Lundberg Family Farms

0:00Bryce Lundberg:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Bryce Lundberg:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Usually on this podcast, I bring on really early stage brands, brands that are just getting into retail stores.

1:34Bryce Lundberg:But every once in a while, I have the opportunity to speak to the people bringing us incredible legacy brands. And we actually don't see it that much in CPG, but there are some brands that are just now synonymous with really the tried and true, the pantry staples that we all know and love. This brand was already in my kitchen and something that I genuinely shop every week. So I have Suzanne Singelman. She is the CEO and Bryce Ludberg of Ludberg Family Farms. So thank you both so much for coming on the podcast.

2:17Suzanne Sengelmann:Thank you, Kelly.

2:18Bryce Lundberg:And Bryce, you're the VP of Agriculture, right?

2:22Suzanne Sengelmann:That's right. We are Ludberg Family Farms and part of our legacy is just farming, right? And so we have vice presidents of ag because we engage with a lot of our own farms and then other farms.

2:40Bryce Lundberg:Which is a really unique piece of your story. And I think it's one of the reasons why your products and all of your product lines, which is so robust, which is, again, super impressive, knowing about CPG and your attention to agriculture. So Bryce, I would love if you could first take us behind the scenes of the brand. I know you're third generation in the business, which is so incredible. Can you walk us through the overview of the brand story?

3:11Suzanne Sengelmann:Sure. You know, it all starts with my grandparents back in the Dust Bowl, right? They went through the Depression and the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in Nebraska. and you know the dust bowl it just blew and it just really destroyed the topsoil on a whole region it was the farming practices that exposed the the soil to the elements and it didn't rain and the wind just blew it really cemented in my grandfather's mind that we need to take care of the soil. And when he moved to California in 1937, he did it with that mantra. We're going to leave the land better than we found it. And that meant even though farmers were burning their rice straw and it's easy, he said that the rice straw comes from the soil.

4:04Suzanne Sengelmann:It needs to go back to the soil. And even though chemical fertilizers started coming in and became the norm, he said I'm going to grow cover crops I'm going to grow legumes and grains and other crops as a rotation because you need to think about that green cover crop it's like it's like um uh barley grass juice for the uh you know how you take a nut and just that green juice and so um in the 1960s we had a uh our first customer came to us and said will you grow organic rice for us and well I should go back and say that my grandparents Francis and Albert had four boys and all four boys started farming together with their mom and dad and when the customer came it was Chico San came to them and asked will you grow organic rice for us it made sense to them And so they started farming organic rice for Chicosan in 1969.

5:09Suzanne Sengelmann:And soon thereafter, they started, well, they packed it themselves, right? They built a small mill and packed it themselves. About 1973, they bought a two-pound ormond fill machine and said, we want to bring our packages right to customers. And we're close to the San Francisco area. And that kind of became a launching. area for Lundberg Family Farms to connect directly with customers. Then we had a bread truck that we filled with product and started taking it up and down north and south along the coast, wanting to make a connection with organic brown rice. And at that time, we were mostly growing organic short grain brown rice.

5:54Suzanne Sengelmann:And that's really how it started. And then - So cool to think that - came in and you know we are Lundberg family farms Kelly and some people wonder is it a real family and is it a real farm and there's three words there Lundberg family farm and we are Lundbergs there are 40 family members wow and we farm and uh and so um yeah I'm not saying that 40 family members is the ultimate way to go but it's it it's in our DNA that we are family and we do farm together and we stick together. And so that's kind of the legacy. I think Suzanne can share then where it goes from rice, it goes to innovate in so many different products.

6:39Bryce Lundberg:Right. Because you all have now touched so many more SKUs from how it originated with short grain brown rice, organic. And just for context, I'm sure that was one of the first organic products that was getting on people's radar, right? At that time, organic was not so synonymous with just better for you or just these terminologies that seem second nature now. Back then, that was really something totally different.

7:11Suzanne Sengelmann:You're right, Kelly. But, you know, people were looking for it, right? We started small, But it was just such a assurance or just confirmation that people started coming to our farm to get it. Right. And one of our first customers was, well, Fowler Brothers in San Rafael. But then then Michael Funk with the United or Mountain People's Warehouse, still one of our biggest. well, our biggest customer. And he started coming with the truck to pick up. So we've had a long term relationship with a lot of wonderful customers who've been looking for our products. What a confirmation that they appreciate how we farm and our approach to caring for our soil, caring for the earth, caring for people's health.

8:06Bryce Lundberg:Absolutely. So Suzanne, coming into the company with such a legacy, with so many family. Well, first, before we dive into all of it, how did you make the connection?

8:20Suzanne Sengelmann:Sure. Actually, just one more build on the organic story is the Lundbergs actually helped shape organic standards. So yes, that's how early and influential they have been in the organic market. So I am a consumer products brand builder by training. I started at Clorox company for a long time and worked on brands like Kingsford Charcoal and Brita Water Filtration, Hidden Valley, all different types of brands and really - Household names. Right. Household names. It got the passion for building a brand in what I like to call kind of a transformative and disruptive way. From there, I went to Angie's Boom Chickapop and really got the fever for mission driven and values different brands.

