The Startup CPG Podcast

00:09
Emily
Our mission is to make America fall in love with buckwheat, to improve our diets and improve soil health. There's such a huge opportunity to create demand for buckwheat to bring this incremental revenue to north american farmers. So, like, the opportunity to actually stumble through learning how to do this and working directly with a farmer, with Luke and Aframe Farm being our first relationship was a dream come true for me. So that's just really cool on the mission and why the hell we go through all the ridiculous things you have to go through in CPG to get your product from a to b welcome.

00:46
Daniel Scharf
To the Startup CPG podcast. I'm your host Daniel Sharf, founder of startup CPG, and I'm really excited for you to hear today's episode about little Bucks and its founder, Emily Griffith, who is bringing Buckwheat into the mainstream. Whole Foods recently put Buckwheat on its top trends list, so stay tuned to find out why. And also, we are thrilled to unveil with Emily the brand new flavor launching nationally at Whole Foods. We're also joined by her regenerative farming partner, Luke Peterson of Aframe Farm. I loved learning about regenerative farming from him in the episode. Enjoy. Welcome, everybody to the Startup CPG podcast. Today we have two incredible guests from Lil Bucks, the Buckwheat brand. We've got Luke Peterson, the skilled regenerative farmer behind Aframe Farm, and Emily Griffith, the visionary driving Lil Bucks.

01:38
Daniel Scharf
Lil Bucks sells crunchy snacks and toppers made from regenerative organic certified buckwheat, most of which is grown by the incredible biodiverse regenerative farm. Aframe Farm in Minnesota, run by Luke Lilbucks, is making waves this year. The esteemed Whole Foods Markets Trends Council has unveiled buckwheat as one of the top food trends for 2024. Lilbucks is now on the brink of launching its hero product line, cluster bucks, gut friendly granola bites into sprouts, and Whole Foods global. Welcome Luke and Emily. I'm so excited to have you guys here. Maybe we could just start and you could each do a little intro for all the stuff that I missed.

02:16
Emily
Oh my gosh. Thank you. You did a great job with the mouthful that is regenerative organic, certified, and biodiverse regenerative farms. So great work. But yeah, I'm Emily, the founder of Low Bucks. I fell in love with buckwheat when I was living in Australia, and I experienced sprouted buckwheat for the first time as a crunchy topper on an acai bowl. They used it to replace granola. And from that point, I fell in love with not only the texture and the crunch of buckwheat, which is actually a fruit seed and not a grain more closely related to rhubarb and strawberries and actual wheat. That's your fun fact for the day. But I felt amazing after eating it. And that, turns out, because buckwheat is gluten and grain free, and it's naturally high in plant based protein and fiber.

03:01
Emily
It's just really gut friendly and energizes you. So what started? I was 24 when I was living in Australia, and it started as like, this innocent obsession of using sprouted buckwheat, these crunchy seeds as an ingredient, and a topper on smoothies, oatmeal, yogurt, all that. And then fast forward. As you said, we're in about 800 doors right now with our hero product line, cluster buck. We're starting to do a lot more food service with our sprouted buckwheat as an ingredient. And, yeah, gearing up for major scaling into some national accounts and over doubling our distribution in q one.

03:36
Daniel Scharf
Awesome. And just before I move over to Luke, if I'm telling a friend, what is buckwheat and they have absolutely no idea, what do I say?

03:43
Emily
Oh, my gosh. I mean, I would say it's the greatest superfood that you didn't know you needed. But, yeah, I would say buckwheat is a nutrient dense fruit seed, again, more closely related to strawberries than actual wheat, is versatile to use on sweet or savory dishes. And it's high in plant based protein, 6 grams of plant based protein preserving 5 grams of prebiotic fiber, ten times more antioxidants in quinoa, particularly heart healthy antioxidants that help regulate blood sugar. So, basically, buckwheat is just this epic, nutrient dense powerhouse that's amazing for your body. And then also on top of that, it's great for soil health and can be used as a cover crop on farms. So bringing a lot more nutrients back into the soil, which Luke can obviously.

04:28
Daniel Scharf
Speak more to that perfect, great segue. Okay, Luke, do you mind taking you from there and introducing yourself and telling us a little more about Aframe farm?

04:37
Luke
Yeah. Luke Peterson from Aframe Farm, Dawson, Minnesota, and started farming about eleven years ago. And I think the journey to where I'm at now actually began before I started farming. And that was with the department of Natural Resources working on prairie restoration. And one thing I learned working with the DNR was that an ecosystem, the more diverse an ecosystem was, the better chance it had at survival. And after I left the DNR, I went into conventional agriculture and realized that wasn't something that I wanted to be a part of. And I quickly transitioned into organic, and as soon as I got into the organic side of things, I realized that it was starting to become industrialized and kind of the standards were becoming simplified a little bit to try to meet the demand that's out there for organic.

05:26
Luke
And that really pushed me to become RoC certified. So after about eleven years, we've got the farm, all the acres under the RoC certification umbrella, and we raise anywhere from like twelve to 15 different crops. And we have a grass fed beef herd. Our rotation can be up to twelve to 15 years long. And we're really just focused on building a model that other farmers would replicate at scale and doing it in a way that is truly regenerative.

