We were lucky to catch up with Mark Shipley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Tree Folk’s mission is to connect consumers with their native locale through offering the finest native wild-foraged food products. We generate wealth for Native communities by connecting people to the ancient, delicious, and nutrient-dense native foods of California.

As a teenager, I learned about the horrifying reality of factory farming from my high school art teacher. This was a fundamental turning point for me, to realize that my food choices not only affected my health but could determine the health of the environment around me. I continued to learn about industrial agriculture, its discontents and alternatives. I began to work on small organic farms, and through this I started learning about gathering wild plants for food and medicine. As a born Chicagoan, I then turned my interest to urban agriculture, horticulture, beekeeping, and foraging. I was a founding member of the Chicago Honey Co-op, where I learned about the urban foraging done by bees. I also began to lead a food recovery and fermentation project. My father was a child of the Great Depression and a Catholic, and he instilled on me an ethos of frugality and waste recovery, which has followed me to this day.

Fifteen years ago, I began working as a massage therapist, which stemmed from my background in dance, yoga, and movement. I attended UC Berkeley as a mid-career undergraduate student in the late 2010s, and graduated during the pandemic. I had intended to work in non-profit advocacy, but had a career crisis when I realized that I would be in front of a computer all day. That happened to be a boom year for California bay laurel fruiting, and the local East Bay forest was saturated with bay nuts. I began experimenting with the nuts, and I realized what an incredibly valuable gift they are to our communities. I wanted to share them with the world and draw attention to the delicious, sustainable, and abundant food growing right in our backyard, and Tree Folk was born.

Behind Tree Folk lie the values of cooperation, community, cross-cultural healing, Native sovereignty, food security, and liberation. My goal is to organize the company as a worker-owned cooperative, and to share at least half of the profits with Native food sovereignty organizers in the region. To this end I network with local Native leaders and activists to support their work.

Mark, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Tree Folk is a company that offers foraged (hand-collected in the wild) native Californian foods to consumers, namely foods made from bay nuts, or nuts from the California bay laurel tree. The California bay laurel is a close relative of avocado, and the tree produces a fruit very similar to avocado, with an edible seed. This seed, or nut, when roasted resembles coffee and chocolate, so the bay nut is effectively a wild California chocolate. The nut has been used by Native people across the region for likely thousands of years. We owe our knowledge of this food to Native Californians.

We are the first company to make bay nuts widely available to the consumer market. We believe our success lies in several market and social demands in the current moment. The wild food market is growing rapidly. It is at the leading edge of foodie culture and upscale taste habits. The scarcity of wild food makes it feel exclusive, exotic, and sought after. As a company that explicitly supports Native food access and Native food sovereignty, people are also drawn to the social mission and are willing to pay a fair trade premium. The food is a nutrition powerhouse and is high in MCT oil (medium chain triglycerides, or “the good saturated fat”). It has a potential stimulant effect, and lends itself well to bakeries and coffee shops. The taste is complex and delicious.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I have gotten positive feedback about working with Native people and making that a key pillar of the business. I give a lot of product away at Native events and to Native leaders.

The Baytella is an exciting product that people like to talk about. The new brand design is popular as well.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

I’m currently making my product in a home kitchen, and am at the stage where I am approaching commercial kitchens for a contract.

I have experimented with several grinders, and I’m currently looking for a roasting machine for the nuts. I also had to do R and D about how to take the fruit off of the nut, for which I developed several systems with various filters, screens, pressure hoses, etc, over two seasons, eventually settling on a machine that a colleague recommended. that works very efficiently. I am still in the process of learning about manufacturing, and I don’t have a finished manufacturing plan. I am still in the home cottage business stage.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @sharkmipley