He Made Millions on Jerky. His Next Food Venture Is Way Harder.

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Key Takeaways

- Robby Sansom co-founded Force of Nature in 2019 after selling Epic Provisions, the company that pioneered grass-fed jerky.

- Force of Nature aggregates regenerative ranchers to sell healthier meat direct-to-consumer, in 5,000+ grocery stores, and to restaurants nationwide.

- The company now impacts 3.8 million acres across 917 ranches, with 60% year-over-year growth and subscription sales doubling annually.

Robby Sansom would have preferred not to start his company.

Not because it was a bad idea — but because he hoped someone else would do it first. After selling Epic Provisions, the company that pioneered grass-fed jerky and made him financially set for life, he was prepared to ride off into the sunset.

Then visitors started showing up at ROAM Ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas, where Sansom owns regenerative bison. They’d see the animals grazing, the healthy soil, the whole system working as it should, and sometimes they’d cry. “How do I feed my family this way?” they’d ask.

For months, Sansom didn’t have an answer. Read some books, he’d tell them. Try to find a rancher in your area doing this. But he knew that wasn’t enough.

“We’d run a successful company and had a great outcome, personally and financially,” Sansom recalls. “But we weren’t done with our mission, and nobody else was gonna do this. We felt like we were uniquely positioned to succeed, and we’re playing with house money.”

So in 2019, Sansom launched Force of Nature. The company aggregates ranchers using regenerative agriculture practices (managed grazing, no feedlots, no antibiotics or hormones) and sells their meat direct-to-consumer, in grocery stores nationwide, and to restaurants. The goal is to create awareness and access to meat from healthy animals raised on healthy land.

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Cheaper meat, but at what cost?

Americans spend about 10% of their disposable income on food, which is among the lowest rates in the developed world. In the EU, that number runs 14% to 17%, with some countries spending over 20%.

The gap isn’t because American food is a bargain. It’s because our industrialized farms engineered a system to drive costs down at any expense. Chickens now reach market weight in six weeks instead of 40-plus. They’ve more than doubled in size. Chicken consumption is up 350% in a generation and a half.

But bigger isn’t necessarily better. Modern industrial birds have been selectively bred to grow so fast they’ve lost natural behaviors — they can’t breed, can’t run from predators, and can barely do anything but sit at a feed trough.

Meanwhile, American obesity rates have tripled since 1975. Type 2 diabetes has more than doubled since the 1990s. Sansom believes there’s a connection.

“How can we not be sick if we’re eating sick animals?” he asks.

Davis vs. Goliath

The meat industry is heavily centralized. Sansom points to what he calls “the big four” — Tyson, Cargill, National Beef and JBS — which control the majority of processing and distribution. That consolidation makes it hard for smaller operations to compete or even access the infrastructure they need.

Banks won’t touch new meat companies, Sansom says. “Nobody wants to give you a valuation to raise money on. Banks are hesitant to lend you money.”

Then there’s the expense of regenerative food to consumers. You don’t need to visit a Whole Foods to realize that eating healthy is more expensive—at least that’s what most people believe. Force of Nature beef runs about 75 cents per ounce. That’s pricier than conventional ground beef, which many families already struggle to buy regularly.

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Building a unique model

Force of Nature took a different approach to both the supply chain problem and the affordability perception.

On cost, Sansom argues we’ve been conditioned to see cheap food as normal. “We’ve traded value for cheapness,” he says. “We need to have a better understanding of the true cost of food.”

He points out that 75 cents per ounce is actually cheaper than Ruffles potato chips ($1.30/oz) or Snickers bars ($1.20/oz) — items we don’t think twice about buying. He says he feeds his family of four with Force of Nature beef and organic vegetables for about $17 total — less than a single Chick-fil-A value meal.

On distribution, the company competes by not owning farms or processing facilities. Instead, they aggregate ranchers who use regenerative practices and coordinate the supply chain. The business model breaks conventional wisdom about focus: multiple sp