Welcome to Cart Culture: Mike Hondorp & the Force of Nature Origin Story

Emily Steele: Cart Culture is all about revealing the real forces behind what ends up in the cart. We're here to have live conversations that unpack how culture, community, and creativity shape modern buying behavior. We've talked to Kate at NIQ, social media teams, and brand operators from Everyday Dose. I run Hummingbirds, which started in my own backyard in Des Moines, Iowa, bringing together everyday creators who work with CPG brands and retail to tell their story, create visibility, and drive velocity through our latest product offers.

I'm obsessed with the moment discovery turns into cart action, the human psychology behind why creators can be so successful for brands. We've been helping CPG brands drive real-world discovery and retail momentum through our creators for the last four years, working with hundreds of customers. Today we're diving into something I think is incredible: Force of Nature's value prop, and how translating that into a pack of meat on shelf is a real challenge to overcome. We'll get into mission-driven subscribers versus price-comparing shoppers, and how Mike's background building Instagram and Cameo has shaped what's going on at Force of Nature.

Emily: Mike, do you want to tell us a little bit about you, your background, and what Force of Nature is for anyone new here?

Mike Hondorp: Thrilled to be here. I run marketing at Force of Nature Meats, one of the first scaled regenerative meat companies out there. What we're committed to doing is bringing better meat to more people, and by doing that, building a more regenerative but also scalable food system. Our food system is pretty broken, and we want to be an active player in healing it and making it better.

Mike: My path here was pretty unlikely. I spent most of my career largely in retail marketing or technology on the platform side: Instagram, Cameo, and way back in the day, early Bonobos, the men's pants company that had the audacious idea of selling pants online in the early 2000s. In a post-COVID era, I knew I needed two things: a company with a mission that mattered to me and to millions of people, and one that was quote-unquote real or measurable. The second piece was wanting to work with good people, people I respect, who treat people kindly. That starts at the top.

A friend of mine asked, “Would you ever work at a meat company?” and I thought it was one of the strangest questions I'd been asked in my career. Fast forward, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing, because I believe in the mission.

Mike: Force of Nature ultimately cares about three things. Are we producing something that's better for you? Are we producing something that's better for the animals? Are we doing something that's better for the planet? If we're doing all three of those every day, that's what gets me excited, and that's ultimately how I ended up here.

From Epic Provisions to Retail

Emily: What's the origin story on direct-to-consumer to retail, and what's that journey looked like?

Mike: Our three co-founders worked together at a company called Epic Provisions. The Epic Bar is still on shelves today, and it was one of the first meat-based protein bars out there. It was a wild idea that worked, and the company was eventually acquired. Throughout that process, our founders kept asking: how do we translate this mission from ounces to pounds? We could scale our impact infinitely if we did this at a bigger scale. So they set out to create a better meat company, with regenerative being core to what we do, but not all that we do. Force of Nature was founded to raise the standard altogether for the meat industry, not just to have high standards ourselves.

Mike: We were founded in late 2019, and we all remember what happened in early 2020. We were just getting off the ground selling to Whole Foods and Central Market in Austin, where we're based, and then the world shut down. We had a massive amount of inventory that was about to go to restaurants and retailers who were shutting their doors, so we quickly pivoted to a D2C and ecommerce business. Retail came back pretty quickly and became a lifeline, but ecommerce was how we got our inventory into people's hands while they were excited about cooking at home.

Today we have a thriving ecommerce business, but it's a fraction of the revenue of the company. The vast majority of what we do is retail, and it always will be, because that's where people buy fresh and perishable food. We also do food service, but retail is the name of the game.

Translating Regenerative Ag Into “Meat You Can Trust”

Emily: Knowing retail has such a profound impact on the company, how do you think about getting the mission all the way to the shelf, to a buyer who may have never heard of regenerative agriculture?

Mike: It all starts with the consumer. We have a really exciting mission and a huge, chunky backstory. We're a triple-bottom-line company, and regenerative agriculture is both exciting and hard to understand, and hard to pronounce. So when I say customer-first, I mean we think first about what people want and need. Our consumers have told us, quite simply, that they're looking for better-for-you products. That's amazing, because it's something we can prove: we test to ensure we're delivering more nutrition than USDA benchmarks, than conventional benchmarks, than even organic benchmarks. But consumers are also looking for something to believe in, and that's where our story gets exciting.

Mike: Our mission isn't solely regenerative. It's to make a better food system, but we believe regenerative practices are what gets us there. We think of regenerative as working with nature instead of against it. If you think about the life of a cow or a ruminant animal that can convert the complexity of grass into nutritious meat, that animal lives on the land it was meant to live on, eats the food it was meant to eat, and does the work of making that land healthier through the way it lives. It moves on, and as a result, that land recovers and regenerates.

Mike: An industrialized system, by contrast, is inherently extractive: mechanical inputs, chemical interventions to avoid weeds and pests that degrade land quality, less welfare for animals, and a lower nutrient profile in the final product. It's a lot to unpack: soil health, land health, water health, mineral cycling. But ultimately it's a better product, and what we say to consumers, because they've told us they care about something better for them that they can believe in, is meat you can trust.