05:58
Daniel Scharf
Okay, and same kind of question for you. If I'm trying to explain to a friend, what does regenerative mean and what is the importance of biodiversity, what should I tell them?

06:08
Luke
Yeah, I guess regenerative is kind of a holistic view of the landscape and the community and the people within it. So there's a lot of different definitions being thrown around out there. Actually, it would depend on who you ask. I think it's actually still. And one thing we're working on the farm is to identify what regenerative is in today's day and age of technology and large scale agriculture. It can mean whatever you want. I mean, it could mean that we're growing our own food outside of our front door and not moving anything down the highways or the railroads, or across the ocean or anything like that.

06:47
Luke
But you could take it to the next level and try to figure out how we're going to be able to farm regeneratively while being able to compete with the existing reality, which is the industrial, conventional agricultural system. And that's where I'm at, is I'm trying to figure out, is this something that another farmer would actually go out and do? So back to your question. Regenerative kind of comes down to. I think I was kind of just going to explain that there are a lot of different definitions for regenerative right now, and it's really easy to greenwash the word regenerative. But as far as we're concerned on the farm, regenerative to us is the five principles of soil health. So it's keeping the soil covered, it's having a crop rotation, it's having livestock integration, it's using cover crops, and it's minimizing tillage.

07:40
Luke
And there's also a 6th one that's being incorporated with the RoC certification and that includes the wellness of the people involved in the program.

07:50
Daniel Scharf
And what are cover crops and tillage?

07:53
Luke
Yeah. So a cover crop is a crop that covers the soil, but it also does a lot of other things. It puts roots in the soil, it collects energy from the sun and stores it in the soil. It creates diversity on the farm. So pests and disease kind of get distracted and confused a little bit. So we don't become so monoculture that we create problems for ourselves. And tillage is basically disturbing the soil. And the reason that we have really high yields right now is because we have tillage equipment that can go in and bust up the hard pan and it can move soil around and it can bring oxygen into the soil. So like, the microbes will go crazy.

08:39
Luke
And it's a short sighted idea to create yield in a way, but it's just disturbing the soil, covering up residue to make it easier to plant the next year.

08:51
Daniel Scharf
So is it fair to say for someone like me, who does not know a lot about regenerative aG, generally, it's all about really using the soil in the right way and getting what you want out of it, but making sure that there's not waste and doing everything that you can to protect the soil where it is and provide a foundation for sustainable use of the soil and crops and everything for the longer term. And then it sounds like also now being expanded into all of the people who take care of the soil and are involved in that process as well.

09:19
Luke
Yep. Trying to work alongside nature instead of against it.

09:23
Daniel Scharf
Amazing. Okay, cool. Emily, anything you want to add?

09:25
Emily
I mean, that definitely covers a lot of it. And I think it's something that know, obviously, starting at Expo West, I think, and our brand certainly benefited from this, that regenerative agriculture is becoming more of a buzword in the CPG space, which is great. But I think if it's something you're not immediately involved in, you might be like, oh, what is this, fad? Or this sounds like a big scary word because it's a mouthful for sure. And it takes on so many meanings. And why we're trying to get out ahead of it and really educate the consumer on what regenerative agriculture is because there is that risk of it losing its meaning. But really, regenerative aG, we're farming in the way nature intended and if we don't start doing that, we're going to have some pretty big problems with our food supply.

10:11
Emily
And that's why even some of the bigger corporates are talking about this, because it's actually like the way we farm right now with tillage and a lot of other things, chemicals, et, like, it's not good for carbon emissions, it's not good for yields. We're degrading the soil harvest after harvest, until there's literally not going to be the same amount of nutrients in what we're growing versus what should be in it. So, I mean, if you look at Luke's farm, for example, out in corn and soy country in western Minnesota, it's wild. Like the drive out there, it's just know, barren farmland or like so much corn. And then you get to Luke's farm and it's like life, like, it's buzzing, it's so beautiful. Like, you live in LA, Daniel. I'm living in San Diego.

10:58
Emily
People, all the health hippies would be just thriving on this farm. It's so amazing to witness and just how rich the soil is, the color, the bugs, the birds. It's a stark contrast and it makes huge difference.

11:12
Daniel Scharf
Yeah. Oh, that sounds incredible. And how did you guys.

11:15
Emily
I don't even remember how we got. Yeah, it was over the phone. It was on the phone.

11:24
Luke
You literally called me and said, hey, you're a farmer. That girl buckwheat, I hear. And I was like, yes, I am. And she's like, oh, cool. Do you think you could grow some for us? And we pretty much hit it off in like 25, 30 minutes and talked business and farming and, yeah, we both left the conversation very well aligned and with good intentions to move forward together.

11:47
Emily
Yeah, it's kind of interesting too, because it's like, there's certainly some challenges with coming. As many founders in this industry know, there's so many challenges coming in and not having experience in the industry and very grateful for startup CPG for being such a resource in so many ways, like truly, but in some other ways, it's beautiful. You don't know what insanity you're getting into, so you get into it in the first place. But also it brings innovation just out of sheer, like, I just figured this is how things would work, like that a brand would work with the farmer to source their core ingredient. Especially after I started becoming obsessed with buckwheat and learning. No brands in the US were really focused on the sprout of buckwheat seed and all of its crunchy.

