them, if you consider what they're actually bringing back into their pockets, but they also have to revamp certain practices in order to make that regenerative certification work.

So my issue with regenerative certification is that, you know, we're not regenerative certified. We provide all of our information to all of our retailers of what we're doing, how we're auditing. Some of our farmers are certified, but we don't - we as a brand, don't participate in those programs. And what I've been very clear with the certifiers about is that this is still a very colonialistic lens that we are viewing certification through. These certifications have been handed down by the Global North to poor farmers in the South, and until we can level the playing field financially for them to participate, not only from a financial perspective, but also from an ideological perspective, we're not helping, right?

So a lot of our farms are very remote. They're indigenous. They are, you know, and indigenous farmers, when you talk about regenerative certification, right Mitch, they're looking at you, like, "What are you talking about? We've been doing this for thousands of years," like saying, "I have to do this one thing," like, "I don't - we're taking care of the land, we're stewards of the land," right? So it's a really fine balance, and I think it's not one that we've gotten right yet.

I want to dig into that, but we're going to take a quick commercial break and be right back. Folks, stay tuned.

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. Let's continue the conversation with GoodSAM Foods founder and CEO, Heather Terry. The company has built a fair regenerative supplier relationship network all around the world. And Heather, your comment about the certification process, I want to ask a little more about that. We've written a lot about this trying to identify, what are legitimate certifications, what are self-serving or basically marketing certifications? How do you think about the authenticity of the information that you're delivering as standing as a certification in and of itself? Is that the right way to approach this?

Yeah, I think it's complicated. And, you know, a lot of people see me as a person who pushes back against certification, but we are USDA organic certified. We are Non-GMO Project verified. The reason we're okay with those certifications, and the reason that we've decided those certifications are important is because those certifications have everything to do with inputs. They're cut and dry, right? It's a "you may not use this, you may use this." And we test the soil every couple of years to make sure that those inputs have not been inputted into the soil. It's pretty cut and dry.

When it comes to organic and non-GMO certification, it's about what you're putting on the product. And also, in the case of genetic modification, obviously, in the United States, there's only, you know, a handful of things that can legally be genetically modified. That will probably change in the next couple of years. But around the world, you know, we're trying to make sure that we're not disrupting nature.

So we like the way those certifications work, and I think they're very standard, and consumers understand them. I also think Non-GMO Project, in their inception, did a lot of work to educate consumers, and that was what may help them stand out to consumers, understanding that like, "Oh, something scientifically is being changed here, and I get to decide whether or not I want to put that in my body or not. Put that in my body, regardless of what it stands for, or, you know, how much of the world we think we can feed with genetically modified food." Fine. Okay.

My issue, and the company's issue around regeneration is that regeneration is extraordinarily complicated, right? We saw this 15-20 years ago in natural products, when Demeter tried to come to the forefront. And I would argue that Demeter actually transcends regenerative - it is a very comprehensive certification. It's been around for an extremely long time. It's very well understood in Europe. It deals with organic, it deals with genetic modification. It deals with regenerative, it deals with land stewardship, right? It deals with all of these things. And consumers rejected it in the United States because they couldn't understand it, and they couldn't understand what they were paying for when Demeter was on a label.

I think we're running into the same problem with regenerative, right? I think consumers don't understand it, and I don't think any group has come to the forefront to educate consumers. And what worries me about it from a consumer-facing perspective, right Mitch, is that there is a lost opportunity there for consumers to understand and to potentially pay more for those products.

So if I can summarize what you said, the challenge with a lot of the certifications that we see today is based on the fact that they're focused on inputs only - that, not really systemic certifications. They are - they address certain checkboxes, but don't address the entire system.

Yeah, I think so. And I think regenerative is trying to cram it into that type of narrative, right? "Hey, if you do this, this, this, this, you're this level of standard. If you do this, this, this, this, this, you're this level of standard," except that my ecosystem in Kenya is completely different than like all five of the ecosystems we work with in Colombia, and by the way, all five of those ecosystems in Colombia, because Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world, only behind Brazil, and Brazil is 10 times larger. All of those ecosystems are different, so the rules don't apply the same way, right?

So when I'm looking in Santa Marta, and then I'm sitting in Tolima, I don't have the same ecological system, and I can't get to the same level of standard in those two places. In addition to that, I think these standards were thrown together through an American and European lens, and that's fine if you're just talking about inputs, right? If you're talking about what you put on something, when we're talking about land stewardship, you have to involve communities in that conversation. You have to involve farmers in that conversation.

