How Simple Mills Founder is Creating Healthier Lifestyles and Planet

Mar 2

In nearly a decade, Katlin Smith has built a purpose-driven, profitable, industry-leading business that has radically changed how we nutritiously enjoy our favorite snacks. Now, she’s making an even bigger impact on the world.

The company Smith founded and leads, Simple Mills, has been a driving force in transforming the center grocery aisles with innovative, whole-food snacking and baking alternatives in categories traditionally lacking better-for-you options. However, disrupting an entire industry is not enough for Smith. She now focuses on making a positive impact on the planet too with her company’s latest purpose-driven commitment of 100% of new product innovations advancing regenerative agriculture. Across the industry, the definition of regenerative agriculture varies. Smith thinks about it as a holistic approach to farming and ranching that builds ecosystem resilience through principles that consider the holistic context of the farm system.

“If you’re a skeptic, don’t be. Katlin has an impressive track record of turning her purpose into a reality.” said Pete Wilkins, who featured Smith in his book, Purpose First Entrepreneur, and was an early investor in her company through his venture capital group, HPA. His optimism is warranted.

In 2012, Smith took a hard look at her eating habits. She was working as a consultant, traveling often, and eating a lot of packaged and processed foods. As a result, she was not feeling her best. She decided to switch to a clean, whole foods diet and noticed a remarkable difference; this is when she realized the tremendous power food has to transform how people feel.

If she was struggling, she knew other people likely were too, so she set out to build a company that could solve this gap in the market. From this experience, Smith started Simple Mills based on the principle that if you don’t recognize an ingredient, your body won’t either, which is why the brand only uses purposeful, real ingredients, and nothing artificial ever.

That focus paid off. Simple Mills soon had dozens of products in market—from bread and muffin mixes to crackers and bars. Today, Simple Mills is the number-one baking mix, cracker brand, and cookie brand in the natural food channel.

Smith’s start-up success story is an impressive manifestation of Smith’s vision, but her purpose-driven quest didn’t stop there. A few years ago, she was reflecting on another aspect of Simple Mills’ purpose—the impact of our food system on people’s health. She enrolled in a permaculture design course, which helped expand her understanding of the connections between human health and planetary health.

The more Smith understood about the symbiotic relationship between her original goal—to provide people with convenient products that could support their health—and creating more sustainable, environmentally minded food systems, the more she realized that it wasn’t just the ingredients we use that impacts our health—it’s also how we grow that food. Smith explains, “We’re just beginning to understand the impact of the microbiome and water usage on crops, but changes to these systems have already impacted the nutritional value of our food.”

Smith also found that nutritious, diverse human diets directly correlated with biodiversity and more resilient ecosystems.

Smith saw this as an opportunity for Simple Mills, and the food industry as a whole, to leave a positive mark and for the brand to continue to expand its original purpose. Smith and her team began to ask what practices could both serve planetary health and create nutrient-dense products.

This exploration led to an evolution of the brand’s mission to positively impact people and planet. Simple Mills is committed to advancing regenerative agriculture and is working directly with farmers to implement sustainable practices, like using cover crops, crop rotations, and reducing tillage.

Simple Mills has also invested in new initiatives to improve the impact of their supply chain. The brand committed to investing in training farmers in regenerative agriculture practices in the regions where they source the most prominent ingredients for their products. For example, the brand currently sources their organic coconut sugar, a notably sustainable crop, from farmers in Java, Indonesia who make use of practices like agroforestry, composting, and intercropping.

Simple Mills is also actively creating new products that promote diversity in diet and crop diversity. Globally, a small cache of crops has come to dominate agriculture in the past several decades; almost 50% of farmland worldwide is dedicated to just four crops—wheat, sugar, rice, and corn. So Simple Mills is now designing products to make greater use of more diverse ingredients and choosing to use ingredients that can positively impact ecosystems, like buckwheat, chestnut, watermelon seed, flaxseed, and more.

All of this innovation has reshaped their company vision to reflect the evolution of their original purpose:

Simple Mills is the company that advances the holistic health of the planet and its people by pioneering the way the world eats, bringing others into the movement, and being a positive force on every part of the ecosystem.

Smith sees this as the next frontier in the evolution of her original mission—nourishing people by nourishing the planet.

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