EPISODE SUMMARY

Zero Acre Farms is creating a new category of healthy oils and fats, made by fermentation. Zero Acre is on a mission to reduce the consumption of vegetable oil which has been linked to significant health risks and has an environmentally destructive production process. Jeff Nobbs joins DTC Pod to give Blaine & Ramon a lesson in vegetable oil and why Zero Acre raised $37M to disrupt the vegetable oil industry.

EPISODE NOTES

Jeff Nobbs is the co-founder & CEO of Zero Acre Farm, an environmentally-focused food company. Nobbs has been an entrepreneur from day 1. As a teenager in 2006, he cofounded cashback shopping website Extrabux. It was acquired by ebates in 2014. In 2015, Nobbs jumped into the food scene and started a healthy, fast-casual restaurant Kitava — which he still owns today. When COVID hit, he co-founded HelpKitchen to combat food insecurity. HelpKitchen  has since served millions of free meals to people in need. And in 2020 he decided it was time enter the oil business. At the same time, he cofounded Zero Acre Farms to remove destructive vegetable oils from the food system.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

Here’s Who Invested $37 MILLION in Cooking Oil
A lot of our investors are folks who aren’t  traditional venture capitalists, but rather high net worth individuals, athletes, or celebrities or whatever. And so they don’t have to invest, they don’t need to make more money on their money, but they’re like, Okay, well, I got to this point in my life where I have all this money and success, good luck and fortune, how can I give back? And so they’re trying to invest in companies that they genuinely think are doing the right thing and that they believe are doing the right thing. And so I think we’re partly a beneficiary of that.
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13:22 - 1404
$37 MILLION Dollars & THIS Is His First Move
We’re starting DTC. So, you know, we could have also started in retail or grocery. But we’re starting DTC because you can just learn so quickly. And maybe you’re messaging on the benefits of cultured oil are way off and that’d be a bad mistake to make if we had just printed like 3 million bottles, and they’re on the shelves at Whole Foods nationwide. But it’s a really easy mistake to fix when we’re making small batches, we can A/B test different messages online. And we can reach a number of audiences digitally. So that’s where we’re starting to build up the volume, bring down the cost, learn a lot, build up the brand, build up this new category of cultured oil, and then eventually get to the McDonald’s and Frito Lays of the world.

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24:41 - 25:14
Why Cooking Oil Could Change The World FOREVER
Some of the things we’re doing on the education front is content. So at zero acre.com/blog we have a bunch of content related to how these oils affects our health and affect the planet when we grow them and when we eat them. And it’s pretty eye opening. Some of the content we have there, as you know, it goes pretty in depth. Like in the Google Doc, it was like 40 Plus pages. But it’s, for example, you know how do seed oils contribute to obesity and weight gain. And there’s a lot there.

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