You've also accrued a certain perspective that gave you, as you told me before, insight into what was going to happen with the tariffs on cacao and coffee and other tropical crops. Why weren't you blindsided by that? How did the benefits of the network that you built prepare you for what has happened?

Well, I'll tell you - when a politician gets up and they say something, I take them pretty seriously. And certainly coming into a second Trump administration, I really believed fundamentally that he was going to make good on everything that was in Project 2025, and so when we started here, it was very funny. There's actually a funny story on LinkedIn, on my LinkedIn, about Expo West last year. For those of you who are not in the industry, Expo West is a big food trade show, and it's lots of education and things like that.

And I was running a roundtable on tariffs, and people came back - no one came to my talk. And people came by, and they're like, "This will never happen. This will never happen." I was like, "I will bet you money right now here on the table, this is going to happen. He is going to do it." And sure enough, a couple weeks later, he did it. And we took that very seriously, and we changed our prices immediately, right? Which I think a lot of other brands twiddled their thumbs and didn't know what to do, right?

But I take politicians very seriously at their word, and I prepare for everything they say they're going to do, whether or not it happens. Because I think as a business leader and a business owner, you have to be prepared for those variations in politics and government all across the world, right? We deal with lots of different governments, and we deal with lots of different things.

The difference is, most of the governments that we are dealing with are trying to get us export. US and European export. They want to do business with the United States because it's fundamental to their GDP, it's fundamental to the health of their countries, right? What we don't understand in the United States, because we've taken it for granted, is that we actually very heavily rely on other countries for food and goods and services even, and we're going to test that here in the next couple of months.

To our infinite chagrin, I believe.

But I think so. I think so. But I think what's good about that, Mitch - like, right? When I really think about what's good about that, right? I think tariffs and inflation are going to cause customers to value quality. I think they're - it's going to cause them to buy less. The United States alone, if we took all the consumption of the United States and we put it in every country around the world, we'd need three planets to sustain that.

So maybe we start backing off on how much we buy and we prioritize values and brands and things that really matter to us. Maybe we start to think about where stuff actually comes from and what the consequence of that is, which we've never had to do as a nation or as a people. I think those are actually some of the positive outcomes that could happen here.

Now I think poor - I think very poor and unprivileged, Mitch, people in this country are going to suffer tremendously, and I think that's a big, big challenge.

Absolutely, you know, noting one of the things that you just said, you raised your prices immediately, but that also insulated you from accusations that you were using shrinkflation strategies, that you were making smaller product packaging. And so there's a lot of value in actually dealing with the world as it is.

Yeah, I think so. And, you know, companies - what we have to always remember about businesses in the US is that, like, old businesses, big CPG conglomerates, they're - I know they're trying, you know, I've sat on the stage with them at COP, climate week. You know, various regenerative ag summits I'm going - I'm going to one in Europe in a couple of weeks. That - it's the same thing. They're doing what they can, where they can.

But we have to remember that the way that those businesses were set up fundamentally works against sustainability, justice and inclusion. It is an extractive model that prioritizes profit at all costs. And what we're here to prove as a business, Mitch, is that you can do the right thing for the planet, for the people who steward those crops, for the business and for the end consumer, in totality, that that business model can actually work, right? And that's the new paradigm. That's the shift that we're looking for in the marketplace. I think we have a cohort of other brands that feel the same way.

What was interesting to me and tied into that is your sustainability model, SOMOS, which is Spanish for "we are." And it's built on the African concept of Ubuntu, which translates to "I am because we are." Yeah, you just described a "we." That's that "we" is always in negotiation. How do we make it bigger and not just more profitable and exclusive?

Oh, man. Mitch, I think we're - I think we're coming to a reckoning, right? Like, we're seeing even like, little communities pop up that are, like, taking care of each other. I mean, who? Like, let's put all politics aside. Like, who cares what the politics are of those groups. But I think what we're going toward now, is we're going to continue to try to grasp onto the "me" economy - "me," which is where we've been for a long time, and we're going to need to emerge as a "we" economy.

And it's interesting - our, you know, anthropologists talk about this like the turning. And if you ever read the - there's a book called "The Fourth Turning," and they talk about how society goes through this every 80 to 100 years, going from this extractive "me, me, me, my own, my people, my thing," you know, which doesn't really serve anything for the future. And then big events happen to change societal mindset, to "we" and "how do we come back together?"

