Page 11 - INC Magazine-November 2018

100-mile bike rides, a hobby that requires the kind of money tioner suggested her vegan diet might be the culprit. “So we
and time broke and busy college kids usually can’t muster. hit the reset button and started eating meat again,” Collins
The solution: They started their first business, a commer- remembers. The paleo movement was just starting to take off,
cial recycling company. Austin didn’t have a good system for and as Forrest’s health improved, the two decided they should
restaurants and businesses to dispose of their recyclable hit reset with their business as well.
waste, so Forrest and Collins scraped together $2,000 for a They entered Incubation Station, a local startup accelerator
trailer and made weekly rounds to about 30 businesses. focused on consumer products that is now called SKU. (See
It was “gnarly work,” Forrest says—“4 a.m. shifts, rats flying in “How Austin Became a Food Startup Hub,” page 38.) By the
your face”—but it earned them as much as $10,000 a month. time they had finished the accelerator, they were convinced
Once they finished school, they started a vegan protein-bar they should pivot to meat. Epic, the new brand, were protein
company called Thunderbird Energetica. Thunderbird drew bars that substituted the powders in products like Quest bars
the interest of Whole Foods, which gave Forrest and Collins a with blended bits of meat, fruit, and nuts. An angel investor in
$100,000 loan and distribution in 30 stores, but the experience Houston loved the idea and invested $750,000. (Forrest and
was a “disaster.” They made mistakes in everything from manu- Collins later raised an additional $3 million, mostly from a
facturing to branding. The only upside was they discovered Colorado-based venture capital group.)
they worked well together: Collins tossed up wild ideas and At the time, no protein bar of this kind existed, and it wasn’t
Forrest would figure out how to actually implement them. easy to get the product right. Once, when they were experi-
Then, Forrest started having health problems. After menting with an extruder in their backyard, nuts clogged the
numerous doctors failed to help her, a holistic health practi- system and caused an explosion that sprayed 10 pounds of raw

RANCH TURNED LAB
The Epic co-founders are hoping their owner, General Mills, can help them scale regenerative grazing practices,
many of which they experiment with on their bison ranch, where they also raise chickens, turkeys, ducks, and bees.