12:31
Emily
Uses and of like, I started the brand in Chicago, where I'm originally from, and just started calling organic farmers in the super early days. And I hadn't even met a farmer before. I'm definitely like a Chicago burbs kid. And so I didn't even realize I was just calling their homes. They were so lovely to give you the time of day to explain kind of how things worked and just getting that early education of how some organic farmers told me they were just growing. They would sometimes grow buckwheat as a loss, just to use as like an organic fertilizer for the soil, or like, I'd love to grow more buckley it's such a great crop. It grows really quickly. It is a cover crop.

13:10
Emily
So it's one of those things you can grow later in the season for, like, it flowers in 80 to 90 days. So it's pretty quick and could bring incremental revenue if there was demand for it. So in the early days, it was kind of like, oh, easy breezy, no worries, I will create demand for you and then fast forward three years. Yeah, that's why this conversation was, I think you kind of hit it off, and we've come a long way since. But it just starts with the relationship. And Luke and I have so much in common, despite being from different worlds, in a way. But I feel like we're both very similar in our personalities and like, well, this is the right way to do it, and why isn't everyone else doing it like this? So we're just going to do it.

13:48
Luke
And we find out why everybody else isn't ridiculously hard.

13:54
Daniel Scharf
Emily, what do you think that's meant for you and your brand as you've grown, having the direct relationship with your ingredient supplier? Because, yeah, I think it's funny you say, I just assumed everyone would be doing it that way. Whereas probably the reality is a lot of people, if they're working with formulators or whatever they're doing, they're just getting ingredients from ingredient suppliers. You don't necessarily know what exact farms those come from, but you just have the ingredient specs and know how it fits into your formula. So what has it meant for you then, to be working with Luke and really understand where the ingredient comes from?

14:25
Emily
I mean, just from a personal standpoint and drive. Our mission is to make America fall in love with buckwheat, to improve our diets and improve soil health. There's such a huge opportunity to create demand for buckwheat, to bring this incremental revenue to american farmers. So the opportunity to actually stumble through learning how to do this and working directly with a farmer, with Luke and Aframe farm being our first relationship, was a dream come true for me. So that's just really cool on the mission and why the hell we go through all the ridiculous things you have to go through in CPG to get your product from a to b. But on top of that, most of my career has been spent just pedaling buckwheat as I started this when I was 25.

15:08
Emily
But I spent three years in the ad industry, and my primary clients happened to be big food. So I was more on, like, the corporate comm side of things. I had no idea all the difficulties in anything that actually went into making and distributing consumer packaged goods, but just on the corporate comm side, basically and all, I would just be dying. Because we're like, the storytelling is so powerful, and consumers, especially millennial and Gen Z, they want to actually know where the hell our stuff is coming from. And we're in an age, we're all on a video chat, recording a podcast, and we're all in different parts of the country right now. We're able to be connected. There's this direct line from a technology standpoint, to be able to actually share these stories and have people learn about, like, there's not that many secrets.

15:52
Emily
We don't want secrets. We want you to know. I'm holding up my product right now, and I'm just like, we want you to know what's in this and where we got it from and be able to. Food is love in a way. So connecting people to all the love that was put into it for all these ingredients, certainly it's a lot more to manage than one point of contact with an ingredient broker, but it definitely makes it worth it from the mission and just the marketing standpoint as well. It's really cool.

16:17
Daniel Scharf
So what is happening with buckwheat? So we know that Whole Foods put it on their top trends list. What does it mean at the consumer level? How are people looking at it? How are they finding out about it? How is it impacting their consumption?

16:30
Emily
Yeah, I mean, on the consumer standpoint with buckwheat, very excited. I'm like, the time has come. I will be damned if we miss the big wave of buckwheat finally making its big mark on the US market. We're late to the game, but I think it's like this two ways. We have these disruptive brands like Lil Bucks, and there's actually at least five other brands that now have emerged in the past year, like Pacha bread or not in the past year, past couple years, Pacha bread, main crisp buckwheat crisps, bam. Buckwheat milk, a few others. And so we have the emerging brands that are also now saying, hey, buckwheat is awesome. For all these reasons, we're going to use it as a hero ingredient.

17:09
Emily
And then some bigger brands, like, for example, simple mills, is actually using Buckwheat as a supporting ingredient, but crucial ingredient in one of their gluten free cookies. So having that validation from some of these bigger brands and some education there, paired with the lifting of some emerging buckwheat brands. And we have a meeting, our second meeting on Monday. We're doing a little collective to work together to kind of ban collective forces on how we can educate the consumer on buckwheat and align on messaging. Get over the hump of buckwheat is not a wheat, it's a fruit seed and all that good stuff. To have this not just be a trend or a fad, but a trend that's here to stay for the long term.

17:50
Daniel Scharf
Who is eating the bucks? Who's eating the cluster bucks? Do you have any data on who that consumer is and who they aren't?

17:57
Emily
I mean, who they are? Certainly our core consumer is generally millennial and Gen Z. Women, men as well. Of course. I think that urban and suburban active lifestyle person who wants something that's an exciting brand from just their own personality standpoint, but also aligns with their values from a sustainability and health standpoint, that's always been the yogis, the surfers, the fitness enthusiasts, they're really the perfect first wave of interacting with this quote unquote new superfood. And so for us, even when I've been working with all these other emerging Buckwheat brands on how we all line up with our messaging, but we've all discussed, we all have our own different hooks for buckwheat. And for some it's the gluten free aspect, for some it's the agriculture aspect. Those are very important aspects for us.

