Plant Ranch Foods Co-Founder and CEO, Gary Huerta speaks with Andrew D. Ive from Big Idea Ventures about starting a plant-based meat company, creating tastes and flavors that give their customers an authentic food experience.
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Transcript:
SPEAKERS
Andrew D Ive, Gary Huerta
Andrew D Ive
Hi, this is Andrew from the Big Idea podcast Food and I’m here today to speak with Gary Huerta, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Plant Ranch, we’re going to learn the story of how they got started. They never set out to become an amazing plant based food company but that’s exactly what they become through some twists and turns in their origin story. So I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation and by all means, engage with us via Big Idea Ventures.com or via LinkedIn or via this podcast. Thanks very much. And let’s get into it. All right, Gary, Gary Huerta from Plant Ranch, as I live and breathe. How are you today, sir? Doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having me here.
Andrew D Ive
Of course. So this is, as you know, the Big Idea podcast focused on food. We spend each week talking to new founding teams. We talk to thought leaders in the food space, you happen to be both of those things. So great to have you on board. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Plant Ranch?
Gary Huerta
Oh, well, thanks. I don’t know that I’ve ever been called a thought leader, but I’ll take that as a compliment.
Andrew D Ive
For when I’m in a meeting with Suzy Welch and she says, whenever anyone considers a vegan lifestyle, she basically points them towards Plant Ranch. Because she knows that will get them over the hump and into the plant based category. You know, you guys have got to be the thought leaders in creative food space.
Gary Huerta
Thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah, I hope we’ll touch on that later. I think the first question you asked is how we came into being and it was actually a very long story. I’ll try to make this a short story because it actually is a little lengthy. My partner, Mike, is a real lover of the forests up above Los Angeles. Los Angeles National Forest. He managed to get a group of Seventh Day Adventists, who are really lovely people, about 200 of them to go up one day and clean up the forest. The trails, specifically as these trails are very used and they get very abused. So he had agreed to make them lunch, and knowing that they were vegetarians, not full vegans, but they are vegetarians, what needed to be provided to them was something that would be suitable for them and likewise, it would be a very nice way to say thank you to these people for helping him with his cause. He thought that he was going to be able to go to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and other places and just have them hand him food to serve lunch. Well, it’s not that easy, because you need to be a 501 c three, and you need to actually prove that you’re not taking this in and having a poolparty with these donations. So anyway, he didn’t get anything. He was actually in between jobs so he’s kind of financially struggling a little bit, had to feed these people and started trying to figure out what and how he could do that. It was very meaty, and it just felt a lot more like meat than any of therecipes he was making off of the internet. He then asked his wife, who’s our other partner Carmen, to to help him do the flavorings and she used her family recipes that she grew up with. Marinating and flavoring and cooking meats. So the first one he did was the carne asada, which is actually now our most popular flavor. They got it. It was an amazing product. They ended up serving the 200 people up in the hills in the Indian Angeles National Forest. He did research and discovered that, fatan is this plant based protein that has been around for actually 1000s of years, and it originated in China with the monks. I won’t deviate off onto that story. So he set about making fatan pates and hated every one of them. He said he tried dozens and dozens of them. One night, very late at night, he had an idea for how to maybe shift the making of fatan and applied his idea and he said he thought he had something that really worked. A couple of weeks later, he had me and my girlfriend, who is now my wife, come over to the house. I was not vegan at the time and he said by the way, I made all of that and it was plant based. That’s vegan meat. And I just freaked out, I couldn’t believe it. There was I, actually didn’t believe it. I thought he was kidding me. i thought he was fucking around. Let’s use that. So I thought no way and then he said yeah, yeah, for sure. And for me, that was my lightbulb moment. I’ve been in marketing and advertising all my career, I went and got a degree in college for that. So for nearly 30 years now, I’ve been doing that and to me, it was the ultimate like, wow, if I am blown away, and I can feel this way, there’s got to be a lot of other people who would feel that way. I really very quickly put it to them. I think it was that night. So we got it, we maybe should do this. So you can think about making this a company and taking this on? Mike was kind of into it. Like I said, he was between jobs. He thought that it might be fun. Carmen was not interested at all. She really was very resistant to it. So it took about a couple more months of, you know, we ate the food. I tried it and then just kept on saying, look, this is a really good thing here. This is something that I think is just amazing. And finally, at the beginning of 2016, Carmen agreed and we started working on a brand plan for the business. Then we we tried to figure out so we only have $7500 what could we do with $7500 to put these products into people’s mouths? Mike came up with the idea of doing a taco cart, because in LA taco carts are kind of the big deal, tacos or valet food really street tacos, especially for taco cart.