9:09So it was about

9:11Suzanne Sengelmann:four years ago when the company actually hired their first outside CEO. Prior to that, not only is it still family owned, but it had been family led and operated. And the board made a very purposeful call that they wanted to show up a little bit more as a consumer product. The story is obviously incredible and the family heritage and history, but the CEO they brought in, who's a friend of mine, Craig Stevenson, really felt like he was brought in to shift from being what he called a farm with a brand to a brand served by an incredible farm. Right. Which is a big shift. It's a huge shift. And again, you know, kudos to the family and to the board for recognizing all businesses have different chapters.

10:04Suzanne Sengelmann:And that this was a chapter really that they wanted to undertake. So he came in, he and I had known each other for a long time. And he brought me in to help really put in place a five year business strategy. And I was supposed to be there just very temporarily. But the first time I drove to the farm, you know, in Richville, California, I was raised right outside Seattle, Washington, in a very rural place on a small lake. and it sounds kind of corny, but the first time I drove up and saw the rice fields and the birds and just, you know, the beauty of a sun coming up, um, on nature. Uh, I was, I, it spoke to me and I had been spending so much time in the Silicon Valley doing things that I liked, but very different, very different.

10:49Suzanne Sengelmann:I want to be part of this. I want to be part of changing the food system. I want to be part of actually seeing and touching what I'm putting out in the world. So I started out doing the five-year strategy, which we'll speak to in a minute. And then I joined as chief growth officer. And to your point, just recently took over as chief executive officer. But really from a brand and a strategic standpoint, we knew we wanted to do a couple things. First and foremost, we did want to elevate the brand to regenerative organic certified from organic. And really what that just means is at Lundberg, we believe regenerative starts with organic.

11:25Suzanne Sengelmann:So we wanted to just elevate up, right? And when we could, we recognized pretty quickly that a lot of the practices that Lundberg and our growing partners were utilizing actually were very closely linked with regenerative organic certified, which really regenerative organic starts with a lot of organic principles around how you treat the soil. It also has principles in terms of wildlife, Lundberg's home to over 200 wildlife species, check, and then social fairness. And, you know, obviously the way Lundberg had set up the company, as well as operating in California, how we treat our workers, that was a check as well.

12:04Suzanne Sengelmann:So step one was to elevate the brand from a certification standpoint to regenerative organic. The other thing, though, that we wanted to do from a brand standpoint is I really felt like the Lundberg story was one of the best kept secrets out there and wanted to get the news out there. But to your point, wanted to, it was a big challenge in terms of how do we honor the history and the legacy of a company that's been around since 1937, showing up in the same way as I'm going to just call it like the modern food movement, you know, showing up in kind of a new way and in a modern and provocative manner.

12:48Suzanne Sengelmann:So we did a campaign that highlighted our unique farming principles, which we are fully vertically integrated. We plant seed, we grow seed, we plant seed, we harvest rice, we dry it, we store it, we mill it, we pack it. Every step of the way, we do things what we call the hard way, because that's typical. So trying to do though, an ad campaign that showed every step of the process. If I had 20 minutes, maybe. So we came up with an idea. One of the things we do in this unique process is cover crops that Bryce was just speaking to when they grow and prior to getting ready to plant the rice, a lot of ducks have made their little nests for their baby ducks amongst the cover crops.

13:34Suzanne Sengelmann:So prior to farming, though when we come across a duck's little duck nest and eggs we along with the California Waterfall Association rescue those bring them to a little warmer where they hatch and then we release them back into the wildlife so it's a beautiful darling story part of that is so sweet isn't it just and it's so sweet yes I mean it's just yeah it gives you the warm and fuzzies for Oh, it is. So we launched a campaign where we basically said, if we care this much about baby ducks, imagine how much we care about our rice. And then of course the tagline is ducking good rice. So it all comes together.

14:17Suzanne Sengelmann:It's super cute. It's provocative. It's memorable. It's truthful. And like I said, though, really what we want to highlight is just that we care more and we care more every step of the way. So we did that. And then the last thing, and sorry to keep going on here, but when we elevated to the ROC and we started building the brand, to your point, we do have, um, six different product lines, three within rice and three within snacks within the package rice business. We have 17 varieties. So it isn't, I know it, I looked at all of them. They're beautiful.

14:49Bryce Lundberg:I was so excited to hear more behind the scenes of like how that all comes together?

14:55Suzanne Sengelmann:Well, again, if we had several hours, but we have a, we have a nursery that we actually breed our own rice. Like we just launched last year, our own black japonica rice, our black pearl. It's amazing. It has, it's richer in antioxidants. It grows in such a way that's improved taste, quality, and yield rates. So we do things like that. So we have 17 varieties of packaged rice. We also, as we started the strategy, entered the 92nd rice business, which is the pouches that you put in the microwave, you can have in 90 seconds.

15:26Bryce Lundberg:Oh, I haven't seen that skew yet.