Mike: That phrase means a lot to a lot of people, and we can back it up through our protocols and testing. If we say “meat you can trust” or “it's just better,” which was a big campaign last fall, consumers react positively. Then they start their journey: they go to our site, they Google, or they work with AI to understand regenerative agriculture. It's exciting to tip off that conversation and bring them into something they can believe in.

The Omnichannel Journey: Shelf to Subscription, Regenerative vs. Organic

Emily: This is a commodity category that you've put a brand to, and that's different from the typical meat-aisle experience. Do people align with the messaging and buy, or are they curious and in discovery mode first? Or is it both?

Mike: It's both. Our most valuable consumer at Force of Nature is an omnichannel consumer. Often, the first point of entry is seeing a brick of our frozen or fresh ground meat on the shelf at Whole Foods, H-E-B in Texas, Publix in Florida, or another market. That brick does an amazing job of painting the picture of what we do. We were one of the first brands to actually put the animal on the pack, with claims that resonate: grass-fed, pasture-raised, or regeneratively raised, depending on the protein.

If that product tastes good, which we hope it always does, we often find great product-market fit, and consumers discover we have an ecommerce site. If they're going through a certain amount of product a week, it can be more economical to subscribe on ecom and have it shipped frozen right to their door, saving money and making fewer trips to the store.

Mike: There are consumers whose first interaction with us is online, but our online business is interesting: we're selling highly perishable products with a fairly high minimum order value to qualify for free shipping, because it's a lot to ask on something a consumer has never tried. So regardless of your touchpoint, we try to invite you into a story, whether that's on the back of pack at retail, on POS or shopper marketing, or in-store signage, and that same message and story translates in ecommerce. Every consumer gets something tactile from us: stickers for kids, a postcard written by a founder about our “soil builder of the month,” which could be a bison or an owl, so you can feel that connection from day one and go on the journey with us.

Regenerative vs. Organic: Myth-Busting for Shoppers

Audience question: How do you get people to change their shopping habits, to buy regenerative instead of organic? What's caught shoppers' interest to go your direction instead of their current ways?

Mike: This is really relevant for an ecommerce shopper willing to do the research on our website. If we're trying to change shopping behavior, we have to prove that we're better, which we say, but we can also prove. We never want to demonize other players in the industry. I'm incredibly thankful for the organic movement, which is well ahead of where regenerative is hoping to be. But we do try to do some myth-busting: most organic beef comes from dairy cows fed in confinement, but raised on organic feed. Is that the system you want to be part of for meat, or would you rather be part of a regenerative system where animals never step foot in confinement, never deal with antibiotics or GMOs, never see a feedlot, and always live on grass with zero supplementation?

Mike: That might be okay for spinach, but for beef, we think maybe not. We're earlier in that phase with chicken. Most of that industry is relatively horrific, and we don't want to show consumers the horrors of industrialized chicken; we want to show them the beauty of what we do. The vision you have of an animal on pasture, free to roam and exhibit natural behaviors, is the reality of our program. If we can show you that, we don't have to show you the alternative.

Marketing Universal Truths: Instagram, Cameo & Patagonia

Emily: For the early-stage founders on this call, is there anything Force of Nature has learned on the marketing side that applies no matter what you're selling?

Mike: I do think there are universal truths, and it always comes back to: what do people want, what are they ready for, and what can we uniquely provide? When I started at Force of Nature, I did a deep dive into what we were saying: beautiful visuals, gorgeous packaging, but a lot of messaging that was probably going straight over people's heads. We were talking about soil health, which is probably the most important thing in regenerative agriculture, but is that what's on a shopper's mind at H-E-B, or is it price comparisons and claims on the pack, just trying to get something so she can get the kids to school? Probably the latter, before soil health. So we lean into universal truths around “meat you can trust,” backed by data.

Mike: This connects to my time at Instagram, where the currency we were seeking was time and attention. Instagram launched as a visual inspiration platform, literally a photo-editing app, and became something else because consumers told us that's what they wanted, not by saying it, but by doing it. The same is true here: consumers are telling us what they care about, and it's nutrient density and specific claims. We tell them how we're different there, while also telling our own story, hoping they come along on the journey. We always defer to the consumer over what we want to say, because if we lead with what we want to say, we're going to miss the mark, since we're not listening.

Mike: The exciting thing about a mission-based CPG company is that we're leaning on the consumer the same way, but the currency is different. It's not time and attention, it's purchase, so we can solve for the mission of improving our food system. That's about differentiation, positioning, standards, and integrity, creating a real bond with consumers, not just something that gets them to spend more time with us. The brands that do this really well, like Patagonia and Yeti, are so much more than a jacket or a cooler. It's a lifestyle, a set of beliefs, something to be inspired by. If we can do even a fraction of that, I'd be really proud.