Why the future of regenerative agriculture might depend less on farms and more on brands
There’s a familiar pattern playing out across the food and consumer goods industry. A passionate founding team spends a decade building a brand around clean ingredients, regenerative sourcing, and genuine health benefits. They grow to $100–300 million in revenue. Early investors need liquidity. And then comes the exit: acquisition by one of the major conglomerates, Nestlé, Unilever, Procter & Gamble.
What happens next is predictable. The brand gets absorbed into a century-old corporate structure built around administering legacy profit lines. Ingredients get reformulated to fit existing supply chains. Farmer margins get squeezed. Within a few years, the founding team has left, and the brand either languishes on the shelf or becomes unrecognizable from what originally made it successful.
This isn’t a story of malice. It’s a story of structural incompatibility, and according to Martin Reiter, founder of RARE, it represents the single biggest bottleneck preventing regenerative agriculture from achieving meaningful scale.
The critical path isn’t on the farm
After years of deep engagement with regenerative agriculture, studying soil biology with practitioners like Nicole Masters, analyzing farm-level economics, and exploring various intervention points across the value chain, Reiter arrived at what might seem like a counterintuitive conclusion: the most critical leverage point for systemic change isn’t at the production level. It’s at the consumer-packaged goods level.
“There’s quite a lot of work happening on the farm level, and I’m incredibly excited about it,” Reiter explains. “But what is actually more of the critical path is how do we get great produce to the consumer? The main problem over the last 10 years is that companies that do better, that are cleaner and healthier, that work on regeneration, at some point get sold to the incumbents, and the incumbents are not necessarily good stewards of their mission.”
The reasoning is straightforward. Consumer brands create demand signals that ripple backward through the value chain. A successful regenerative dairy brand at scale doesn’t just buy from existing regenerative farms, it actively converts conventional operations because it has outgrown available supply. The brand becomes the forcing function for land use transformation.
But only if it survives intact.
Why incumbents keep failing at regeneration
When large conglomerates acquire regenerative brands, two fundamental problems emerge.
First, there’s a profound culture clash. Companies like Nestlé and Unilever are often 50–100 years old. Their core competency is the administration of mature, stable profit lines, not the cultivation of fast-moving, mission-driven startups. The speed, decision-making structures, and values orientation of a founder who built a $200 million business in 10 years are completely alien to these organizations.
Second, and more structurally damaging, is the supply chain erosion. Incumbents pay high multiples because they believe they can immediately boost profitability through “synergies”, using their existing distribution networks, manufacturing facilities, and ingredient procurement systems. The problem is that these very actions often destroy what made the brand valuable in the first place.
“They bring a modern regenerative supply chain into their own traditional supply chain,” Reiter notes. “In their very natural aim to create synergies, they erode what made the brand successful at the first place.”
A regenerative tomato sauce brand works because of soil-specific sourcing, minimal processing, and transparent supply relationships. Plug it into a conventional industrial supply chain optimized for commodity ingredients and cost efficiency, and you have fundamentally altered the product, even if the label hasn’t changed.
The market opportunity is already here
The counterargument is straightforward: if the market really wanted these products, wouldn’t they already dominate?
Reiter’s response points to two converging forces that are reshaping consumer behavior.
First, demographic shift. Gen Z and millennials now represent more than half of western retail sales. These are generations who grew up in an environment of ubiquitous processed food, endocrine-disrupting chemicals in everyday products, and declining health outcomes despite rising GDP. For them, clean products aren’t a luxury preference, they’re a baseline expectation.
“The better-for-you or conscious consumer segment is the fastest-growing profit pool in the western world,” Reiter argues. “It’s accelerated and will keep accelerating because there’s a generational shift.”
Second, functional performance. The days of consumers accepting trade-offs, where “clean” products were allowed to be less effective, are over. Reiter is emphatic on this point: “Selling a deodorant that doesn’t work but is clean is not a winning strategy. Selling an organic tomato that doesn’t taste like a great tomato is not a strategy to win.”
The brands that will succeed are those where regenerative practices aren’t a compromise but an asset. A tomato grown in healthy soil actually tastes better. Grass-fed dairy has superior omega-3 to omega-6 ratios. Clean beauty formulations can be just as effective as conventional ones when properly developed.
This creates what Reiter calls a “perfect storm”, growing consumer demand for products that actually deliver on both health and environmental benefits, met by incumbent players structurally unable to serve that market credibly.
Building the alternative: permanent capital for mission-driven brands
RARE’s model is designed to address a specific gap in the market: providing regenerative founders with a genuine alternative to the binary choice between staying small or selling out.