The last time this happened was right after World War II, right, where everyone's like, "Okay, we're in this together. We're taking this on. How do we get this done?" Right? The whole world came together around something and then...

But, you know, we had accomplished something too. Yeah, we had accomplished them. So here's the challenge, I don't know, is, what do we - what is the crisis that actually causes the turning? Because I agree, we are absolutely on the cusp of that moment. What we see in Washington is the last gasp of the extractive economy. But boy, is it a big one.

It's huge. And it feels massive, and it - and I don't know what it is. I'm not sure yet. Every day I wake up to the news like all the rest of us going, "What's gonna light on fire today?" Right? I mean, it's so overwhelming. And we're going to see, I do think we're going to see a big change in this country. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, just like it always does in these situations. But I do think that 25 years from now, we'll still be dealing with some of the wreckage, but I think we will be emerging into something better than we were.

Do you think that the United States has become a toxic setting for regenerative and responsible food companies?

Absolutely, because I think it's siloed. I think the whole narrative is siloed. I've written a few pieces about MAHA and what's happened in the current administration. And look, this is not again - this is not about me being a Republican or a Democrat. This is about me looking at the landscape going, "Okay, we're saying we want MAHA, we're saying we want to make America healthy again." I fundamentally agree with that, right? I don't agree with some of the policies of RFK by any stretch of the imagination. I vaccinated my kid, like all those things, but I do agree that we're a very sick country, and we need to do something about it.

But when I look at the defunding of the EPA, the defunding of USAID, the defunding of the deregulation of toxic chemicals, the persistence of things like glyphosate in this country, they do not line up. Policy and rhetoric are at exact odds right now, and that is fundamentally my problem when it comes to my industry with this administration.

So do you envision a time when the United States pays a little more for its food, but is also healthier? Because of all the advanced economies in the world, we are the least healthy. You have five minutes with Bobby Kennedy. What do you tell him?

I tell him he's gotta - he's got to negotiate because the policy and his promises don't line up and they never will. And eventually people will wary of that, right? Eventually people will turn on you in that. And I've fought my whole career for better food. I've put out natural products, Non-GMO Project verified organic, fighting for better products on shelf, across the board, failing spectacularly, right Mitch, in big box, conventional with natural products, early in my career, spending lots of money, the consumer not being ready for it because we're not educating them. From any standpoint - this whole - there is a really interesting moment here where you have the ear of the American consumer, and if you don't get it right, it will fail again, and this time, I don't know if it's recoverable.

Why? Because big banks and VCs are buying up farmland in the United States at an alarming rate. This is our opportunity. If you can't get policy to line up with your principles and your rhetoric on the Health and Human Services side, it is going to take decades to recover from this.

We are headed for a reckoning, and we are going to need to learn a lot from it.

I think so. I think so.

As you think about GoodSAM and the years ahead, you've closed a round recently and so forth. What's ahead? What can shoppers expect from you as you learn through this crisis?

Oh, I mean, every day feels like it is a new situation. And so the flexibility that I think my team has had to come to the table with has been unprecedented. I've been in natural products for over 15-16 years, and I've never seen a landscape like this. I've never seen a financial landscape like this. I've never seen a consumer landscape like this. It is up and down, up and down. One day you feel like you're on solid ground, and the next day, you feel like the entire world is falling apart.

I think it's going to require leadership on a level that we've never seen before. And I think leaders have got to be really healthy. They've got to be kind of - we've all got to be kind of really tapped in to our own spirituality, our own self-preservation, and what it is that we're doing for ourselves in order to continue to lead and continue to be part of the narrative. I think that piece of it is so important because it's so stressful, and we were being inundated with so much from this administration, from climate change, from the happenings of the world, that we're constantly pivoting in business right now, especially those of us that are in small and medium-sized enterprises. This is, you know, these are the hardest parts for businesses when we're growing and we're trying to get over the hump in the inflection point.

So I think strong leadership, clear leaders, leaders who aren't - who aren't willing to back down again. I will say very plainly for me, what's happening in this movement and what's happening in the United States - I have my own personal political views, right Mitch, but at the end of the day, I have to look at a holistic picture as a leader, and I have to make decisions based on that, and I have to be able to speak with conviction about what my business stands for and why it helps the US consumer and why it helps the US economy, and why businesses like ours are really important and not back down from that and not compromise on that and help other leaders in the position of government to see why this is so fundamentally important, without caving to emotion and caving to, you know, hitting low.

