Robby Sansom is the co-founder and CEO of Force of Nature, a regenerative meat company based here in Austin that's now in Whole Foods nationally and 1,475 Publix stores. Before that, he was one of the first hires at EPIC Provisions, where he helped build the company from a scrappy Austin startup into a category-defining brand that General Mills acquired in 2016. Robby and I were on a panel together recently and I immediately knew I needed him on the podcast because the format was too constrained for the depth of what he has to say about our food system. We get into the real math behind regenerative agriculture — like the fact that it takes 500 years to create an inch of topsoil and the U.S. loses 2 billion tons of it every year — why most certification labels are misleading consumers, and why Force of Nature's beef at 75 cents an ounce is actually cheaper than a bag of Ruffles. The moment that stuck with me most: when I asked Robby whether regenerative agriculture can scale, he said he rejects the premise of the question entirely. The current system isn't the baseline. It's the one that's failing.

Follow Robby on LinkedIn and Force Of Nature on Instagram at @forceofnaturemeats. Check out Force of Nature at forceofnature.com and sign up for their newsletter — even if you never buy anything, the education alone is worth it. And if you're digging Gross to Net, subscribe, leave a review, and tell someone who needs to hear conversations like this one.