Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Eggheads helps curious people in agriculture understand how the egg industry really works and where it might be headed.
Patrick Samuels: Even on our personal farm here, for example, after two seasons of running chickens, we increased hay production by like 17%, right? Little things like that. You can see tangible outcomes from the land as a result of improving it.
Greg Schonefeld: I'm Greg Schonefeld and this is Eggheads. At this point in the show, I think it's fair to say we've covered an awful lot of different methods of producing eggs, and so it's rare that I encounter someone who's doing something truly different.
Patrick Samuels: Each farmer will have anywhere from three to five thousand birds, all raised in mobile coops that we actually move around the pasture.
Greg Schonefeld: That's Patrick Samuels, the CEO of Sunnyside Egg Co. Sunnyside houses their chickens in mobile coops, which sort of look like covered hay wagons, and there's two main reasons why they choose to farm that way. One, to force the birds out onto pasture.
Patrick Samuels: The chickens spend 365 days a year outdoors.
Greg Schonefeld: And two, moving the birds around makes the whole process regenerative.
Patrick Samuels: What we're doing is actually improving the land and making it usable for future generations.
Greg Schonefeld: And that message seems to be resonating with farmers.
Patrick Samuels: We started with 300 chickens a year and a half ago. A year and a couple months ago, I was still handwashing eggs in my kitchen sink, and now we have 25,000 birds across 12 farms. At this point, it's probably 200 farms on the wait list who are ready to pull the trigger with us and put birds in for us.
Greg Schonefeld: So what inspired Patrick to leave his long career in the military to start a pasture-raised egg operation? And how did he manage to turn a passion for healthy food and regenerative agriculture into a scalable and commercially viable operation? And just how scalable is it? Today we'll take you through that whole story, and we'll begin with a tour of the farm.
I'm kind of imagining just kind of a wide-open pasture and these coops, like you said, they're moving in most cases daily, but really they just need to move every couple weeks. I guess, could you paint a little bit of picture of that?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah, so we move them at least a couple times a week, so two to three times a week is kind of our minimum. Feed and water is all hauled out to the coops, whether that's water. For example, some guys will run an irrigation line through their field or just a hose line, or they're hauling it in tanks. Same thing with feed. A lot of guys will use a gravity wagon and pull the feed out there, and then vice versa going back with the eggs. Eggs are collected every single day just like they would be in a barn, and then taken to a cooler on farm, just like a standard commercial layer operation. And so they're stacked on pallets, and then we have a truck that comes around and picks them up and takes them to our packing facility.
Greg Schonefeld: Are they bottomless or you mentioned slats?
Patrick Samuels: There's some family farms out there who have those systems, where it's basically like a greenhouse on skids. That's what I call a schooner style. We use what we call a wagon style, which it's almost like a hay wagon-type frame that's got running gears on the bottom, but then you have poultry slat flooring. Just like you would have slats inside of a poultry barn, you have that slat flooring. And then the chickens are allowed to have 24/7 access to the pastures, the way we do it now.
Greg Schonefeld: And then you've got sort of like a mobile fence that you're moving around along with the coop, to keep them a little more contained and where you can protect them better.
Patrick Samuels: Yeah, that's correct. So the big challenge or the big critique from the industry side obviously is, well, what about predators, and so we've found that using that mobile netting, one, it helps with ground predators obviously, but even with aerial predators. Hawks tend to be a bigger problem than maybe foxes. What I noticed on our personal farm was it was the ones and twos who went off by themselves into the far corner of the pasture. That's the ones that always got picked off by a hawk. So using that mobile netting keeps them close enough that they can just run underneath the chicken coop. We have some predator loss, but I think there's predator loss in just about any system that allows outdoor access, and so it's not more than what I've seen from the more commercial "pasture-ized" systems.
We have higher risk of interaction with wild animals and wild birds, and we're constantly dealing with weather and whether it's cold or heat or whatever it might be. It's a more natural system, which is what our customers want and are looking for. It does bring its own challenges, but we try to mitigate them as best we can.