Andrew D Ive
Let’s just break. Let’s just unpack that for a second. Is this a big ass truck? That is like $20,000 or $30,000?
Gary Huerta
No, this is like the cart you see outside of like sporting events that have the hotdogs on them the bacon hotdogs and whatnot.
Andrew D Ive
So like an aluminum, little Rolly thing.
Gary Huerta
Yeah. Yeah, it was food grade, it was stainless steel and we got it from a guy that makes taco carts about 15 miles away from us. We had a couple of specific things that we wanted done but just say it was a taco cart. It had a couple of steam tables for the proteins, we made tortillas and went out onto the streets in Highland Park, which is a kind of hip area in Los Angeles, good Street to be on. Struggled for a few weeks, and then we caught the attention of a few vegan plant based influencers, social media influencers who came by, and we’ve been, you know, pinging them and trying to get them to come by but they came by showed up with a couple friends and once they got a taste of it, and they saw that this is really great stuff. We started to get some lines and lines grew into bigger lines, which grew into a more complicated setup. Mike and Carmen are students of the Toyota lean manufacturing process. So we actually rented an auto repair corner. They would be closed down, they’d move the cars for us so we had this big area and within about, I don’t know, I would say it was less than than six months, Mike had figured out you know, we could use square we could integrate it with other things and we were setting up on the street like a taco cart, but we had we had point of sale. People at the front doing the orders. The orders were going back to tablets and TV screens in an outdoor setting where we’ve got people making things, we were pushing orders through. They were taking about a minute and a half a minute and 45 for somebody to order a burrito anyway, they wanted tacos, they wanted nachos, we cranked it through. That did really well for a couple years we ended up doing Coachella god, this is a long story!! before we
Andrew D Ive
Before we finish the story, because it’s actually really quite interesting. Let’s say an average day Saturday on the weekend, Highland Park what kind of number of dishes or number of meals or number of couples or however you think about it? What’s a normal day? What is
Gary Huerta
Okay, let’s get to the question and it’s actually kind of staggering. We sold our food products and you can still see them if you go to social media and look at Cena vegan. You’ll see what the tacos and burritos and nachos look like, they’re massive. I mean, I think I’ve always argued that it’s way too big but you know, that’s social media, Instagram loves those things. Let me get right to your answer, though. So all of our products sold between $8 and $10. And on a Friday night, we would do about $3500 $4,000 from 6pm to 11pm. Five hours.
Andrew D Ive
Wow. Okay, so three to 400 mil.
Gary Huerta
Yeah, and it was pre pandemic, when we would set up there on a Friday, we will be setting up and there would already be a line of 1015 people waiting for us just to open and then sometimes it just wouldn’t subside and then the lines would go around the corner a little bit. But again, I think people who knew us and understood what we were doing, saw that there’s 25 people, I’m going to be through this line in about five minutes, because these guys turned things so quickly. And that was I think part of the allure is that people realize they weren’t waiting and they were waiting in a long line, but the line was moving. So to pick back up, right, so we become this local Southern Cal phenomenon, kind of hit of the vegan festivals and that the lines are super long there because people are traveling and they want to see it. We ended up doing Coachella. And sometime around the beginning of 2019 I had thought wow, we’re doing really well as Santa vegan but we’ve gotten really sidetracked, we’ve now become this kind of very profitable food service and we started to have some really good success with stores and other food service companies coming to us. We had no sales no marketing, no nothing. It’s just this cart and Instagram. And suddenly Lassen has come to us and follow your heart cafe in the valley and a couple other stores and then there’s Veggie Grill actually came to us unsolicited, because they had either seen or tried our food. And it was at that point we realised we had to work out what we wanted to do and how we wanted to go. We were either going to be a good food service company, or we’re going to be a pretty mediocre plant based protein company that doesn’t do very well in distribution and sales. And so we started to reshift and refocus in July.