18:50
Emily
And for us, it's like, for the consumer, it's first and foremost that nutrition and crunch that you're getting, and then, oh, you're also helping the planet in a really important way.

19:01
Daniel Scharf
That's interesting, because that is one of my questions is if you look at your pack on the cluster bucks, for example, it says cluster bucks, and then it says gut friendly, and then in bigger font, granola clusters. And then below that, it says bucks and honey. You can see the product. It says climate friendly on there and kind of white font, gluten free, a little bit smaller as well. So when somebody looks at this, really, I would love to know, why are they buying it? Is it number one because it says granola clusters and it looks crunchy and delicious, or how much are they really reading all of the attributes and making decisions based off that? How many people are buying it because it's buckwheat and they know what that is.

19:41
Daniel Scharf
And that's something that factors into this versus it just being a generally delicious overall snack and maybe one of those attributes or something they care about.

19:49
Emily
Yeah, that's a really great question. This is something that I think I spent five years just painstakingly studying the messaging surveys with our consumers, outside of our consumer audience, working with our advisors who have incredible experience from, like, General Mills, infra, et cetera, really pushing me to figure out, how are we going to create a product that resonates quickly with the mass consumer? Because if you want to be, you want to see buckwheat in every pantry in America, and you want to be the Quaker roads of buckwheat, we need something that's going to resonate a little more. I thought, you know, maybe a year ago, I was like, buckwheat has definitely, since the pandemic, it's picked up. It's growing a lot more quickly. Big brands are starting to use it, blah, blah.

20:33
Emily
Maybe the time has come to put buckwheat really big on the front of pack. And I did some studies, and it is absolutely not time. It's still really misunderstood on the mass market perspective. So by using buckwheat really big on our packaging, we're actually scaring a lot of people away.

20:50
Luke
Cool.

20:50
Daniel Scharf
Okay, so coming to you, Luke, then. So what we heard from Emily about the target consumer for buckwheat, a lot of urban, suburban, yoga, females, surfers, health oriented environment. So what I understand about you, Luke, is that you are a farmer and you are in a rural area and you grow buckwheat. What do you hear from people in your community about buckwheat? What's the level of familiarity? What are the preconceptions they have about it? Do people talk about it at all? What are their reactions when you mention it?

21:20
Luke
Boy, honestly, from a food perspective, not that many people talk about it as food. The only time I've heard anybody talk about buckwheat is an old farmer that said, my grandpa used to grow that in the low spots on a dry year, they had a use for it, and it was as a soil amendment, and they used it as flour, and it was also used as feed for their livestock. And basically that comes from a time when they farmed, similar to how I farm now, before synthetic fertilizers and chemicals came on the market. But, yeah, in the community, there's not much talk about buckwheat other than the farmers.

22:02
Daniel Scharf
So to herald in this era of buckwheat that whole foods is predicting for us what are all the ways that buckwheat can be used in food, so we know it can be really delicious. Cluster bucks and toppers. What else do you think it could be used for in the food system?

22:18
Emily
Oh, my gosh, so many things. Well, first of all, what's funny is I'm sure there's so many ukrainian and russian people. I don't know how many are listening, but they'd be like, hello, how about kasha, the basically national dish that's been around for centuries. Basically, that's cooked. Buckwheat porridge can be used as a side dish or main thing. Sweet or savory. Buckwheat is soba noodles. So buckwheat is huge. In Japan, buckwheat is one of the first crops cultivated in Asia. So it's been around, but mostly it's been used in this cooked form. Buckwheat has to be cooked or sprouted in order for humans to absorb the nutrients. So that's why you haven't seen a ton of use of buckwheat seeds just raw on its own, because it has to be processed so often.

23:03
Emily
How we've experienced it is it being a flour, and then it's cooked or made into pasta or porridge or bread pancakes. I think my only experience of it as a Midwest suburb kid was some really gnarly, nutrient dense old people pancakes that I never had again, because I was like, these are super dense and didn't seem fun. So then the Aussies had this really unique preparation of sprouting and dehydrating and using it as a crunchy ingredient in desserts. Little chocolate bars, snacks, granolas, where, oh, my gosh, it takes on all these great sweet and savory flavors. We've even done, like I was talking before, this call that I needed to make sure there's no little bucks. Everything buck seasoning in my teeth because we made, like, an everything bagel seasoning with the buckwheat as the crunch.

23:52
Emily
And then, like chia seeds, garlic, onion, all that good stuff, and it's like something we just saw on our website right now, but huge. But, yeah, we're seeing it use in baking mixes and certainly anything in the baking category. Partake and simple mills are both using it as an ingredient in their gluten free cookies. And I think we'll start. I mean, I still haven't gotten to try the, bam, buckwheat milk yet, but she's worked really hard on the formula, so there's just so many ways we can tap into this ingredient. We've even found a few suppliers, and it has this full usage. Sorry, I'm so passionate about buckwheat, the buckwheat seed, which we're using.

24:27
Emily
Then there's buckwheat flour, which has all these uses, and then also the holes, which is the shell that a buckwheat seed comes in that has to be shaken off before we use the seed. And we've even found some buyers for the holes to make buckwheat pillows, which are super popular, and they're used often in meditation pillows.