Greg Schonefeld: So Patrick's got this innovative method of producing eggs. And as we mentioned off the top, he's seen a lot of growth over a pretty short period of time, and that's all the more impressive because up until pretty recently, he had very little farm experience.
Patrick Samuels: So I was in the military. I went to West Point, was an infantry and then Special Forces officer. While I was in the military, I was actually in the Special Forces Q Course whenever COVID first kicked off. And so my wife and I just started looking into the food system, which I think a lot of people did at the time. And that's where we found guys like Joel Salatin or Greg Judy and Will Harris and these kind of big names in the regenerative pasture poultry space. I spent basically my entire adult life up to this in the military, and so my background was not agriculture at all. And so that was my foundation for agriculture, was Joel Salatin.
We kind of started thinking about maybe buying our own farm at some point, and even at the very least, homesteading. ended up making the decision to get out of the military after a while, and so I took a job with one of the big pasture-raised egg companies. And then I went and saw what the industry was calling pasture-raised, which the industry standard for pasture-raised is generally 20,000 birds inside of a barn with outdoor access to pasture space, but they're not physically raised out on pasture.
It's a very, very small fraction of the birds who are actually out there on pasture. It's 108 square feet per chicken of outdoor access, but there's zero requirement for those chickens to ever go use that space. Obviously they all like to promote, "We're using 108 square feet per chicken," but again, that's access to 108 square feet per chicken, zero requirement for those chickens to ever actually touch any of that space.
We use double that for our system. So for every thousand birds that we put into production, we use five acres per thousand birds, so that's double what the industry standard is for "pasture-raised." Over the course of a few months, our chickens are using every inch of that pasture. I was looking at it and I was like, "This isn't outdoor access at all. This is like just cage-free 2.0, basically."
And so I was really fortunate in that I got to see how the industry worked at a fairly commercial scale, saw what it looks like to get your products into retail and what the distribution is. Why is it that you put 20,000 chickens in a barn? What are the logistics behind all of that? What are the mechanisms behind everything? How do you get the feed? All of the pieces of the puzzle I was able to kind of observe and see, and then made the decision to, "Hey, I'm going to step away, kind of try it out here on our own small farm of doing these mobile coops," and we're adding. A new retailer says yes every week. We've got eight and a half million views on social media in the past couple of months. So we're really building quite a movement here around mobile pasture-raised eggs.
Greg Schonefeld: So it's one thing to set out to do things differently, but to get the volume of eggs he needed, Patrick needed buy-in from producers. And one thing that helped him to do that was his relationship with a certain community with a very specific set of values that made his style of egg farming extremely appealing.
Patrick Samuels: In terms of recruiting other farmers, personally I'm very close to Amish communities here in Kentucky, and so we had a lot of folks who kind of started watching us. Whenever we were just doing it on our own farm, they were kind of watching from the outside and thinking, "Okay, well, if this goes off, maybe this is something we could do." And so on the supply side, very tied into the Amish Mennonite communities here, really across the Midwest at this point.
On the demand side, it really started off as just cold calls. In the early days, I was making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cold calls to every restaurant. We're an hour north of Nashville, and so it's like if you're a restaurant in Nashville, you've probably had me on the line at some point just calling you and saying, "Hey, this is what we're doing." We started with a little bit of food service, started getting into some small independent retailers, and then it kind of just adds up from there.
You start in these independent retailers, then you move into some local chains. For example, we're in Sprouts locally, Fresh Market locally. And then now that kind of just creates this momentum that we've now translated into, in a couple weeks we'll start sending eggs out to California, we'll send them up to the Midwest, out to the Northeast, so we'll have eggs almost all over the country.
Greg Schonefeld: So I guess I'm picturing in those early times, you didn't have a ton of birds, a ton of eggs, so you didn't need some major scaled yes. You just probably needed some form of a yes. You mentioned local restaurants, those kind of things. What made someone like that interested?