Andrew D Ive
Why Why? Why do you think those were the two scenarios?
Gary Huerta
Well, I can tell you from my experience in BIV, Big Idea Ventures for those who don’t know the acronym. It was impossible for me, as the CEO, to do both. I resigned from Santa Vegan during the course of the accelerator program because I have a duty to make Plant Ranch as successful as it can possibly be. I have an obligation to the investors to dedicate 100% of my time to this business and I think that it’s not possible to do even as somebody who doesn’t have full on ,day to day, hands on with the restaurant. A restaurant is time consuming, I don’t care who you are, and you know I think you and I discussed this at the beginning of the program. You said how are you gonna manage that, and I said I think I’ll manage it. Mike said the same thing, how are you gonna manage this? He said, you realize that this accelerated program means you’re all in buddy, you put all your chips on the table, and I was like I got this. I realized around March that no I don’t and what I have to do is just get rid of it. So I did. That said, I sort of knew I back then that we needed to separate the two out, and we needed to have focus on this other thing and then the pandemic hit and we were just about to get into Whole Foods into their prepared food section and that went away. It was feeling a little like we were taking very slow steps backwards even though the business was actually growing, we were still doing well. Year over year growth between 2019 and pandemic year was really good, we did very well. There glaring problems of having a small company, and I think you said and other people I know said, there’s a reason why a lot of small companies can’t scale up because it’s fucking hard. It’s really hard and I’ve never done anything in business that’s been harder than trying to get this thing scaled up for real. That really started with the painfully long 17 minute video I sent you guys as our intro. I went back and looked at it, I can’t believe it was 17 minutes long. Anyway, I was like what was I thinking? So you know, when we got there and you and I talked and we talked with the rest of the Big Idea team for me, I felt scaling up sales and distribution were our biggest challenges. We needed to do something about that and so here we kind of are out of out of being this foil, that’s a long story right, out of being this lunch that was served for a really good cause, for a good reason, to getting on to the streets to becoming sort of Food Service foenum to shifting back to being the plant based protein manufacturer that we wanted to be when we started in 2016, to be on the verge of scaling up to have some serious national distribution. It’s mind blowing when when you start these things, I’m sure there are a ton of entrepreneurs who do it the same way. You have no idea what you’re getting into and with food service, and with food manufacturing, boy, it’s good that you don’t know what you’re getting into, because you’d never do it. I mean, if I had known all of the challenges and things that would exist in food manufacturing, back when we were in that backyard, and I was telling them, let’s be a plant based meat company I don’t think we would have ever done it, but you know, it’s good that you don’t know what you don’t know sometimes, because you just have to learn it along the way.
Andrew D Ive
I want to say I hope whoever’s listening to this, who has the potential to be another Plant Ranch one day doesn’t listen to this and get turned off. Because
Gary Huerta
No, no, no, that’s not what I want at all. In fact, I I’d say you have to follow what your dream and your vision is and I think that if you have a product that you really do believe is better than what’s out there currently, then you have to go for it, just full tilt you have to go all in on it and be prepared to just really work hard. No matter what category, no matter what portion of our planet we live on, there is always room for better, always because that’s just the way better works, better is always available. So you gotta make it happen.
Andrew D Ive
This should be a headline for this conversation “better is is always available”. I love that. So let’s talk about the team. Now the three of you set out together, I’m guessing you were the marketing person. Take us through what the other team members did? Let’s go through that first. How do you guys divide up the company and who does what and how did you decide in the beginning? How you are going to divide up the responsibilities and the functions?