24:46
Daniel Scharf
All right, I'm ready for the buckwheat revolution. Here we go.

24:50
Emily
Buck wild.

24:51
Daniel Scharf
So before everybody was ready to go buck wild, I imagine in the early days of your brand, it took a lot of education and uphill conversations with some of your early buyers to get on shelves, convincing them that there was demand out there. What was that like? Who were your first couple of retailers, and how did those early conversations go?

25:09
Emily
Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I mean, that's been, like, the journey, really, from just a learning about being a founder in this industry, but also because I was bringing something new, like, basically not entirely new categories, but a new major ingredient in these categories, and then a misunderstood ingredient on top of that. So there's like, that uphill battle of education. And I kind of thought like, oh, I'm a graphic designer. I'll design this cool brand. I will share it with the fitness enthusiasts of Chicago, and it'll be a no brainer, just like it was for me. And it really was like, you try that crunch and you never go back. But at first, I was really aggressive on the health benefits. It was like, try this raw, vegan, plant based protein, fiber, gluten free, grain free, high antioxidant, superfood seed.

25:56
Emily
And people were like, that must be horrendous. I don't want to try that. And so it really took a lot of learning to just, no matter what, even with the most value oriented consumers, including Gen Z and millennial, who will pay more for sustainable products. It has to taste very good. And so on the front of pack, that needs to be the first communication is that this is something I want to eat, I want to taste it, and then it's going to satisfy a major need for me. At the end of the day, unfortunately, we're just all more selfish than we think. And so a lot of brands in this regenerative space as well, we talk about how do we talk about regenerative as a whole, and how do I talk about Buckwheat as a whole underneath that?

26:39
Emily
But at the end of the day, you can talk about all these buckwheat benefits and regenerative agriculture benefits. But first, people need to know it tastes good. And second, they need to know what it's going to do for them or their family. And then third, hook them and bring them back because it aligns with their values and they fall in love with your story and mission and continue to support you.

26:58
Daniel Scharf
Awesome. Well, I'm definitely familiar with the uphill battle. So who were the first couple retailers that took it on?

27:04
Emily
Oh, my gosh. Sorry. I did not answer that question. So actually, it's really full circle. One of our biggest kind of retailer that took a bet on us was Whole Foods Midwest region. And went through a journey with this. I think I posted about this on LinkedIn. So it's not a secret, but our first product line, Lil Buck sprouted Buckwheat Crunch, which is our bestseller on thrive market, Amazon online, it's the food service ingredient, literally just sprouted buckwheat seeds and different flavors. That's all I had to start.

27:31
Emily
And that's what Whole Foods Midwest, after were in about like five independent stores in Chicago, where I did a bunch of demos, kind of learned how to talk to consumer, at least had some basic philosophies, brought that to the Midwest region, and they decided, great, we'll bring in Lil Buck's product line into Whole Foods Midwest in March 2020. And I'm like, wonderful. We have made it big. I'm going to train up 20 brand ambassadors across the Midwest, and all we're going to do is sample, because once people try it, there's no competition. They fall in love with it. Game over.

28:03
Daniel Scharf
Obviously, I know what's coming in March 2020.

28:06
Emily
Demo timing for a complete demo reliant product line to enter the market. I mean, we didn't even get on shelf at most stores until August, September of that year. So, a, we're posting zeros for half the year because we're not even there, and I have no idea what's going on. And then we can't sample it at all. It was horrendous. So that was a big push. And learning, difficult learning, but the blessing in disguise of, like, if you're trying to scale this product in retail nationwide, you're not going to be able to do 2000 demos every quarter at all these dealers. So you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out what's going to work. And so a year later, we launched cluster bucks. So whole food literally gave us a second chance.

28:48
Emily
We switched in cluster bucks, granola bites, and even that product line's gone through its own journey of how we talk about it and the flavors and getting it to the point where now it's launching nationally with four to five skus.

29:00
Daniel Scharf
And is cluster bucks named for all of those problems you were having of trying to launch in the pandemic with demos? It was a total cluster buck.

29:08
Emily
It was a cluster buck. I know once I heard that, it was funny because I was coming up with this product, I was like, we need buckwheat in a way that is more familiar. Like, it needs to be snackable in a way that's more familiar to consumer, that they can eat on the go. So I was already working on these, and then my now husband's uncle was, like, facetiming us once, and he puts the phone up to his chin. He's like, I have the best idea for you. You need to make clusters. And they shall be called cluster bucks. And I was like, that's just, I can't not do that now. I'm already making clusters. I was like, if I don't do it and people see that we have bucky clusters, they're going to be like, why didn't they call them cluster bucks?

29:49
Daniel Scharf
Maybe we can do a crowdsourced campaign for other names for your future product lines, like buck around and find out. You want to just lock that one in right now, Julie.

30:01
Emily
I know. I do want to at some point, because when we make the cluster bucks, there's some crumbs that don't end up making it into the bag. And I'm like, we do need to sell those as toppers at some point. And those are true cluster, not.

30:15
Daniel Scharf
All right. So when you mentioned being a graphic designer, it just made me think to ask, what do you feel like is your superpower as an entrepreneur? And, Luke, I'll have the same question for you. What is a thing that really differentiates you? Is it because you can design great stuff and you really lean into that skill over and over again. Or is it just your passion for buckwheat? Or is there one thing that you would say, really, is your superpower?