Patrick Samuels: A lot of it's story. Whenever it starts out, it's we're just a local egg company. And I think people appreciated that we were doing it better, but at the end of the day, they wanted cheaper eggs. And part of that was just timing of the market as well. We started selling basically in January of 2025, is when we first sold our first eggs, and the market went nuts in February. And so everybody was a little bit short on eggs, and so that helped us get off to a running start where everybody was looking for eggs at that time, because commodity eggs were like $8 a dozen. And I was like, "Well, here's this local pasture-raised egg for less than that."
That turned into momentum, where people started tasting the eggs and they're like, "I've been buying X, Y or Z company and it kind of just tastes bland. Well, I can actually taste an egg for the first time." That's when we started doing our social media, so people could see behind the scenes and what the difference was behind what our operation actually looked like. And so yeah, people love the story.
Greg Schonefeld: So what really got Sunnyside into retailers was the combination of low supply and high prices that made their specialty product competitive with commodity eggs. But as they say, nothing cures high prices like high prices, and that market that was creating a huge tailwind for Sunnyside eventually swung the other way.
Patrick Samuels: Everything comes back around, right? This year is the exact opposite, where now we're going to a retailer and we're like, "Well, we have pasture-raised eggs." And they're like, "Yeah, well, you're one of 40 pasture-raised egg brands. We don't really care." And a lot of it has to do with education to not just the consumer, but to retail buyers, for example, because they've been told by some of these other companies that whenever they buy their eggs, they're buying basically what we're doing, which is like 100% of chickens outdoors every day.
In the early days, it was like I could just call somebody and they'd be like, "Oh, yeah, we got shorted eggs this week, so bring us what you got," and that kind of got us at least in the door. Nowadays, it's the exact opposite. It's a lot of education to whoever that buyer is, that decision maker, to make sure they understand the difference between us and everybody else. And then obviously showing them, "Hey, here's our sales. Here's our social media attraction. Here's all the cool people that we have on board," and that kind of thing.
Greg Schonefeld: I don't even know what your eggs typically retail for compared to say a conventional or cage-free or pasture-raised. Is it in line with, say, the types of eggs that are marketed as pasture-raised?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah. So we use all certified organic and we use corn and soy-free feed, which that in itself is what drives our price up. If I was using conventional feed, I could produce a dozen eggs using this model for three to four dollars on shelf. Right now, because we use an organic corn and soy-free feed, locally we're at like 8.49 on shelf, and then out on the West Coast, I think we'll be at 10.99 on shelf. And so that's very competitive with all of the big names whenever you compare us to an organic pasture-raised egg.
Greg Schonefeld: And when you compare a Sunnyside egg to other organic and pasture-raised eggs, Patrick says that it's not only that their process is better for the land, but it actually produces a superior product, and that goes beyond just taste.
Patrick Samuels: Obviously there's subjective opinions about all of this. How should a chicken be raised? Should it actually be raised outdoors? Should it be raised indoors? That's a conversation to be had. The objective truth of what we're doing here is that ... So we had our eggs tested for nutrient density recently. You would actually have to eat four to six of our competitors' eggs to get the same vitamins and minerals that you get from one of our eggs. And so that's an objective, data-driven fact, that our eggs contain more nutrients than our competitors. It's not just that our eggs taste better, which is what we believe, but now we can actually prove with data that the eggs are better for you.
Greg Schonefeld: Yeah. Are those on similar genetics to say a commercial bird?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah. So we use Hy-Line Browns, Hendrix East Browns, Tetra Browns. We kind of have a mix right now, but yeah. I mean, we're using commercial layers.
Greg Schonefeld: Interesting. So what drives that difference on the nutrition?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah, so it's twofold. So whenever we first started, we were still using a corn and soy-based feed. Even in those flocks, we saw low omega-6 to -3 ratios, for example, really similar nutrients. We made a change because of really just demand for the corn and soy-free. But ultimately what drives the higher nutrient density is chickens out eating more than just the ration itself.
