This week, we flip the script and take you the launch of EPIC’s Impact Journal!  To kickoff the episode you’ll hear exclusive behind the scenes audio I secretly recorded and then we’ll chat with Katie and Taylor about their dream of an Impact Journal came to be.  We’ll then get to hear from the heart and soul of the Impact Journal, our author and designer, David and Andrea.  They’ll explain how they took our founders’ vision, and turned it into a 100+ page publication filled with inspiring stories and images.  

 

We’ll end the podcast with our normal interview, but this week’s guest is not just a Meatcast hero, he’s also one of the heroes featured in our Impact Journal!  We’ll chat with Jason Rowntree, professor of Animal Science at Michigan State University, and the man responsible for bringing Regenerative Ag to academia.  He and I cover

• How he converted 70%+ of the meat served on campus, to local producers  and how teaching campus chefs to cook chuck roasts played a pivotal role
• Why he refuses to villainize factory-farm beef producers and rather, how he gets them to buy-in to a more holistic model
• What is it about a Tri-Tip steak that’ll save a marriage

Finally, throughout the episode, I explain how YOU as a loyal Meatcaster, can get your free copy of the Impact Journal, just for listening!

This week, we chat with the co-founders of Siete Foods, Miguel and Veronica Garza. Their refrigerated grain-free tortillas often outsell milk and their tortilla chips are one of the Top 3 selling items in Whole Food’s entire salty snack aisle!  

This episode is a lot different than our past episodes. We get a rare glimpse at the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, we discuss the challenges of being 1st or 2nd generation americans when your food and cultural values conflict, and we talk about what its like to have your idols suddenly advocating for your brand!

For this week's INSIDE EPIC we chat with our Brand Journalist, David Leffler. David explains how he turned a freelance writing assignment interviewing our founders, into a job where his words represent the voice of EPIC

We'll also be teasing our big 12/1/17 announcement AND giving yall details on how to win a Meatcast T-Shirt!

 

 

Meatcasters!   This week, we bring you Kiss The Ground’s Finian Makepeace. Before Finian was a professional musician, gracing the stage of America’s Got Talent, he was an avid environmentalist who understood the fundamentals of climate change and what he could do about it. Or so he thought.  Come listen to how a single lecture on soil health transformed Finian’s life and birthed Kiss The Ground.  Using their backgrounds as artists and storytellers, Kiss The Ground has become an incredible resource for education and advocacy for the Regenerative Ag movement.  Finian and I touch on the following during our conversation and plenty more!

• How Kiss The Ground is using the power of media and storytelling to raise awareness for soil health
• Why famous actors such as Rosario Dawson and Adrian Grenier care about composting
• How can conscious carnivores get a seat at a climate change table filled with vegetarians and vegans?
• Why everyone needs to stop using the word “sustainable”
• Kiss The Ground’s Upcoming Book and Documentary

For this week’s INSIDE EPIC, we bring back our Office Coordinator / Interior Designer Ashley Leline. A woman of many talents, Ashley is also our Wellness Warrior, planning events like team bouldering and yoga or simply whipping up essential oil tinctures for the office diffuser. We talk about her holistic philosophy on wellness and how she translates that into events and content for the EPIC team.   YALL, we have Meatcast t-shirts!  Listen in and I'll tell you how you can win one for yourself and a friend!

This week we head seaward, as we dive into responsible seafood with Duncan Berry from Fishpeople Seafood.  Come listen as Duncan describes

• Why only 30% of Americans are eating seafood at home
• How we export 90% of our seafood catch, only to import it all back and sell
• Why its just as important to serve the Walmarts of the world as it is to serve the Whole Foods

Duncan also provides some great advice for how you and I can shop for better seafood, and we have our first ever 100% marine Rank Your Meats!

 

For this week’s INSIDE EPIC we’re talking to EPIC’s Western Sales Manager Tim Krausse.  Tim tells us the incredible story about how Type 1 Diabetes almost took his life and how diet and lifestyle literally saved it.

Finally, with us on the eve of Halloween, I provide some advice on haunted houses, trick or meating, and how you can score some EPIC swag.

Today on the Meatcast, we welcome our first vegetarian guest, author of Defending Beef, Nicolette Hahn Niman.  You read right, she’s a vegetarian, Defending Beef consumption. Nicolette’s unique story and experience have made her a best-selling author and a renowned advocate for regenerative agriculture, with her writing featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times.  

Here’s a small sample of what Nicolette and I cover during our conversation

• How a vegetarian ends up becoming an advocate for cattle ranchers, and why she’s chosen to remain a vegetarian
• Why it’s important to understand that beef isn’t bad for our health
• Debunking the most common myths around beef production and its harm on the environment

For this week’s Inside EPIC we take yall to EPIC’s Roam Ranch, as EPIC’s fiercest outdoorsmen lead our sales team on a hunt for Axis Deer.  Trekking through thick brush before dawn, hoping to hunt and harvest a deer we’d all share for lunch that same day; not your typical Sales Team meeting.  Afterward, Katie and Taylor give us a tour of the ranch and lay out their vision for its future.  The work happening on this ranch is literally the EPIC mission coming to life, so we’re incredibly excited to share this with you and hope it's the first of many Meatcasts featuring a peek inside Roam Ranch.