30:42
Emily
I mean, my superpower, definitely. Everything has a balance. Like logistics and operations were torture for me to get up to speed on learning and bringing on the right people. But the superpowers for us and what the brand has really benefited from comes from. I think two best things I can do are create and connect. So the creation, seeing this opportunity for buckwheat, creating a brand that's going to resonate with the mainstream target audience and take on this crazy task of educating consumers on not only this misunderstood ingredient, but, like, a little bit. We don't expect everyone to fully understand regenerative agriculture, but understand the importance of knowing your farmer and knowing that the food you're eating is doing right by the earth. And then connection, because I think a lot of how we're starting to build out our supply chain, we use co packers.

31:38
Emily
We're not like, I don't own any part of the supply chain. It's really our relationships and our contracts with our farmers and how we're going to learn from them and benefit them and grow together. So that's what it comes down to for me.

31:50
Daniel Scharf
All right, Luke, same question for you.

31:52
Luke
Yeah. Honestly, I think it comes down to just being crazy ambitious, maybe just like, the ability to handle really stressful and impossible situations. Once I had kids, too, I really started to think about the future and how fast time goes by. And living in the heart of industrial agriculture, it just seemed like something that I had to do. And then I'm also very committed. If I start something, I just get locked onto it until it's finished. And, well, fortunately. Unfortunately, I feel like with regenerative agriculture, it probably will go on forever. Like, we have so many improvements to do. This is what I'll be doing for the rest of my life.

32:42
Daniel Scharf
That's amazing. That's really beautiful, Emily. So when you talk about things like studies and packaging, the dollars are going. In my eyes, as someone who's run a brand of like, okay, this all sounds expensive. Where has all the money come to fund the business and your growth and product development along the way?

32:59
Emily
Oh, my gosh. Isn't that the question we all are always wondering, where is the money? So far, we've raised about $1.6 million over the course of four years. I mean, I've been doing this for almost six, but that's big bucks. Yeah, big bucks? No, we've never done anything. And none of this has ever been like, oh, we raised a million dollar round from this firm. Nothing like that. It is all really built by friends and family, angel investors and my friends and family, we did not bring 1.6 mil. I know a lot of people are probably like, oh, so that you just have a bunch of rich friends and family and, no, it's truly like, to the ends of the earth for the networks that I have found and gotten people excited about this mission.

33:46
Emily
So we had raised a bit in 2020, just before this Whole Foods launch, where I was going to make it big in March 2020. And then a year later, we did a crowdfunding campaign on Republic because, yeah, were kind of running into this wall of like, we're in this valley of death where we haven't hit a million in sales and no firms will invest in us. And everyone's freaking out because of the pandemic and trying to reassess their investment strategies. And I'm like, well, I don't have time to wait for that. So I'm just going to go straight to the people who want this product.

34:15
Emily
And we had 252 people invest through our crowdfunding campaign, which in a similar place a couple of years later, where there's a lot of uncertainty in the investing and CPG world, and you're seeing a lot of brands have success again with crowdfunding.

34:31
Emily
And then we've also, in the past year, done some angels, and then we closed some money on what's called a care note, which is a cogs agreement to retain equity, which I won't try to explain all of the details on how that works, but basically it was just exploring options that aren't the traditional equity financing, where it's maybe something where it's kind of like combination, or like a variable based convertible note, where it's a combination of kind of like a loan with an upside of a warrant to buy equity later, or kind of has, like, it's like, in the middle ground of a loan and equity. And so I think in this uncertain time, that was a way that felt a little safer for investors.

35:15
Emily
And then also, if it's something that you can build out in your cash flows in your business, where you are going to be paying back this note over time, it forces you to really prioritize your spending and are you actually getting the margins you need to be able to do this? So it's really helped us level up on planning and explore different ways to finance a business.

35:35
Daniel Scharf
As you look back. Would you do anything differently about how you raised funds, whether it was around the timing or the mechanisms or the crowdfunding, anything you feel like you would change if you could.

35:46
Emily
That's tough, because I think there's so many lessons to be learned that raising some money, even if things didn't work out the way I planned, like that initial Whole Foods launch, which I raised the first little bit of friends and family money for, that obviously didn't work out in the way I expected or planned. But the lessons that I learned there afforded us this opportunity to grow with whole foods and come out with clusterbacks and blah, blah. And I think my old self would still hate to hear this, that if I could have waited a little longer to raise some of that money and proven out cluster bucks, I think I had all this pressure that I needed to grow for the sake of growth, even with just the little bit of friends and family money I raised.

36:27
Emily
So I never thought to just take my foot off the gas for a second and step back, and it's okay to pause and be like, okay, we've launched something. We're taking feedback. We're going to go work on the product and come back even stronger, versus kind of like, keeping up with everything and continuing to have these monthly expenses and tasks of marketing an active brand, it would have been fine to take a break and just focus on the development of the product instead of keeping everything going at the same time while doing all that in the background. But I'm impatient, and I was always like, well, Buckley, it's around the corner, so we got to be there. And now it's finally here, and we're ready.

37:06
Daniel Scharf
Yeah. All right. Very interesting. Yeah. Luke, I was going to pass it to you, and I also was just kind of curious if you could maybe share what are some of the main challenges for you as an entrepreneur and farmer?