Gary Huerta
We had to do it very much by how many hats can each person wear? Because like I said, we started with $7500 and for almost five years took no investment until you guys came along and were the first people to have some monetary faith in us.
Andrew D Ive
I think it must been you didn’t ask anybody.
Gary Huerta
I kind of didn’t. I was very fortunate in that, my time at DirecTV and at&t exposed me to a really wide swath of how the business was run. Now I was in marketing and sales most of the time, but I was always part of our big company meetings. I’ve helped put the decks together for the executive vice presidents, contributed to the CEOs deck and got a really great education in a lot of parts of business. Not that I wanted to do all of that but that’s been kind of my side of it, not just marketing. But I have been doing the finances and just trying to overall see what the vision of organizing a real company is going to be all about. Mike and Carmen are product people. I mean, you know, they’re the secret sauce. They have unbelievable palates. Mike’s ability is to be this incredibly focused person, wanting things to be better and wanting to find efficiencies and Carmen’s recipes are amazing, they both have a lot of manufacturing experience and it has been key to our ability to actually produce a lot of pounds product in what is a very small, shared kitchen.
Andrew D Ive
So he’s the product development guy from an engineering perspective.
Gary Huerta
Yeah,
Andrew D Ive
She’s the product development person from a taste, spices from the flavoring side. And I kind of see you as the sort of lead singer because you’re the marketing guy out in front you know, the person that people see, while Mike and Carmen are doing the magic in the background, right?
Gary Huerta
Yeah, that’s why I grew my hair long to be the lead singer. So yeah, that’s very true and I am very much looking forward to this next step as we get close to hopefully closing funding for a seed round, fingers crossed, toes everything. Yeah, I am really excited by the idea of now having real divisions of the company that aren’t all having to wear different hats. I’m excited that we have a great sales team that understands distribution, starting to work on it. I think we found a marketing person who’s going to be good. We’ve got a finance guy in place and I’m eager to have all of these things build and work cohesively. Whereas before, it was always kind of me, I gotta do payroll, I got to do the finances, I got to do this, I got to see over the taxes. You know, having an HR person to administer HR would be fantastic. I mean, I’ve had to do that stuff as well and it’s time to let really good people start to do that and integrate these things as a true functioning business. It’s so exciting. Again, I go back to you know, what it was like to have all those people just up in the hills eating, eating a bunch of tacos on a path to having an organization and an infrastructure and making the r&d schedule, and timeline and budget work together with the marketing timeline and scheduling budget, this is really cool stuff.
Andrew D Ive
I was gonna say, one of the toughest things you guys had to do, was make that decision. Okay you know, we’ve got a number of places we can take this business, we got a number of directions we can travel and even though we might want to, we can’t travel them all at the same time. So what do we want to be when we grow up? And you guys went through that thought process? It sounds like you came to the decision, at least you did in terms of what you want to focus on day to day, that you want to be a world class, world positioned, plant based food company. Does that mean that the restaurant and that side of the business, which is obviously the heritage and where you came from and something you guys got really very, very good at, Is that something you needed to pass over to a different group of people? Did you sell it? What did you decide to do with that part of the business?