Whenever you think about even a commercial pasture-raised or free-range operation in the industry right now, 99.9% of what that chicken is eating is coming from that feed that's given to them. And our system, I don't have an exact percentage, but let's say it's 80%. Let's say the ration is 80%, but the other 20% is what they're out eating, the bugs and everything like that that they're eating out on pasture. That kind of hypernatural diet for that chicken, plus the time spent outdoors, just getting Vitamin D from the sunlight, all of those factors play a role in the quality of the egg.
And so it's not that we have some secret sauce in our feed. It's not like we have a premix or a special vitamin inside the feed. It's literally just driven by those practices of actually getting the chicken outdoors, eating bugs like it's naturally supposed to be, and it creates a more nutrient-dense egg.
Greg Schonefeld: So your birds are literally living on the pasture, and that's where they have access to bugs and all these factors that enhance their diet as you described. Yet there's this, I guess, pasture-raised category that exists that looks different from what you're doing. So you're marketing your eggs as regenerative. Can you talk some to the decision to call yourself a regenerative egg?
Patrick Samuels: It started off as we just wanted to make sure that we were differentiating ourselves on shelf. Ultimately, my sort of approach to all of this is that agriculture, the current American agriculture system, is extractive. If we look at crop systems, why do crop farmers have to constantly pour fertilizer onto their land? It's because we've extracted all of the nutrients out of the system, right?
What do they do when they build a big commercial poultry barn? A lot of times they'll deforest the land, excavate all that land. They'll pour a bunch of concrete, put up this giant barn. And so our system is designed in a way that it's meant to actually give back to the land. It's meant to give back to the farm. It's supposed to improve the land that we're using, not extract everything from the land that we're using. And so that's where the term regenerative comes from, is that we're actively regenerating the land.
Even on our personal farm here, for example, after two seasons of running chickens, we increased hay production by like 17%, right? Little things like that. You can see tangible outcomes from the land as a result of improving it. And so we work with a regenerative certifier that comes out and does soil samples, and they test every year to make sure we're actually having a positive impact on the land. They're testing to make sure we're actively sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. And so we're trying to have this kind of large-scale impact on the land through these practices.
Greg Schonefeld: Does regenerative have an official definition, like a regenerative egg, or are you sort of defining it yourself?
Patrick Samuels: So it does not, really. And right now, there's a lot of other brands that are starting to pop up from some of these major corporations that are claiming regenerative. There are already regenerative certifiers that are popping up that have no requirement for an impact to the land. They'll say, "Well, as long as you implement a regenerative practice, that counts as regeneration," which is simply not accurate, because the whole point of the system is that you're having an impact on the land. And so if you can't demonstrate that, well, then you're not actually regenerative.
I have a personal, not vendetta maybe, but I have a personal beef with certifications more broadly in the industry because a lot of these certifications, they make money based on every dozen of the eggs that are sold. That's a financial incentive to look the other way or to not hold somebody accountable, whether it's pasture-raised or regenerative, or there's a whole myriad of different certifications out there.
And so my personal opinion is in the long run, forego all certifications. Forego all the claims and move towards objective, data-based analysis, where I don't have to say, "Well, our eggs are pasture-raised and everybody else's isn't." I can just livestream from the farm and you can see what the farm looks like. I don't have to say, "Our eggs are better because we think they're better." I can just test our eggs and then I can test all of our competitors' eggs, and I can say, "Look, here's the data that proves our eggs are better." And so, yeah, we can just kind of do away with these claims and certifications, and it's all kind of made up anyways.
Greg Schonefeld: I mean, the way I take that is, instead of tying to this broad certification that kind of brings in these third parties and I've got to rely on some third-party system, I'm going to take this all into my hands and directly show people who we are, and they're going to know me by that.
Patrick Samuels: That's exactly right, yeah. And then on top of that, we open all of our farms up to customers. So if you want to come see a farm, you can reach out to us online and we'll set up a time for you to come see a farm, right? I've told customers, "Tell me the code on the dozen eggs you just bought from us, and I'll take you out to that specific farm." We are an advocate for complete transparency as much as we can.