37:16
Luke
Yeah, I actually wrote down in my notes, Emily, that one of your superpowers is lack of patience. That's a superpower in a sense, because there's not enough time for us to sit back and relax. Why hasn't this been done already? This needs to happen, like, next month.

37:34
Emily
Like, what are we doing?

37:36
Luke
Right. I had that in my notes, so when you said that. But same struggles, I think, as Emily, like, farming is just business basically for me, because I don't own any land or anything, so I run it as a business, and it's cash flow and ton of you don't have any collateral, but you're trying to build equity and things like that. So it's like an impossible situation, but I think it's just that slow grind, and then you just kind of like build momentum and then maybe get lucky a time or two. But some challenges with regenerative agriculture, the big ones are how our government currently recognizes agriculture. So basically it makes sense at the end of the day.

38:19
Luke
And sorry if sometimes I will have to think too long to answer a question, because I do understand it completely, and I do understand why things are the way they are now that I'm this far down the road. In the beginning, I was just really frustrated and thought it was a huge conspiracy theory and whatever. But right now, the government, taxpayers, they support crops that produce the molts. And the problem with that is that they can't see the negative effects that has on the landscape. So it's kind of like this race to the bottom mentality again with our farm bill. And the farm bill is a challenge for regenerative farmers because we don't have crop insurance for our crops. We don't have places to sell our crops. We don't have the machinery that we need to grow our crops.

39:09
Luke
And there's also, like, the scale piece and efficiency piece. When you're doing five different things, you lose your concentration in one day. Whereas if you're just planting corn all day long, you don't have to go move cows or go swath the kernza or go check the buckwheat. There's efficiency in there, too. So that's a problem as well. But that is a make believe world that we live in, that we shouldn't have to be complex and recognize things that are happening right in front of us and that we shouldn't be able to ignore them. Nature is very complicated, like the little bit of progress. I've made a lot of progress as far as agriculture is concerned.

39:49
Luke
But as far as getting my far back to where I was at with the Department of Natural Resources, with like a natural functioning ecosystem, we got a long way to go. And just to move the needle a little bit takes a lot of effort because we're pushing against basically the idea of extraction. So the government supports extraction because it produces a lot of energy as cheap as possible. So now with regenerative, we're trying to produce the amount of energy that nature will allow us to in the same time that it can rebuild itself, which goes against the current capitalism that we do business in. So it is an impossible situation.

40:30
Luke
But Emily's superpowers have helped me have a market for one piece of my complex so there's tons of challenges, but there's also a lot of opportunities as well, because simplicity and trying to just work on creating more at less of a margin so you can outcompete your neighbor has its downfalls as well. And, yeah, there's a lot of benefits that go along with those challenges. And the hard part is back to a challenge. How do we put a price tag on those benefits? Like, how do we put a price tag on clean water or healthy soil, or carbon sequestration, or habitat for wildlife or pollinators? Right now, currently, our system doesn't actually pay farmers for that. And that's why the phone call that I got from Emily is so important, because without Emily, there's no buckwheat on my farm.

41:27
Daniel Scharf
It's amazing. Yeah, really well said.

41:30
Luke
Thank you.

41:30
Emily
That's really important for brands, because as the brand, we're the direct interface with the customer, and so we're the ones that create the value. So, again, being a creative marketer, that's where I saw value, and I can hopefully create something that's compelling enough to get a consumer to value this. And so when brands are looking at, oh, they want to have this sustainable impact, and then you talk to a supplier and you're like, oh, gosh, that's like, a lot more. But it's something we should consider, like the impact of not doing that and marketing something as quote unquote sustainable but not supporting it, actually, then we're actually undercutting what the price of sustainable products should be, which isn't actually helping anyone. And there's a reason it's more expensive. It's not just like Luke sitting on some fat margin, that's a big one.

42:20
Luke
If you have brands right next to yours with the same words on them, whatever, but they're not actually fulfilling those standards. What that does is it undercuts you as a business, which in return takes away my market. So there is a domino effect that comes right back to the farm. And as a farmer, pretty isolated. I don't have much of a voice out here. And it's really hard for farmers to speak with one voice because there's so many of us in so many different areas with different experiences and different operating loans at the bank or some own land, some don't. It's just kind of a mess. That's a big one where you say that the other brands on the shelf next to you, if they're greenwashing or not, it does matter. And as a farmer, it's also not very appealing.

43:09
Luke
To call anybody out or be like, hey, this is crazy. I'm trying to do this. But you're not actually buying this. You're buying it off of a ship from across the ocean because you can get it a lot cheaper and you can slap a label on it and call it what you want. So it's really hard for me to get into that space where you start saying, it's just not attractive, really, to down that road. So I know you've been good at that, where you've been good at saying, like, standing your ground and saying, like, hey, let's not take this really important thing that we need to do and just greenwash it to the point so it's not there for people that actually wanted to implement it and carry it out.

43:49
Daniel Scharf
Amazing. Yeah. Thank you.

43:51
Luke
Very well said.

43:52
Daniel Scharf
So just as we're starting to wrap up here, Emily, we did promise our listeners some exciting news here for little bucks. So are you able to share with us some news and potentially what is in, if anyone's watching us on YouTube, what's in this bag that I'm shaking here? This unmarked bag? Can you tell us about it?