Gary Huerta
Well, I resigned so we’re currently working on what my buyout is according to the operating agreement. Mike and Carmen are continuing it right now while a decision is being made as to what they want to do with it, actually. I told them, when I resigned rather abruptly, we were actually looking for a brick and mortar. After that I had gone with them and looked at the place and saw it needed a bunch of work and immediately in my mind, I thought what am I going back to. Am I going back to the same chaos that I was trying to solve before. I mean, now suddenly, I’m going to be moving over and having to work on this and what happens with Plant Ranch. Plant Ranch cannot be a diversion, Plant Ranch cannot be a secondary thought, Plant Ranch has to be the primary thought. There’s too many great companies out there already. There’s too many great companies coming up right now. The competition is growing and it needs full attention. So from my perspective, there was no doubt in my mind and my wife had said Are you sure? Are you sure? I said look, there’s no doubt in my mind that Plant Ranch is what I want to do. I mean I’m a Product guy. I was always used to selling products, whether it was a service or a product, goods and services, right. I never got that gigantic thrill out of standing at a register, taking orders and serving people and whatnot. It was great, fantastic, nice sure, but that’s not what was on the inside. That’s not what drives me inside. People are driven that way. God bless anybody who’s driven any certain way, right? I knew that this was where it was always supposed to be and you know, in fact, like you said about wanting it to be a world class company, when I mentioned I wrote a brand plan for us, because a business plan was going to be a little more tricky, but as a marketing guy, I could start with the brand plan, because that was like my sweet spot. So I wrote the brand plan and identified a couple of things that I had envisioned for the business and I had always said that we’d be on the cover of Fast Company as one of the 20 Best Places to Work. That’s something that I really needed to get after. It’s something that when you’re a small company, you know, you tell your employees, good times are coming, hang on, hang on, please hang on with us. It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming. And now I’m going to be here, I want to make sure that I live up to what I wrote down five years ago, I want our company to be a great place to work. I believe that everybody who has been with us and people who are working with us, I never like to say working for us. People who work with us should be paid well. They should have insurance available, they should have opportunities to get into 401 K’s. This is just as important as anything else we do, taking care of our own and making sure that that we’re growing a company responsibly and ethically. This is like when we had to do the Delaware C Corp, you have to name a CEO, and we kind of muddled back and forth about who was going to do it and because I do have more of the gift of the gab, I think than Mike and Carmen and so I get out there and I can do that and say what I got to say and believe it, but I never realized at the beginning how how very important and how much responsibility the three letters CEO has. It really does. I mean, you know, it’s this really important thing that I need to do and I need to do it the right way. I think I sort of had mentioned before we started recording that I had been influenced by a former CEO of DirecTV, his name was Mike White. I met him one or two times working on a deck and we chatted, but he always had this philosophy and belief of, and instilled in the company when he got there, of doing things the right way. I always thought when he came in it was like, okay, as a CEO he’s gonna do his flyover thing and he’s just making that up, but he really did, and he instilled that, in everything that that I saw that he did, and everything he did for the company, it was always about doing it the right way. I have always been a freewheelin dude. I mean, I’m the rebel in the marketing group that was at DirecTV and at&t. I was hired out of an ad agency so I always had a little more of a rebel mentality. I really believed in what he said that doing it the right way is just so important. I’m harping on with this, but boy, if there’s anybody out there listening, who is going to start up a business, do it the right way. This is something that you’ll never ever regret.
Andrew D Ive
Fantastic. So right now, it sounds like there’s a little bit of a transition going on, as you divest yourself of some of the business, which is certainly part of the heritage in terms of amazing, great tasting vegan based foods. From a heritage perspective, Carmen has brought the tastes and flavors of the sort of Mexican side of things.
Gary Huerta
Yeah.
Andrew D Ive
Where do you see the company going? I mean, we’ve sort of got to where you are today and the fact that you’re going through that this transition. Obviously, there’s the piece about making sure that the culture you create is the kind of company people want to come to work at every day, that it’s not just a job, it’s actually something they’re all very passionate about being a part of. So where, if you can make everything work the way the brand plan dictates, and you Mike and Carmen can create where do you guys see yourselves in let’s say five years time?
Gary Huerta
Well, I mean, I don’t know if people who have the ability to see video can see that I have a significant amount of gray hair on a young guy.
Andrew D Ive
You have more hair than me, I’ll swap you your hair for my hair!!
