Page 9 - INC Magazine-November 2018

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changing consumer tastes, they’ve begun to look at food
startups as a sort of innovation pipeline. By buying a
company like Epic, General Mills could get access to
Millennial consumers. Epic, in turn, would get access
to vast resources, with the potential for greater impact.
It sounds like a business fairy tale: Lovebirds build a
mission-driven company, sell it for a fortune, and still get
to keep it. Except it’s not that simple. There’s no shortage
of cautionary tales among insurgent brands snapped up by
the big guys, as when Kellogg’s acquired the cereal maker
Kashi in 2000 and managed to turn eight years of impres-
sive growth into declining sales when it imposed its big-
n a cloudless mid-April company ways. Within months of Epic’s acquisition, it
morning in Texas’s Hill Country, about 60 miles west of looked like the company might already be heading down
Austin near a legendary honky-tonk town called Luckenbach, that path. Forrest and Collins were chafing against their hat path. Forrest and Collins were chafing against their
t
Katie Forrest and her husband, Taylor Collins, eye a herd of new owners, to the point that they began avoiding calls
bison grazing in a pasture on the 900-acre ranch they pur- from unknown numbers at headquarters. “It was awful,”
chased last year. About a dozen of the giant beasts have Forrest says. “It seemed like everything that was put on us
formed a protective circle around two baby bison as they went against our very core values.”
amble, en masse, in their owners’ direction.
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe they’re coming
over here!” Collins marvels, in the hushed, “We went there as a joke, to
conspiratorial tone of a nature-show host.
“This is crazy. This is as close as anyone will see the inside of this mega-
get to a week-old baby bison.”
This ranch, this field, this herd of ani- corporation and understand
mals, is what paradise looks like to Forrest
and Collins. A couple of Austin natives, what we were up against.”
they bought the spread with money they
made when they sold their startup, Epic
Provisions, to the Minnesota-based
consumer packaged goods (CPG) conglomerate General Yet here they are, two years later, not only sticking
Mills in 2016, after a scant three years in business, for a it out, but insisting that they’re not going anywhere. By
reported $100 million. Barely into their 30s, they were Inc. estimates, Epic is now on track to top $80 million in
suddenly rich beyond their dreams. They’d built the revenue this year, more than four times what it did before
company, which makes meat-based snacks, without taking the sale. But Epic’s journey has been neither a fairy tale
enormous amounts of outside investment, and managed nor a horror story. The reality of getting acquired, con-
to keep a majority stake in it when they sold. cedes Collins: “It’s hard.”
They were also, like many founders of hip food and bever-
age brands, obsessed with making products that offered a t least part of the Epic story actually is a fairy
healthy alternative to big food—healthy for consumers and tale. Collins and Forrest first met in high
for the environment, and humane to the animals. The ranch school. He was a senior and she was a fresh-
would not only be an outlet for their outdoorsy lifestyle, but man and they passed in the hall one day. They
also serve as a lab for regenerative grazing practices that they Adidn’t say a word to each other, but something
hoped to push more of their suppliers to adopt. They wanted happened: “It was like an atomic bomb went off, like a burst
Epic to be a force for changing America’s food system, and of energy that shook my bones,” Collins recalls. “I remem-
the ranch would help. They started raising bison, chickens, ber it so clearly”—even though he never actually spoke to
turkeys, ducks, geese, and bees. her, and then soon graduated.
Meanwhile, they were still running Epic, still working Six years later, when both were attending college at
out of the back of the same one-story Austin building, Texas State and commuting the 30 minutes from Austin,
behind a barbershop. They still went to work in flip-flops Forrest got Collins’s number from a friend and asked if
most days, still had half a dozen dogs wandering around he would like to carpool. Then came a first date, and he
the office. General Mills, one of the world’s largest food told her about his memory of that day in high school; she
companies—the parent of such conventional mega-brands recalled the same feeling. Within three months, they were
as Cheerios, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, and Green Giant— living together. Both passionate athletes, they took up
might seem an odd home for the couple’s creation. But as endurance racing together. They became vegans together.
big CPG companies have struggled in recent years with They began traveling together to compete in triathlons and

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