Building A Regenerative Future For The CPG Industry

Regenerative agriculture has emerged as a critical strategy to address the intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity. At the heart of this movement lies a need for collective action among producers, consumers, and investors to transform our food systems.

ReGen Brands, founded by natural foods industry veterans Anthony Corsaro, Kyle Krull, and Arron Mansika, is taking on this challenge by aiming to foster an ecosystem focused on regenerative practices for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.

I had a chance to learn about this work from Anthony Corsaro, who is also the co-host of the ReGen Brands Podcast. He told me that their work consists of three complementary components: the ReGen Brands Institute, which generates insights and education on regenerative practices; the ReGen Brands Coalition, a trade association fostering collaboration among regenerative CPG brands; and the forthcoming ReGen Brands Capital, designed to align regenerative enterprises with purpose-driven financial resources.

We discuussed how these initiatives address the critical barriers regenerative brands face: lack of access to knowledge, community support, and aligned capital.

Christopher Marquis: Can you tell me a bit more about the launch of ReGen Brands - what are the components, why did you decide to take this on and how has your work up until this point informed your approach to the company?

Anthony Corsaro: ReGen Brands’ ecosystem consists of three components: ReGen Brands Institute, ReGen Brands Coalition, and ReGen Brands Capital.

We established the ReGen Brands Institute because brands need information and insights to help them win in the marketplace. This news and analysis engine provides that on the world of regenerative CPG to brands, retailers, investors, and other food system stakeholders. The Institute will continue producing short-form resources such as blog posts and podcast episodes but also provide more in-depth industry research. Our first report, The State of Regenerative CPG – Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities for Collective Action, was released this fall and unpacks the commercial, community, and financial needs that regenerative brands share, which ReGen Brands hopes to help solve with its new offerings. The Institute operates as a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

The second component is ReGen Brands Coalition which is focused on supporting regenerative agriculture by creating a dedicated community for brands. This new trade association advances the regenerative CPG community by collectively identifying its shared challenges and catalyzing its collaborative solutions. The Coalition boasts 31 inaugural brand members, including category leaders like Kettle & Fire, Ancient Nutrition, Harmless Harvest, and Serenity Kids, along with promising emerging brands like Alec's Ice Cream, GoodSAM Foods, Lil Bucks, and Painterland Sisters. A full list of inaugural members can be found here. Each member brand has at least one product with a third-party validated regenerative claim from one of eight approved pathways. The Coalition is the first organization to unite brands with various types of regenerative product claims under one banner to take collective action for positive change. The Coalition operates as a 501(c)(6) non-profit.

The last portion is ReGen Brands Capital, which is coming in 2025. It shouldn’t be a surprise that brands supporting regenerative agriculture need aligned capital that matches their unique context. This will be a brand capitalization advisor, provider, and connector, aligning regenerative CPG growth strategies and needs with the most symbiotic funding sources. Capital aims to help close the massive funding gap for regenerative brands by championing new, innovative financial products and fund models better aligned with holistic, regenerative business outcomes.

The story of “why” is this: We started the podcast in the summer of 2022 and became the leading “researchers” on regenerative brands somewhat by accident. We uncovered unique proprietary insights and problems that we couldn't ignore. We felt like we had to help solve them, and this is the culmination of a lot of work trying to figure out how to do that.

Marquis: Great to learn about this vision and the systematic way you are approaching it. Can you say a bit more about what challenges you hope to tackle with ReGen Brands?

Corsaro: Regenerative brands have unique commercial, community, and financial needs. These are three focus areas that we hope to address with our components listed above. Commercially, we want to help increase the ROI of regenerative sourcing, improve consumer awareness and demand for regenerative products, and help brands better operate their businesses in their unique regenerative context. From a community perspective, we want to clearly understand and articulate the group’s shared challenges, ideate and implement collaborative solutions, and help them take collective action on the most important topics. From a financial perspective, we want to help create the most optimal funding strategies for their businesses, help them access adequate and appropriate capital, and co-develop new structures and tools that provide more aligned investment.

Marquis: I’d like to hear more about ReGen Brands Institute. As an academic, creating a think tank type organization is appealing, but I am interested in learning more about the commercial aspect of how it fits. Why did you feel this needed to be a core component of ReGen Brands?

Corsaro: Very simply, knowledge is power and we need to find a way to proliferate knowledge around how we can have brands where supporting regenerative agriculture is a core piece of their business. Many challenges come with that, so we have to research all the people doing it successfully to learn from them to provide a roadmap and case studies. Beyond just learning about the brands, there are very specific knowledge gaps that different stakeholders like retailers, investors, certifiers, and farmers may have which we hope to help fill with future educational content.

What the institute allows us to do is use a nonprofit structure to have philanthropy fund the creation of insights to fill those knowledge gaps that can be shared open source with everyone so that we can create as much positive change as quickly as possible.

Then, when we had gotten to 75-plus episodes of the podcast, we realized there are a ton of really cool insights here, but someone has to go listen to tons of hours of podcasts. And so it was our first exercise as a research institution to say you not only have to capture the information, but you also you have to put it into the right medium, and then you have to do the right marketing to get that medium into the right people's hands. So the report was about how we could re-package and publicize all these insights that we've gleaned to date which would educate our key stakeholders, demonstrate our body of work, and illustrate our focus areas moving forward. We worked with a consultant named Katey Finnegan who was the lead author. She was amazing, and she worked with me to review all of our existing content, synthesize the key insights, and package them into the report. Then we worked with Jellyshot on the design, and they’re phenomenal. We’ve been sharing major takeaways and more bite-sized gleanings from the report via our newsletter and our LinkedIn page, so I would encourage folks to follow us there.

Marquis: I really like how this came about through such an organic way. Can you say a bit about what are a few of the major findings/takeaways from that report? And also what your next steps are with this work.

Corsaro: It’s hard to pick because they are all my babies in some way. Let me just highlight the ones that I think are the most important for the ways that regenerative brands are winning today:

Number one, regenerative brands bring increased value to farmers. It’s always important to re-emphasize that. Number two, regenerative product innovation creates markets that boost biodiversity. Thirdly, regenerative products win over consumers with health and wellness benefits.

These are some of the most important challenges that came out of the report:

First, regenerative claims will not be the main reason why a consumer buys a product. Secondly, regenerative product claims are contentious within the industry and confusing to consumers. Third, regenerative brands will not invest in transforming supply chains without receiving proper incentives or rewards. The last challenge to emphasize is that the financing for regenerative brands is insufficient and misaligned.

I’d say that those are the most important challenges and learnings to take away from this inaugural report.

Overall, I just want to emphasize that our job is to help the community identify the most important problems and have real clarity about them, so that we can all work to solve them. This report and a lot of the work that the Institute is going to do are really underneath that North Star. So the hope is that we establish consensus and clarity in the community about the most important problems and how we can solve them and also about the wins that we should celebrate together as well. It's a clarity mechanism and it's a hopeful spark of productive collaboration because brings the clarity and focus needed to take action.

But also, in many ways, 2024 was the year of formation and launch. Next year is the year where we build our foundation. We're just really focused on doing what we do well and doing more of it better. So for the Institute, that's the same research that people have gotten from us for two years now but even more and better. And for the Coalition, it's really serving the needs of those inaugural 31 members who took a chance on joining and supporting us and delivering a lot of value to them through our work. And then on the Capital side, we're going to find a Head of Capital to really lead those efforts and just launch that programming. That's the trifecta.