Gary Huerta
So, in between the five years, I do see us expanding into flavors that are non Mexican. Mexican has always been, like you said, the heritage, it’s the sweet spot. It’s what we’re really known for and, you know, you should always start, especially when you’re tackling scale up, start with a bit of a narrow focus and as things get better, you can expand out as you learn more. So sometime within the next 24 months, I would love to see us be able to expand into a couple of products that we’ve already developed and sold at the vegan business which are American flavors, roast beef, BBQ beef, pulled pork, and we’ve worked on some Italian sausage and meatballs that are really pretty phenomenal. I think that, from my perspective, there’s no shortage of opportunity in terms of the way we do it, that what I consider to be our right way, which is making things that allow people to say I get that back in my life, like really authentic flavors, that’s really the core. But one of the core principles of our business is that is it has to taste amazing. I like to think that we make great food that happens to be plant based. We have to be taste forward. I think that one of things that encourages me as our business is that there’s so many alternatives out there that just don’t taste that great. And that’s what I mean by the big playground, is that there’s a lot of things that we can produce, that I know we’ve already done and we can come up with, especially with Mike and Carmen’s ability to understand, you know, what the real flavors are. Well, there’s a lot of products and a lot of ways we can go now, where are we in five years, I certainly hope and believe that our real job here is to really prove out through a couple of rounds of fundraising, that our product, our vision, our ability to create products is superior enough that somebody with gigantic national and international marketing and distribution would then want to acquire us and and that’s sort of what I am hoping will happen. It’s what we’ve really sort of hoped for the whole way which is, we’ll get it to a great size then somebody else with larger infrastructure can go and take it, you know, to the rest of the world. In doing that, I think we we serve the greatest purpose that plant management concern which is to which is to get in front of the most people that it can get in front of. That’s what we look for. I always had believed that let’s have somebody else with gigantic capabilities, take us global and, and let people see how good plant based food can be.
Andrew D Ive
So I’ve got so many questions based on that. You guys started with Mexican. It’s been very good, diverse. The Mexican food I’ve seen out there, especially plant based Mexican. Is poor. So far, everything I’ve tried to make and I obviously haven’t tried everything, but so far everything I’ve tried in the plant based category and the Mexican side of things isn’t so great. In fact, it’s not always great in every area you know but that’s been your binding element, that taste and the flavors so what makes you want to go into areas outside so for example, meatballs and beef and all sorts of other areas. Why do you feel the either the need? Why not be really good at one particular thing?
Gary Huerta
Great question. Yeah, I suppose those are the two forks in the road. You can go yeah, we’re just going to focus on Mexican. We could, we’ve already got in addition to the three skews that are already in stores and available for food service, another five that we’ve either already served at Cena Vegan. Actually, we serve all of them at Cena Vegan to really good success. But like I said, we’ve also served these other products pretty successfully as well. Again, it comes down to that. To me, I think that’s what makes the company exciting for us as founders. Okay, I know Mike just is like a kid when he creates a flavor that replicates something that he had in his life that he didn’t have before. The roast beef that he has made was like that. In Los Angeles, there is a famous sandwich, the French dip sandwich from Felipe’s. It’s a restaurant that’s been in Los Angeles since, I think around 1919, in the same spot, and they make this French beef dip sandwich and a lamb dip sandwich and, if you were a meat eater, you have probably had it probably loved it, you gave it up and you thought I’m never having it again. Well, he just decided I want that sandwich again and he went and created the roast beef exactly the same. Put it on the exact same bun, we use the exact same Colman’s mustard, and God damn it I took a bite into that and I said, there’s the Felipe’s sandwich, you nailed it, you absolutely mastered that sandwich. And I think when you do that, and you give people these opportunities to either get it back or try it for the first time, it’s super powerful. And, it’s really that part of it that is really fun. When I realized that we’re eating the prototypes of these things, and it’s better than anything out there in the market, and I’m just having it in my own kitchen, it’s like, I can’t wait to unleash this on the world, people are going to flip out, they’re going to absolutely lose their shit when they try this stuff. So that’s the the reason to keep just keep innovating, innovation is fabulous.