The structure is straightforward. RARE provides permanent capital, modeled after Berkshire Hathaway’s holding company approach rather than traditional 10-year fund structures, to founders of brands with strong product-market fit that are built clean from the start. The founders can take some money off the table (typically 20–25% of their equity value) but retain majority ownership and operational control. Early investors who need liquidity get bought out. The company stays mission aligned.
“Why don’t you take those 15 million anyway,” Reiter frames the pitch to founders, “but the other 45 million you leave in the business. And out of those 45 million, you can make 400 million over the next 15 years.”
It’s not for everyone. But it only needs to work for a few,the founders who want to build category-defining companies rather than flip businesses. The ones, as Reiter puts it, “who want to become the Chobani of regenerative dairy.”
The macro context adds urgency to the model. We are on track to lose one-third of the global population by 2100, with roughly 40% of the fertility gap driven by environmental toxins and poor nutrition, the very foundations of today’s dominant consumer conglomerates’ profits. The system that makes us sick is also the system creating the market opportunity for alternatives.
The categories that matter most
Not all product categories are equally strategic. Reiter focuses on categories with three characteristics: large land use footprint, high consumer perception impact, and structural disadvantage for incumbents.
Grains, particularly wheat, represent a major opportunity. Reiter argues the gluten-free movement was largely driven by excessive glyphosate use in conventional wheat production, not gluten itself. Population wheat varieties with anti-inflammatory properties exist and could reshape the category.
Regenerative dairy with minimal processing (low-heat pasteurization, minimal homogenization) offers both health differentiation and significant land use transformation potential.
Personal care and beauty products free of endocrine-disrupting chemicals address a massive unmet need. Brands like Kosas have demonstrated category growth is possible when clean formulations deliver genuine performance.
Low-sugar or fermented beverages that can credibly replace conventional sodas without artificial sweeteners.
Minimally processed frozen convenience foods made with regenerative ingredients, recognizing that families with two jobs and multiple children can’t realistically cook every meal from scratch.
The common thread: these are all categories where the health-conscious consumer segment is growing rapidly, but where incumbent brands have deep credibility problems and structural barriers to pivoting.
The science that changes everything
Perhaps the most striking shift in Reiter’s thinking over the past two years concerns ruminant livestock and climate.
“I did not understand well enough that ruminant methane emissions are not an active driver of climate acceleration,” he admits. “I was long in that mindset that we need to eat less meat to save the world.”
The scientific reality is more nuanced. Methane is a fast-cycle greenhouse gas with an atmospheric half-life of roughly 12 years. This means that if ruminant populations remain stable, the methane they produce cycles through the atmosphere without creating incremental warming, it’s already “priced in.” The actual driver of rising atmospheric methane is fossil fuel production, particularly oil and gas flaring and leaks.
This has profound implications for how we think about grass-fed beef. Conventional corn-fed beef has an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 10 -15:1, driving chronic inflammation in consumers. Grass-fed beef has a ratio around 2:1 – aligned with human evolutionary biology. The science on this is conclusive: excess omega-6 intake drives cardiovascular disease, dementia, and systemic inflammation.
“We’re growing corn with all that fossil energy,” Reiter explains, “mostly used in the Haber-Bosch process of producing nitrogen and in the nitrous oxide of excessive fertilizer application, which is all 100% settled science, to then feed it to cows to produce steaks that make us sick, in order to save us from a few cow burps that actually have never been a problem to start with.”
It’s a narrative inversion with significant implications for how regenerative brands can position themselves.
Why This Has to Work
The 12-15 major consumer packaged goods conglomerates that stock roughly 90% of supermarket shelves have a combined market capitalization of approximately $2 trillion. As a group, they haven’t returned inflation-adjusted gains to shareholders over the past decade. Most are struggling with declining brand loyalty and structural disadvantages in responding to the clean products movement.
That represents hundreds of billions in retail sales vulnerable to disruption.
The question isn’t whether the opportunity exists. It’s whether the capital structures, operational capabilities, and founder alignment can come together at the right moment to capture it.
RARE is betting they can. Not through impact investing that tolerates below-market returns, but through conventional private equity discipline applied to a thesis that happens to align profound health and environmental impact with significant commercial opportunity.
“We are in a world where more or less 12 to 15 CPG conglomerates stock 90% of our supermarkets,” Reiter summarizes. “Nearly all of those products actively make us sick. We’re six times sicker than in the 1960s, but also six times richer on a GDP per capita basis. It’s the stupidest trade ever. We made ourselves sick by buying products that we have no need for.”
The solution isn’t more research on nutrient density or more advocacy campaigns. It’s building companies that win in the market while transforming the system.
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Listen to the full conversation with Martin Reiter on the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast:
https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2026/01/27/martin-reiter-2/
Learn more about RARE: rare.inc