Obviously, because we work with a lot of Amish, they may not want us livestreaming their farms and their families 24/7, and so we're still kind of working through what the future of that looks like. But at the end of the day, we are pushing for more and more transparency, both in our system and for our competitors, because we want people to know what they're buying when they buy it. We want people to know what they're putting into their family's bodies, if that makes sense.
Greg Schonefeld: I guess what's going through my mind is like, man, you start with 300 birds. You've got to figure out how to market the eggs, you've got to figure out things like certifications. I mean, there's so many things to figure out with this, right? What's been sort of your process with that?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah. In terms of the actual production model, fortunately there are family farms who have been doing this for a while. Again, Joel Salatin. Alexander Family Farms out in California, they've got a pretty big mobile coop operation. On the actual production side, I could look at who was already doing it and what were they doing on farm, and I could kind of replicate those practices.
And then from the actual business operation standpoint, again, some of that I was able to pick up whenever I worked for that other company, thinking about why do we place 20,000 chickens at a time now. Well, that's because 20,000 chickens equals roughly one semi-truckload every two weeks.That's about how that math works out. And so now we recruit 20,000 chickens' worth of farmers at a time. Our competitors might put that on a single farm. Well, we'll put that on five farms in the same community. And so we're getting close to the same logistical efficiency, for example, that the big guys are by placing 20,000 chickens at a time.
Lessons like that, I was able to pick up. Everything else has just been as we encounter an issue, we take it head-on. Whether that's certifications or whether that's retail partnerships, we just learn as we go. And it's kind of my personality to go all in on something, and so if there's a problem that arises, we work it until it's figured out.
Greg Schonefeld: And that attitude toward problem solving has brought Sunnyside a good amount of success thus far, but Patrick has no intention of stopping there. In the coming years, he has ambitions to expand the company considerably.
Patrick Samuels: Our goal internally is a million birds in mobile coops. That's kind of what we want to work towards. So to go from 300 chickens and handwashing eggs in my kitchen sink to a million birds as an end state, that's the way we think about it. And to me, that's the American dream, right? I leave the military, go start a small business on my little farm here in Western Kentucky, and take that into a nationwide brand. That is the American dream for me.
Greg Schonefeld: Why a million birds?
Patrick Samuels: To me, a million birds is kind of what puts us on the map in terms of competitive with some of these bigger pasture-raised, free-range brands. We're trying to prove that our system is viable at a commercial scale that's truly viable to compete with the big corporations. And so what I've heard from those big corporations all the time is that this model of production is not economically viable. That's what they've all been saying for a long time. Here at Sunnyside, we're proving that it is economically viable, and we're proving that we can compete with them on pricing on shelf. We don't have to charge $17 a dozen to produce this high quality of egg.
We compete with all of them on all of the systems, the logistics, the pricing. We can do it all, but we can do it in a much more sustainable model. That's what I think the future of agriculture looks like. Whenever I think about what do we need the future of agriculture to look like, it's not what we've been doing for the past 30 or 40 years, which has been killing off all of our topsoil, being very destructive to our agricultural systems. This is what the future of agriculture looks like for us.
And so the real kicker is how do we start translating this and working this into crop systems so that we're rotating these chickens onto cropland so that it's a natural fertilizer to that soil, you're having improved crop outcomes. That's sort of like the future of agriculture, in my opinion.
I think, again, from just a straight capitalism perspective, the industry will go where the market goes. Why is there 30 or 40 big pasture-raised egg brands right now? Well, it's because a couple of pasture-raised egg brands did really well, and so then everybody kind of started popping up and creating their own because that's what was working in the system.
And so if I can do that with our system, if I can prove, "Hey, this is economically viable from a corporate standpoint, it's what customers actually want, creates a higher quality egg, it's better for the environment," if I can prove all of that, and oh, by the way, we're outselling all of our competitors, well, then the industry by and large will start to move towards that model of production because it works better.