15:27Suzanne Sengelmann:Oh, you haven't. Okay. We're going to need to set you up, Kelly, with some product when we're done. Listen, I'm in. Yeah. And we have yummy flavors like cilantro, lime, right? Coconut, Spanish. Oh, I need this. Okay. Yes. And then we have within our snacks business, we have three different types of rice cakes. We have the thick ones, the thick round, which is our heritage. We have these bespoke machines that only we make and they're crunchy and amazing. We have the thin ones that are in squares and come in a carton. And then we have our minis that are just the darling of the portfolio. Yeah, they're the little hexagons that you can eat a whole bag of.

16:03Suzanne Sengelmann:And they're very light and crunchy. And they're the ones that we just launched two new sweet cake flavors this year, a birthday cake and a salty caramel. That if you're looking for a little bit of indulgence in the afternoon or after dinner, that doesn't make you feel terrible. They're very light, low sugar and delish.

16:25Bryce Lundberg:Amazing. Wow. You did a great job of explaining all of those SKUs. No, that's perfect because you all have so many SKUs. And again, I've tried many of them, but I'm excited to try a few that you mentioned that haven't been on my radar yet. But Suzanne, for you coming in, I'm just also thinking as a brand strategist, that's a lot to organize and And to also have distinction on shelf to make it easy for a consumer to make a decision because you all are truly leading this conversation, right? Of organic, regenerative organic. It's like the next wave of food and beverage. And I was saying off camera before we started, I'm working with a client right now.

17:12Bryce Lundberg:We've been looking into regenerative organic certification for her product that I think would be a really great fit. But for consumers, I feel like they're just now catching up to organic. And then the next wave of regenerative organic, I feel like there's still a lot of education to it. Again, to your point of content. What's been the strategy around having so much variety, but also making it easy for a consumer to find what product fits their needs, their budget, what they want flavor wise like all those things that you you know quickly go through your own personal checklist when you're looking at products but I would love to hear from your perspective again kind of coming in with a fresh set of eyes also knowing your background

18:03Suzanne Sengelmann:yep so we did a strategy there we did actually um upgrade the packaging too when we elevated to the regenerative organic because to your point there's a lot of consumer confusion and we didn't want it to just be the certification mark, although that's very meaningful. We wanted the whole kind of net takeaway for a consumer to be rice is a plant. It's grown in the ground, how we grow it matters. So we added things like the pond and the rice panicles to have, yeah, to have that, that net takeaway, because when you sit in center of store, the more removed you are from the perimeter, the less time consumers actually spend about how was this product grown.

18:42Suzanne Sengelmann:So, so that was very important. The other thing about the varieties is consumers tend to first and foremost shop based on what they're cooking. If I'm making Thai food, I want Jasmine. If I'm making Japanese, I go for sushi. So we also know that that's like the entry point along with the brand. So we pretty much know in any given shopping location, you need to have a breadth of varieties represented because consumers are looking for their specific recipe. Sure. Strategically, you're right. There's so much consumer confusion out there in reference to regenerative overall, which is why, like I said, at Lundberg, we really believe it starts with organic.

19:22Suzanne Sengelmann:Don't want to leave that behind. Right. We also, though, are big believers that certification matters, which is another reason why we're aligned with regenerative organic, because it's one of the only kind of forms of certification that we think really represents how food is grown. And then we're working hard with the Regenerative Organic Alliance to make sure consumers do and our customers understand that regenerative organic is the gold standard.

19:50Bryce Lundberg:Very cool. Bryce, from your point of view, VP of Agriculture, what do you think is the most compelling reason for a consumer to want to reach for that regenerative organic option? Just from your own experience and again, what you bring to the table, I would just love to hear your own personal take of why this is important in the food choices that we're making.

20:17Suzanne Sengelmann:Well, regenerative organic certification has the three pillars that Suzanne referenced. Caring for the soil, for soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. And we believe that, you know, well, we farm regenerative and organically because we believe the health of our bodies and the health of the world depend on it. And what is regenerative about using toxic chemicals to grow food? Really, the term regenerative and toxic chemicals, chemicals that have pesticide or insecticide or fumigant. Those just aren't compatible. So I know how we grow our rice, right? We use it caring for the soil, putting in cover crops, using plant nutrients that are from nature.

21:16Caring for the farm in a way that is compatible with animals to come and engage.

21:24Suzanne Sengelmann:Now, we don't grow, you know, one of the things my grandpa said was pretty smart to leave the animals in Nebraska, but we farm with the wild here. Thousands and thousands, if not millions of birds come through and use our fields as their home in the wintertime. We flood a portion of our fields for the birds and then a portion of our cover crops, but they are essential for a habitat for the Pacific Flyway and for the ducks, the geese, the cranes, the shorebirds. That flooding is purely for the Pacific Flyway. Yeah, so we do it in the winter and it's really for a place for the birds to rest. Now, having said that, they work for us because they poop and they walk and they do all kinds of things.

22:13Suzanne Sengelmann:It's good for the soil. But yeah, flooding the fields is really for the Pacific Flyway.

22:17Bryce Lundberg:That is so interesting. I would never have thought, I mean, I feel like I'm pretty hip to regenerative and organic and all that good stuff. But that level of detail, I never would have put those pieces together.