And I think we're in a really - I think we're in a tough time, and I think we're going to see a lot of leaders fall out, and I think we're going to see leaders rise to the top in order to take and rise to the occasion and to really make things fundamentally better for business and consumers.

So how can our listeners follow your progress as you undertake that mission?

Well, go follow GoodSAM on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok. Our website is goodsamfoods.com. I personally have my own Instagram page, Heather K Terry, which I post a lot of things behind the scenes on. But support us. Buy product, pick up something when you're in the grocery store, even if it's a little bit more expensive, you know, maybe sacrifice something else that isn't as good for you to pick up a bag of our macadamia nuts or our fruit chips. That makes a huge difference.

I know we don't think about it often, because we think of going to the grocery store as like this passive process, but every time you pick something up off the shelf, I've said this my entire career, you are voting. You're sending a signal to a company. You're sending the signal of "I accept this. I will purchase this. I will feed myself with it. I will feed my family with this." When you reject certain things on shelf, you are sending a very clear signal to companies to stop making things, to stop extracting, to stop doing the practices that they are doing.

So - and don't waste food, right? Don't waste food so that you can put your money toward really high quality food that is doing the right thing. That is my ask to everybody listening.

Well, I hope that everybody appreciates the weight of the decisions that they make at the store. And thank you very much, Heather, for the time today, it's been fascinating.

Thank you, Mitch, great questions. I really appreciate your time.

You're welcome.

Welcome back to Sustainability in Your Ear. You've been listening to a conversation with Heather Terry, founder and CEO of GoodSAM Foods, a distributor of regeneratively grown organic fruit, nuts, coffee and other snacks. And you can learn more about GoodSAM at goodsamfoods.com – that's all one word, no space, no dash: goodsamfoods.com.

And, while you're there, take a moment to find a snack that swaps out a highly processed product from your diet in favor of a healthy alternative. It may cost a little more, but the benefits to your health and the planet will pay you back with a better quality of life, one in a cooler, stable environment.

As Heather so clearly explained, we're headed into a confrontation between a wasteful, extractive approach to living and one that values planet, nature and people. And each of us, individual consumers and business leaders, have the opportunity to be leaders at a time when our food system and access to information, and the food choices available to us are being renegotiated.

So where can we start? Begin by learning about your food, where and how it's grown and by whom it's grown, as well as the path it takes from farm to your home. That's a more interesting story than you might get from a television commercial that touts only the benefits, not the consequences of our food choices. It also requires a dialogue, and despite its marked tendency to dictate how we should live, the Make America Healthy movement is an opportunity to activate a national discussion about transparency in the food system.

On the other hand, the recent MAHA report on highly processed food calls for reduced regulation and liability for chemical companies, which opens the door to the use of more, not less, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in our fields, and all those substances are running into our rivers, lakes and oceans, and ultimately reaching our bodies through the food that we eat. So maybe we could keep the regulations in place, while forcing more information about sourcing and content of packaged foods to be made available. That's the negotiation that we should be having with Bobby Kennedy.

Heather rightly says we're a very sick country and need to do something about it. So how did we get here? We were told to ignore the facts behind generations of chemical-laced food products. Shoppers are told by advertising and the media to focus only on the fun of consuming at a time when more information is becoming accessible, which enables us to make better health choices.

Companies that want to enter the next economy and lead it - that regenerative system that can eventually reverse declining yields while delivering more nutritious foods - should focus on setting the best example. Share the provenance of your ingredients. Don't shy away from the details about health impacts, and help shoppers make better decisions through transparency.

When we're at the store, each of us can also be a leader. We can send that vote for healthier food that Heather talked about by making more informed choices. So get to know your food. Leadership at this critical moment needs to come from the top and from the bottom, meeting in the middle to produce a healthier, small "d," democratic food system, one where we all have a voice and we all have the ability to make meaningful choices that change our health outcomes.

And as always, Sustainability in Your Ear will stay tuned to this conversation, so watch for more interviews on this topic, and I hope you'll take a moment to look at any of the more than 500 episodes of Sustainability in Your Ear we've got in the archive. We've got shows you can share with your community to get them thinking about these issues, and writing a review on your favorite podcast platform can help your neighbors find us.

Folks, you're the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So tell your friends, your family and coworkers that they can find Sustainability in Your Ear on Apple podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability in Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself. Take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.