Meatcastocrats!

Today we’ve got your typical Marine sniper turned accountant turned chicken farmer, Paul Grieve from Pasturebird. Beyond his incredible story, Paul is an amazing resource on the complications of raising chickens and why doing it right is such a delicate process. There’s no better person to explore the intricacies of a single animal species than him!

Paul and I discuss….

• How he founded Pasturebird and landed the Los Angeles Lakers as his first customer
• Diving deep on our existing chicken supply chain and why pastured poultry is so incredibly rare
• Every stage of raising chickens from breeds, to feed, to slaughter and how Pasture Bird is doing things differently each step of the way

For this week’s INSIDE EPIC segment, we talk with our first sales employee ever, Martha Siskron.  Without a sales team, EPIC products never make it to your store shelves — and for our early years, Martha was EPIC’s sales team.  Now she’s responsible for getting you EPIC where you least expect it (but so desperately need it!). If you’ve come across our products at an airport, convenience store, or in a vending machine, thank Martha: that’s where she works her magic!

This episode of the podcast is going to be a little different than usual. As y’all know, Texas was rocked by Hurricane Harvey last week, particularly the Houston area — which happens to be where I live.

That’s why I thought I’d give y’all a look at my evacuation experience, as well as sharing the stories of a a couple EPIC employees whose families felt the wrath of Harvey. My goal is this: to highlight how, in the grand scheme of things, the problems we faced (and in some cases, are still facing) are minor inconveniences compared to so many others who have been left homeless or worse in the hurricane’s wake.

Unfortunately, such tragedy touched one of our very own EPIC Wolfpack.  We’ll hear from our founder Katie’s mother, Terri as she shares an incredible story of courage and kindness.

And to help make some sense of things and how we can all do our part to help out, I chat with Elizabeth Pena, Development Director for the Central Texas Food Bank. In addition to being our closest charitable partner, the food bank has been running at full steam collecting donations and getting aid to people in need.

Meatclipsers!

We’ve got your ideal soundtrack for the solar eclipse as we chat with Planeteer, Judith Schwartz (that makes her Gi for all you Captain Planet fans). Judith’s first book, “Cows Save the Planet,” is required reading for all new EPIC employees, so we’re honored to have her come on to talk about her latest book, “Water In Plain Sight.”  Listen in as we dive into a number of compelling topics, including the current challenges our environment is facing today and how almost all of them can be traced back to our land's inability to hold and retain water.  We also touch on…

• Why our economy encourages environmental destruction vs. protection
• How the design of modern cities has created ideal conditions for drought
• The impact of supporting local vs. global economies
• What you can do to help improve and restore our ecology

For this week’s INSIDE EPIC, we talk to our Warehouse Manager, Steve Huish.  When Steve’s not rapping about Thrift Shops, he’s ensuring your EPIC product—the most precious cargo of all—is delivered safe, sound, and on time. He and I talk about the challenge of running a warehouse for a fast growing company, how he’s helped build the EPIC culture there, and how working at EPIC has impacted his and his family’s health.  

Listen all the way to the end to for a once-in-a-decade Meatcast/Eclipse offer.

As EPIC fans, I’m sure many of you are familiar with this week’s guest, Diana Rodgers! Diana scratches all of EPIC’s itches, as she’s a dietician, a regenerative ag farmer and she runs the Sustainable Dish podcast and website.  Her articles and podcasts are often forwarded between EPIC employees, and so we were really excited to bring her on and chat about the following...

• Why people should eat more red meat, and less chicken for their health AND for the environment
• Why she became a Registered Dietician, despite disagreeing with most of the curriculum
• The power of Regenerative Ag within a community
• How to not be the crazy ‘Paleo Parent’ with your kids’ food choices

For this week’s INSIDE EPIC segment, we chat with Sarah Creech, EPIC’s Marketing Coordinator.  Sarah has one of the coolest jobs at EPIC, managing our brand partnerships, our ambassador program, and our field marketing efforts.  We chat about her sowing seeds of bacon lust in the yoga community, her journey to EPIC, and she drops some real inspiration with what her time here has taught her.

This week we're exploring the Whole Foods universe with David Woods, their Global Category Manager for salty snacks— or in layman’s terms, the gatekeeper for every delicious item that enters the Whole Foods salty snack aisle. Y’all seem like the kind of people that go to Whole Foods to load up on samples, so here are some tiny morsels from our conversation....

• His journey from drugs and pizza delivery to paleo and Whole Foods
• What is he looking for when choosing brands for Whole Foods and why it might be easier getting into Harvard
• The unlikely place to get his attention if you're trying to get your brand into Whole Foods
• How being a CrossFit athlete impacts his work

For this week's Inside EPIC segment, we speak with the "to" in farm-to-table, EPIC's supply chain lead Rebecca Linz.  Simply put, without Rebecca, we'd be eating a farm table.  She talks about her experience being part of the General Mills "due diligence" team that evaluated EPIC prior to the acquisition, what was it like being the first General Mills employee to join the EPIC team, and what are the biggest differences she's seen between the two organizations.

Also, for the first time ever, I read one of our Apple Podcast reviews.  Tune in and find out if its yours....or my mom's.