Greg Schonefeld: So one thing you've mentioned a couple times that really surprised me is you said the model doesn't cost more. You said if it weren't for the feed, you could probably do three to four dollars a dozen. That really surprises me. Did you predict that going in, or is that just what you've discovered as you've honed things in?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah. I mean, when we first started, even on an organic feed, we were selling on shelf, and there's still stores here locally that sell our eggs for 5.99 on shelf. And that's, again, an organic corn and soy-free feed. The big benefit really on the pricing side is if you think about a big commercial poultry barn, right now to put in 20,000 birds, it might cost a million and a half dollars. For us to put in 3,000 birds with us, it might cost $150,000, because the mobile coops are so much cheaper.
You're not pouring concrete, you're not putting in all this infrastructure. There's no deforestation, there's no clearing of the land, no excavation that has to happen. None of those things have to happen, and so your cost is literally a tenth to get in and get started with us than it is as a farmer, compared to one of the big guys. And so because of that, the farmers aren't paying thousands upon thousands of dollars on their loan payments every month just to keep up with the barn payment. And so because of all of that ...
Greg Schonefeld: Interesting.
Patrick Samuels: ... it really boils down to how much do we have to pay the farmer to make sure that they're cash-flowing on whatever feed it is that they're using. And so we use a very high-quality feed because it's corn and soy-free, and so we pay the farmers more than what the industry norm would be.
But if I used a conventional feed, if I wanted to offer a cheaper version of this, all I would have to do is bring that price to the farmer down, and all of the other metrics are fairly set. We could use a slightly cheaper egg carton, for example, to bring the price down a little bit, but costs of logistics don't really change from us to one of the big guys.
I'll never get down to 99-cent eggs, because I don't have a million birds on a single location all in cages. I'll never get down to 99-cent eggs, but if we ran a conventional feed, yeah, three to five dollars on shelf is certainly not outside the possibility.
Greg Schonefeld: Really interesting. When you're talking about the big guys, are you referring to the big pasture-raised people or the big commercial, conventional or cage-free type producers?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah, good question. It really depends on who you're talking to. Whenever I'm talking about it, I guess whenever I'm talking about big guys, I'm usually talking about big pasture-raised egg companies. In the egg world, those are still small guys, which I have to remind myself of sometimes, because we have a Cal-Maine facility down the road. That's a real big corporation. They're much larger than our competitors in the pasture-raised space.
Greg Schonefeld: Patrick says that even with fewer birds per farm, he can compete with the bigger pasture-raised companies on pricing, but one difficulty his model might have compared to other certified pasture-raised setups is that mobile coops aren't really feasible in some geographies.
Patrick Samuels: In order for us to run this system, we need somewhat moderate climates. Now, I do know people who are doing it down in Texas, for example, so it can be done in hotter climates. The colder climates would be the big challenge. The mobile coops that we use, we've actually seen, because of just the way that they're built and we use some tarp systems that kind of help keep the warmth inside the coops during the winter, we've actually gone down to single digits without water freezing inside those coops.
So we have these kind of little on-farm innovations that we've made to keep working towards more and more commercially viable on-farm options. But again, if you're in Northern Wisconsin and temperatures are going to drop down to below zero for weeks at a time, this probably isn't the system to run in that environment. Fortunately for us, basically across the entire Midwest and down into the South is still an option.
Greg Schonefeld: Interesting. What if you were say in a colder-weather state like Wisconsin and you only ran it certain times of the year? Is that not viable?
Patrick Samuels: Yeah. Even like Joel Salatin, who again is kind of like the big name in this space, he puts his chickens in a greenhouse over the winter exactly for that same reason, right? We don't allow it, and the reason that we don't allow it is twofold. One, we want to make sure that whenever we say mobile pasture-raised, we mean mobile pasture-raised 365 days a year. The other piece of that is really the core root of it is that I don't want farmers to have to build two structures. I don't want them to have to buy a mobile coop and then also build a small barn or a greenhouse system that they use for the winter.