Andrew D Ive
So the binding element by the sounds of it isn’t, Mexican versus American versus Italian, or whatever. It sounds like the binding element is being able to give people the amazing food that they find in traditional meat categories, and give it to them in a plant based way. That’s replicating a world famous meatball dish that’s in Little Italy, in New York or wherever, taking that world class dish that’s meat based, and being able to replicate it in the plant based category.
Gary Huerta
It doesn’t matter. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. That’s exactly right. And we’re very fortunate, right. I mean, when you live in a metropolitan area, Los Angeles, New York, London, whatever you’re surrounded by international cuisines that are truly authentic. There are people who have come from their countries, they’re not bastardizing menus, these are their family menus. We’ve tried making shwarma and have done a really good job of it, I think that it needs still a little bit more but but there’s no shortage of being able to give people back these flavors that they grew up with, either gave up or are considering giving up or wanting a healthier alternative that has less than zero trans fats and no cholesterol and whatnot. Yeah, that’s the driver. We want to be known as the plant based protein company that delivers the real deal. I mean, it’s just so important that the flavors be as authentic as they can possibly be and maybe you know what, maybe for some of the population, they’re a little spicy, maybe they’re a little this, they’re a little that, but we want them to be authentic to whatever it is, and that’s fine. It’s not going to be our job to run around and try to make a flavor that’s going to appeal to as many people as possible, we just want the flavor to be real. We want people who are after the real flavor to know that they can always look for the Plant Ranch name and package and go whatever’s inside that thing if they say it’s roast beef, if they say it’s an Italian sausage or meatball if they say it’s shwarma if they say it’s carne, it’s carne. And I can actually take that, I can heat it up it’s cooked, it’s flavored, it’s ready to go and I can have an amazing meal without any hesitation or question.
Andrew D Ive
This is because the gab you mentioned right? You have a really good way of explaining yourself, you’re very competent and you know really nail things We’ve got five minutes left. So two really quick questions. One is, you mentioned that five years from your point a view is potentially partnering with someone or some company, some entity that has the capability of taking Plant Ranch global. Getting your food authentically in front of as many people as possible and sort of showing people that a plant based lifestyle is absolutely possible, without giving up anything in terms of taste and experience. Explain why you think that that requires an acquisition or a company to be part of that story rather than Gary, Mike and Carmen taking this company global?
Gary Huerta
I don’t know that it does. I mean, again, I think you reach every plateau with that you don’t know what you don’t know, and I think maybe for me at this moment, that’s part of the I don’t know what I don’t know. It certainly sounds like an appealing plan, the idea of being able to be acquired for what would hopefully be a profit and settle into a a table in Tuscany with an espresso watch life go by for a couple of weeks. That sounds great to me. But that’s not to say that I couldn’t do that while we’re doing this. Just, you know, I guess they would say what’s your exit strategy? I guess that’s my exit strategy. It may not necessarily be my full on business strategy once we see what happens. it could be that we manage to grow it we build the sales, we build the infrastructure in the business the right way, like I said earlier, and we have the ability to take it global that’s fine. If I can see my plant ranch logo on an f1 car in Monaco, that’s fine too.
Andrew D Ive
Okay, last question. If someone is either an investor or consumer, someone who’s considering a plant based lifestyle, if somebody for whatever reason wants to find Gary Huerta, Mike, Carmen and Plant Ranch, what are the best ways of getting hold of you guys and offering their help support and love?
Gary Huerta
Well, LinkedIn is a good way to find both Plant Ranch and me. Twitter, we’re just getting on to the Twitter thing. So we’re getting there with that. We can share my email though if people really have questions and they want to they want to reach out I’m fairly good at email gary.h@plantfoods.com
Andrew D Ive
And it’s www.plantranchfoods.com is that right?
Gary Huerta
The company isn’t named Plant Ranch Foods. Unfortunately Plant was taken and plant ranch foods seem to be a natural so for now our social media stuff says plant ranch foods, but the company is Plant and we’ll get that changed back someday when we have money to buy those things.
Andrew D Ive
The website is available, I looked today. 25,000 bucks if you sell one of those collectibles in the glass cabinet behind you ….
