From Margin to Mainstream: The Moment Arrives for Regenerative Food

What fifty years of organic can teach us about the next decade of food systems investing

By Tripp Baird, Managing Partner, The Builders Fund

When Traditional Medicinals, the largest US organic tea brand, started sourcing organic herbs in the 1970s, ‘organic’ was a fringe idea, treated as a niche indulgence by the CPG industry. Traditional Medicinals championed the concept anyway, helped write the early standards, advised on the creation of industry standards like FairWild, and built a supply chain around their values. They stood by the conviction that how food is grown and sourced is inseparable from whether it’s good for you, and for decades, that was the contrarian bet. Builders bought into that vision at TM in 2017 (and again in 2022), as the latest in over two decades’ worth of investments in systemically-responsible food systems by our team.

Over the past 25 years in the space, we have watched organic and regenerative food move from niche health food to grocery mainstay. The global organic food and beverage market now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars and continues to compound at double-digit rates, with a $76 billion footprint in the U.S. alone.

Organic’s journey from margin to widespread adoption serves as a blueprint for the natural next step, into regenerative food systems, i.e., those that not only reduce harm, but also actively contribute to healthy ecosystems and healthier people through regenerative agricultural practices and more nutrient dense food.

Demand Drivers

Today, three intertwined forces are defining demand for regenerative food practices:

As ever, the consumer is the primary demand driver. The generation of consumers now setting household food budgets (i.e., 18–54) reads labels and cares about provenance. Roughly three-quarters of consumers hold a more favorable view of brands engaged in regenerative agriculture. Their willingness to pay is what drove organic food into grocery chains and big box stores, and that same consumer is investing today in regenerative food systems.

The rise of GLP-1 medications is a related but distinct demand driver. Patients want healthier, higher-protein, nutrient-dense food, which is pulling demand away from ultra-processed products and towards real food.

Corporate procurement is moving in lockstep — and maybe a little ahead — of the consumer, as Big Food looks for the “next organic” category. In May 2026, forty of the world’s largest food companies committed to accelerating regenerative agriculture across their supply chains. FAIRR, an investor network that tracks the sector, found that 79 of the top food and beverage companies now invest in regenerative practices. Nestlé alone has committed more than a billion dollars to sourcing half its priority raw materials from regenerative farms by 2030. The regenerative agriculture market reached roughly $11 billion in 2025 and is forecast to roughly triple by the mid-2030s, with consumer-facing brands the fastest-growing source of that demand.

Recent Case Studies

As investors in systems-responsible food companies, we see several trends reflected in the Builders Fund portfolio:

Nutrient Density: For most of the industrial food era, food was formulated for shelf life, cost, and craveability. Nutritional content was often a distant afterthought. That hierarchy is inverting as consumers start asking what a food does for the body rather than simply what it costs. Brands now built around nutrition see benefits via pricing power and loyalty. The impact compounds with scale: every new door a nutrient-dense brand opens displaces ultra-processed calories on the shelf and pulls demand back through the supply chain to the farms and practices that grow better food in the first place. And this is an enormous area for impact — today certified organic land accounts for less than 1% of all US farmland.

Urban Remedy is reflective of the broader trend for nutrient dense food. The company built a 100% organic, plant-based prepared-food business on the simple premise that food is healing. Every meal, juice, and snack is certified organic and free of refined sugar, formulated to reduce and mitigate inflammation rather than just fill a package. The company now sells nationally through Whole Foods, Kroger, and other retail partners and has sourced tens of millions of pounds of organic produce from local supply chains nationally. As the market moves toward nutrient density, a brand built entirely around that concept is positioned to win.

Quality Jobs: Food runs on labor, and the industry has long treated churn as an inevitable cost. Forward thinking companies see it the other way around. Companies that invest in wages, benefits, quality jobs, and career pathways create an operating advantage, keeping hiring and training costs low, driving better customer service through a motivated workforce and enabling labor-dependent retail footprints to grow. MIXT has tracked that path in foodservice, creating a people-first culture. Founded in San Francisco in 2006, the company makes chef-created, plant-forward food from scratch, sourcing hundreds of local and organic ingredients through regenerative farm partners. Since Builders invested, MIXT has doubled its store count, served well over twelve million organic meals, and managed employee turnover to approximately 1/10th of the fast-casual industry norm by focusing on career pathways, above market benefits, and a purpose-driven culture. Two decades in, MIXT sees themselves as stewards of what’s become known as the MIXT Movement: the notion that macro-level change in its industry, as with any, is driven by the small actions that its team tackles on a micro-level. As a proud B corp, it’s the team’s vision to transform the food industry with small conscious actions in its business practices. The result is a restaurant that reimagines what it means to eat better and inextricably links the growers, the makers, and the enjoyers to propel a healthier world. Craveable real food, made accountable to its customers, its workers, and its supply chain, is a durable position as the category matures.

Responsible Supply Chains: For investors evaluating real-food brands, sourcing and supply chain are the sharpest differentiator of both impact and value — and the one most often underweighted. Can a company actually get the ingredients? Can it do so at quality, at volume, year after year, as the climate and geopolitics of supply grow more volatile? The same sourcing base that de-risks the P&L is the impact engine: as a brand grows, every incremental unit of demand flows back through the chain to farming communities, funding regenerative practice at the acre level. Sourcing is often the most undervalued competitive advantage in food, and Traditional Medicinals’ strength here is a perfect case study. TM purchases roughly 99.7% certified-organic herbs across a globally diversified base of farming and wild-collection communities in forty countries, and it’s working toward sourcing 80% fair-certified volume by 2030. It pioneered FairWild, became a Fair for Life brand, and convenes a pre-competitive working group of botanical companies to share the real cost of measuring and cutting supply-chain emissions. The result is a supply chain that is resilient because it is diversified, and defensible because it took fifty years and thousands of relationships to build. A brand can be copied in a season, but it takes decades to build a diversified and traceable sourcing network.

These companies win because of their systems-responsible approach to business building: their impact business models create economic benefit and social / environmental impact through scale in a colinear fashion. Put simply: they were built to win by deliver nutrient-dense, real food.

White Space

A clear opportunity for investment today can be found in the layer that connects the regenerative farm to the finished product: the aggregation, processing, and single-origin ingredient platforms connecting agriculture to the consumer. As large buyers commit to sourcing targetst, demand for verifiable regenerative and organic volume is racing ahead of the infrastructure that can supply it. For example, one ingredient miller alone grew its enrolled regenerative acreage from under 40,000 acres to nearly 600,000 in four years, with a target of 2.5 million by 2030. These midstream suppliers tend to be ingredient-of-record businesses with long customer relationships and recurring revenue. Too established for venture and too small for large buyout, they sit squarely in the Missing Middle where Builders invests. Supply-chain platforms can be working-capital intensive and can over-build on demand that hasn’t yet been contracted so it is important to be disciplined in a review of the space: scrutinize offtake, unit economics, and balance-sheet intensity hard before leaning in.

The Builders Fund invests in growing, cash-flow-positive businesses (generally with $20M–200M in revenue), and where purpose can be harnessed as a competitive advantage. Our investor base includes dozens of former founders and operators from the natural-and-organic world, i.e., a ready-made bench of “builders” who sit on boards and help teams scale without losing sight of the mission and purpose.

If you’re building a real-food brand, a regenerative ingredient platform, or the supply chain that feeds them — or you’re an LP or co-investor who sees the same opportunity — we’d love to talk.

The Builders Fund is a Certified B Corporation investing to build a better world. To start a conversation, reach us at thebuildersfund.com.