44:13
Emily
Yeah. So that's really exciting. It's a new flavor of cluster bucks that will be launching in Whole foods nationally in March. And actually it's going to first regenerative organic certified cluster bucks flavor, which is a really big deal to commit to a certification. And that means, like, 95% and above of our ingredients in that formula are from regenerative organic certified products, which being someone who I will be the first to say I'm not the best at operations is a feat in itself. And one of the reasons were able to make this happen is, thanks to Luke, we not only are sourcing buckwheat, but roc sunflower seeds from them for this flavor, which is called jumro blueberry crisp. And it is believably tasty. My husband literally came up with it, and his name is Chris.

45:02
Emily
So I thought about putting blueberry crisp on the packaging, but inside joke might not translate to nationwide Whole foods.

45:12
Daniel Scharf
I love it. I think actually, this is my favorite even of all of your that I think that it's really well balanced. I have a sweet tooth for sure, but it is really well balanced with, I would say, deep flavor, but also it's not too intense, it's not overly sweet. So just really great products. So I'm really excited for this launch at Whole Foods.

45:37
Emily
Yeah, we've been testing it, sending out those unmarked packages to some influencers and our investors. And customers, we even did for Black Friday, like, oh, you can buy whatever, spend whatever, and get a free bag of the mystery flavor. And we've been having people write in, like, so when is this happening? Because we've really, I feel like, come a long way in dialing in the taste, and this is the pinnacle of achievement in both sourcing and taste. So we're excited.

46:04
Daniel Scharf
That's great. So will you be bringing this to Expo west or doing any kind of big efforts around it?

46:11
Emily
Oh, hell, yeah. Definitely. Expo west is going to be really big. Luke, you got to come out one year. It's like, yeah, I know. I'm like, Luke's got to see. So, actually, the cool thing is the full circle of regenerative farming. I think this is a really good example of how a holistic approach of farming works. And you need all these different ingredients as a part of the system. But, like, simple mills sources some of their sunflower seeds from aframe. We're sourcing buckwheat and some sunflower and then Patagonia provisions, which is really been amplifying their consumer or their food line. They actually came out with, like, they partnered with all these brewers across the country and came out with this kernza beer, which is this type of ultra sustainable wheat that Luke grows.

46:55
Emily
So Luke actually hosted all these epic brewers from around the country at their farm. And we got. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Like, a little tangent there, but just like, I was like, Luke, you got to see all these brands that could be using your. Yeah, we're definitely. Expo west is so big, and it's coming at a really good time. We're launching in sprouts in January and then rolling out in whole foods nationally in March. So we'll be getting a lot of distribution, like, hitting the warehouses in February. So it's going to be a really good time to most of the target natural chains we will be talking to. We will actually have distribution with our top performing Skus.

47:36
Daniel Scharf
Amazing. All right, well, yeah, super congrats. I can't wait until I can go out and buy it in Whole Foods. I'm really excited for that. So just to wrap up here, Emily and Luke, thank you guys so much for joining. Is there a good way for people to stay in touch with both of you? Follow along the success of your businesses?

47:55
Luke
Mostly for me, it's Instagram, and it's just at Aframe Farm.

47:58
Emily
Yeah, same. I think our handle, Instagram and TikTok is love lil bucks. Sometimes people think lovely bucks, but there's also like a dancer rapper called Lil Bucks. So he got there first ages ago. So, yeah, love lil bucks. And yeah, we try to share as much as we can on aframe as well and provide visibility to what's actually going on the ground.

48:21
Daniel Scharf
So that's awesome. I used to have the Instagram handle Danny Miami with two underscores, but if you didn't use the underscores, it was an underwear model. So I'd always have to say, it's not that know. Now I switch to Danny California. I haven't had that confusion. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, just have to add a bunch of underscores and then you can get the.

48:43
Luke
So.

48:43
Daniel Scharf
All right. Hey, that wraps up our discussion today with Luke Peterson and Emily Griffith from Lil Bucks and Aframe Farm. Thank you guys both so much for sharing all of these insights. I think I finally understand what regenerative agriculture means and just really cool to hear about all of your sustainable business practices and how you're trying to bring buckwheat into the mainstream, especially in our world of CPG. And also just really cool hearing about how you're tackling a lot of the challenges that you face, many of which are unique to growing a buckwheat brand, but also a lot of which people in our community will be really familiar with. So thank you guys, both of you, and just really excited to stay in touch with both of you.

49:25
Emily
Yay. Thank you. Thank you for this wonderful community and podcast and slack and events. They're so wonderful. And I think a lot of brands will resonate with this and hopefully take away something on how they can partner directly with amazing sustainable farms.

49:42
Luke
Thank you guys.

49:43
Daniel Scharf
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast today, it would really help us out if you can leave a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. I am Daniel Sharf. I'm the host and founder of Startup CPG. Please feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn. If you're a potential sponsor that would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnerships@startupcpg.com and reminder to all of you out there, we would love to have you join the community. You can sign up at our website, startupcpg.com to learn about our webinars, events and Slack channel. If you enjoyed today's music, you can check out my band, it's the super fantastics on Spotify music. On behalf of the entire startup CPG team, thank you so much for listening and your support. See you next time.