Gary Huerta
Maybe the pre Columbian piece but I won’t part with that. Yeah that’s probably the easiest way to get ahold of us. Hopefully in stores, lots of stores and food service places soon. That would be great. That’s that’s our goal and intention.
Andrew D Ive
So LinkedIn, Gary Huerta founder, CEO of Plant Ranch foods or Plant Ranch. Plant Ranch. That’s what’s on LinkedIn. Then plantranchfoods.com. online and you’re starting the Twitter thing. Unlike Mr. Trump, I think he’s still off of it. Instagram?
Gary Huerta
That’s why we’re starting Instagram. Hey, I just saw your Twitter needed another loud mouth. So yeah, we got ready Trump. Well, here it goes Gary.
Andrew D Ive
There you go. All right. Hands are bigger though. Yeah, everyone’s hands a big amount of That’s true. Tyrannosaurus sorry. We’re not editing this. I don’t have the time care.
Gary Huerta
That’s, you know, if you’re going to reach out you’re going to get the Gary were to experience as follows But it’s like the Grateful Dead experience. Right? Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Andrew D Ive
Always a pleasure, love to Mike and Carmen, and obviously to you, too. Thank you for your time and for talking to us today. I’m going to pause and then we’re going to be done. Thank you Sir.
Gary Huerta
Let me let me just take a minute and say thank you to you and to Big Idea Ventures and the entire Big Idea Ventures team of mentors, advisors, and of course, the staff. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you talked me into doing it because I can’t believe I originally was like, Thanks for the invite. I think we’re going to do something else. And you call and said, Gary, you’re gonna make a gigantic mistake here. You’re right, it would have been a mistake of epic proportions. I just can’t tell you, man, Andrew, how grateful I am for everything that you guys have done for our business over the last five months of being in this cohort. It’s literally changed our business. It has changed my life, quite literally, because I have taken this role of CEO and I love it, and I’m embracing it. But I also just can’t tell you, man, how grateful I am to you guys. You just really have taken our business and done exactly what you were supposed to do, which was accelerated it and we are now running 10 times faster than we ever have been. So thank you so much. I’m really grateful.
Andrew D Ive
You guys have been amazing. You are amazing and by the way, we’re going to be stuck together for the next five to 10 years so I’m glad it’s a good relationship.
Gary Huerta
Well, gee, I’m glad I was so nice to be a far tougher crowd than you were.
Andrew D Ive
I thought you were gonna be. I’m like we’ve really I said to my team, we’ve really got to work hard with Gary and team because these guys are not going to allow you to slack off you guys have to absolutely over deliver. So I’m glad you feel they have Thank you.
Gary Huerta
They have been great. I express my gratitude to them every time they they help us with something. They’re really terrific people. Really terrific. You have a terrific group of people working working with you.
Andrew D Ive
I do, I absolutely do. I’m not sure whether we’re going to be on the fastcompany front page, but we can strive for it.
Gary Huerta
You know, you’ll be there. You’ll be there with us. Let’s put it that way. Right within the GOP. We wouldn’t have been able to get there without you.
Andrew D Ive
I’m in for big idea ventures. I want to be on the front page. You can be inside the magazine will be at no I’m just kidding.
Gary Huerta
I don’t see it that way. But okay. I’m not seeing your vision. I’m sorry. I know we clash. And now suddenly we don’t get along. Wow.
Andrew D Ive
Really a pleasure. Thank you, Gary. I’m going to press stop record. If anyone wants to reach out to Gary, please do, amazing man with a great mission and a great team. Please do reach out to him and offer him all of your support. Thanks for listening to the day’s podcast with Gary Huerta. From plant Ranch, great company, great person, great team. By all means reach out to them or to us and by all means subscribe to the big idea podcast food via either YouTube, in iTunes, or one of the other platforms that are available. Thanks for your time today. do reach out if you have any thoughts or comments on it. Thanks very much and look forward to next week’s podcast. Thanks