While more regenerative agriculture food brands are popping up in grocery stores, these businesses often lack adequate funding and infrastructure necessary for growth.
In other words, the brands doing the most with regenerative agriculture often receive the least amount of support, says ReGen Brands cofounder Anthony Corsaro.
ReGen Brands, which began as a podcast discussing its namesake, has over the last couple years grown and expanded to provide this kind of support. At the end of 2024, it officially launched its “ecosystem” that includes a trade association for regenerative agriculture brands, a research arm and a funding aspect.
“We’ve become the de facto fund leaders in this whole regenerative CPG thing,” says Corsaro, who runs ReGen Brands with cofounder Kyle Krull and executive director Arron Mansika.
Below, he discusses the origins of the ReGen Brands concept, how it works with brands, and what must happen next to keep building a regenerative food system.
AgFunderNews (AFN): How did the ReGen Brands concept start?
Anthony Corsaro (AC): Kyle was at [CPG company] Kettle & Fire, [which] had launched two regenerative bone broth SKUs. I was in LA on a work trip and I saw [one of Kettle & Fire’s] regenerative-themed end-cap display at [organic grocery chain] Erewhon and I was like, “Who is this guy?”
So I reached out to Kyle. We had a zoom call, and then I moved back to Bend Oregon, where I had lived before, but not known Kyle, where he lives still. We went to two coffees, and I said, “Let’s start a podcast about regenerative brands,” not knowing what it would become.
Since then, we’ve become the de facto fund leaders in this whole regenerative CPG thing.
AFN: Tell us more about what ReGen Brands does.
AC: It started out as a media company, which was ReGen Brands 1.0.
I was also doing some investing out of a separate brand called Outlaw Ventures, and Kyle was doing some informal brand cooperation out of the original ReGen Coalition. Since then, we’ve worked really hard to revamp all of that under the “ReGen Brands” ecosystem banner.
Now we have the ReGen Brands Institute, the ReGen Brands Coalition, and ReGen Brands Capital. We use philanthropic money via a 501 (c)(3) to do research and education, like the podcast, newsletter, blog and our new report. All of the work is designed to produce, open-source and publish any research and education that would help create more demand for regenerative agriculture through CPG.
AFN: What is the Regen Coalition?
AC: It’s basically the next evolution of what Kyle was doing very informally. We formed a real 501(c)(6) trade association, onboarded 31 members, and that entity was the first trade association for regenerative brands.
We’re uniting various different products and brands that have different certification or claim types. Historically, it’s been, “I’m ‘regenerified’,” “I’m regenerative-organic certified,” “I’m land-to-market.”
We were the first group that said we’re going to take any brand that has at least one product with a third-party-validated regenerative claim.
There are eight different pathways into that third-party validation that we honor for membership.
AFN: Tell us a bit more about ReGen Capital.
AC: I had made about 20 different angel investments, and about six of them were into CPG brands.
We needed to fund these businesses categorically differently than we were, but there were very few investors thinking that way, and next to no institutional investors or angels or anyone really saying, “Hey, how can we fund these brands differently than just regular equity and debt investments?”
So Regen Brands Capital will begin as programming of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit to try and answer that question.
The hope is that it will eventually produce research that could seed a for-profit fund where we would use some of these new, innovative tools and fund models to actually fund the brands themselves.
AFN: Why do regenerative brands need to be funded differently?
AC: At a high level, these businesses have a different mandate than just growth and profit, so there’s not a lot that makes the investment binary: boom or bust, success or failure, etc.
[Traditional equity funding] usually demands a very high, rapid growth in a short timeline which a lot of these brands don’t want to do and a lot of the supply chains can’t support if they’re truly going to be regenerative.
On the debt side, it’s more about [providing] a way for these brands to potentially reap the economic rewards of the systems they’re supporting in a way they can’t fully realize in their cost of goods or their prices for consumers right now.
[For example,] is there a way to do inventory financing that has a variable interest rate that is reduced based on some sort of societal or environmental impact that the brand is creating by procuring those goods from a regenerative farmer?
Or could we do something similar with a line of credit?
AFN: How do you ensure the companies you work with are legitimately doing regenerative agriculture and not greenwashing?
AC: We believe that these agriculture practices need to be adopted on as much land, as fast as possible, as quickly as possible. That [includes] everyone from the most regenerative (“We’ve been regenerative forever, we’re going to stay regenerative”) to the other side of the continuum (“We’re not using any of these practices, and we’re just going to start”).
We support all of that work, but what we are really focused on is probably more of the former. Those are brands with at least one regenerative product in the marketplace that has that third party backing.
We define our third-party validation criteria as you have to have one of seven different certifications on that product, or you have to have gone through the Whole Foods Market Regenerative Assessment, and they have stamped your product as a legit regenerative claim.
AFN: Do you work with agrifood corporates that have regen ag commitments?
AC: We are not and have not really entertained or worked with McCain or PepsiCo or any of these brands that are really self-defining regenerative. That’s not because we don’t think that’s valid work — it’s just not the work that we want to support, and there’s tons of subsidies, other NGOs, other people already supporting those people.
We really felt like the most regenerative brands were really receiving the least support, and we wanted to build something new, to create a new support mechanism for them.
AFN: Would you ever have imagined ReGen Brands would grow this big from a Zoom call and a podcast?
AC: I never, ever in a million years would have thought I would ever be a nonprofit entrepreneur. I never thought I would start a 501 (c)(3) but ultimately, part of the problem is these brands are providing society, societal, human health and environmental good that they are not compensated for in their businesses. Either the government has to subsidize that or philanthropy has to subsidize that. [A 501 (c)(3)] is the only way that you could support an industry through the guise of that societal good they’re creating.
AFN: What is your focus for 2025?
AC: I think the two things that people are most interested in is the work of the coalition and capital. The Institute is a new legal entity, but we’ve been doing the podcast and the blog and the newsletter for quite a while now.
On the capital side, it’s really hiring ahead of capital to come in and lead those efforts and start doing that consultative and advisory work with the brands and building that research base, which we’re not setting a hard timeline on.
On the coalition side, this thing’s brand new, but we are trying to really work with the brands on developing unified consumer messaging. How do we develop some sort of way to better partner with retailers to collaboratively and uniformly promote regenerative products in their stores?
We’re looking at what kinds of collaborative marketing, events, and activations we can do. We see ourselves as a kind of aggregator in the space. We’ve reached a point of critical mass where each certification program is going to do what its messaging says, but that’s not the holistic narratives have to give to Sprouts, Whole Foods, etc., where there will always be different types of regenerative products and certifications at the store.
[Retailers] need us to do that because no one else is going to. We believe the ceiling of consumer awareness and demand for regenerative is significantly limited if no one does that.
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Author Jennifer Marston