Now, in extreme inclement weather, let's say you get a foot of snow on the ground or something like that, we'll tell the farmers, "Hey, it's okay if you park this thing for a week or two just to make sure that the chickens are healthy and you can get water to them and the eggs aren't freezing." So in extreme circumstances, there's reasonable leeway for the farmers on farm, but we don't want guys to have to create two completely different systems because then you're talking about ... Just think about the cost of nesting boxes. I'm sure you're aware of how expensive nesting boxes are, right? If you had to get that in your mobile coops and then also build it in another barn, that would be very expensive very quick.
Greg Schonefeld: So obviously, Patrick is really passionate about regenerative agriculture, and given what he's been able to achieve in the egg business, I wondered if he has any plans to expand into any other sectors.
Patrick Samuels: That's probably one of the most common questions I get, actually, is like, "Well, when are you going to do beef and when are you going to do pork, and when are you going to ... " and I started with eggs for a couple reasons. One, that was kind of my entry point into the agriculture industry. That's what I have the most familiarity with, just because I went and worked for one of the bigger companies.
The other piece of it is, as I'm sure you're aware, each system has its own regulatory compliance requirements. For eggs, for example, we keep them refrigerated. Well, if you transport beef, maybe you gotta do it frozen. Every time you introduce a new product, it vastly increases the complexity of your system, not in terms of on-farm, but in terms of how do you bring that to market, how do you get the logistics to get it onto shelf, all those pieces of the puzzle, it's essentially creating an entirely new business from scratch.
And so I think for us, at least for the foreseeable future, we stick with eggs. And my opinion is we can change on-farm practices. We can change what the egg industry looks like. We can have a significant impact on that by getting to a million birds, for example, and so that's what we're pushing for right now. That's not to say we'll never get into another food system, never get into beef, never get into lamb, never get into any of that.
But it's to say that the way that we truly change an industry is by focusing on one product first, making that the best possible product and the best possible practices that we can do. We see this as the epitome of how an egg can be produced. We create that at a commercially viable scale. Once we've proven that model, then maybe we move on to the next one and the next one maybe. But in the early days, it's kind of an all in on eggs for a multitude of reasons.
Greg Schonefeld: So Patrick's all in on eggs, and he stays driven in his mission to provide the best possible product to serve his customers by keeping in mind what inspired him to start his journey in the first place.
Patrick Samuels: So really it started as what do we want to feed our children, and so that's how my wife and I, that's why we created this system in the first place, is like this is what we want to feed our kids. And so whenever I think about our customers, what do our customers want, I can just think, "Well, what does my wife want for our kids?" My five-year-old eats four or five eggs every morning for breakfast, right, so that was kind of just the starting point. And then also that was my entry point into the industry. That's where I kind of took a job first, was in the egg world. For whatever reason, I'm just hyperfixated on eggs, and all I do all day is talk about eggs, think about eggs, look at eggs. Yeah, it's all I do.
Greg Schonefeld: I can relate. It's all well and good to complain about the way your food is produced, but it takes someone with real drive to say, "Well, okay, then I'll just do it my own way." And then it takes real vision to be able to turn that into a commercially viable business. I admire the way Patrick has set out to build this model from the ground up. There's a lot to bring together, from the structure and the feed to predators, weather, and who knows what else.
And whether you agree with Patrick's views on modern agriculture or not, I think we can all agree it's impressive what he's been able to build in a relatively short period of time. I'll be interested to continue to follow Patrick's journey that started with just 300 birds as he works toward his goal of a million. No doubt there'll be more stories to tell along the way.
And now, having covered Patrick's story from cold calling restaurants to national distribution, just one question remains. How do you prefer your eggs?
Patrick Samuels: Great question. Over easy on top of something is how I really like them, on top of potatoes and sausage and toast and yeah, kind of like running all over everything.
Greg Schonefeld: Heck, yeah. Pretty much anything good is a little better with a fried egg on it.
Patrick Samuels: That's right. That's exactly right.
Greg Schonefeld: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague or friend. Word of mouth really helps us to grow the show. And to make sure you don't miss an episode, follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld, and we'll talk to you soon.