We recently connected with Jeff Bednar and have shared our conversation below.

Jeff, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I grew up your typical middle-class American. We ate some good food at home, like tuna casserole, spaghetti pie, and frito salad. In highschool and after I moved out at 17, though, I ate a lot of fast food, like an embarrassing amount. It was cheap and convenient. Then I met my wife, who didn’t grow up in the US, and had never seen a drive-through until she moved to Texas when she was 28. She prepared fresh salad, baked chicken, and she made eating real food easy. Also, she tried to garden in our brutal Texas clay soil.
The less fast food I ate, the less indigestion and heartburn I had and the better I felt. It got me thinking… what am I putting in my body? Where does my food come from?
As our little family grew, my wife and I watched documentary after documentary. We started studying sustainability and conservation. We built a small raised bed to grow some backyard veggies. We got an aero garden for countertop herbs. All this research led me to discover hydroponics and aquaponics. I built a tiny kitchen system with 3 goldfish and 3 strawberry plants. It was really cute to teach my 6-year-old daughter about the system. I got hooked on growing, eating healthy food, making a difference and focusing on sustainability. But I couldn’t build a bigger backyard system in the HOA we lived in, so we started looking for a property where we could do small-scale farming.
They say the universe will conspire to support you when you’re clear about what you want. Magically we discovered our little farm when my dad rode past on his bike and saw the for sale sign. We were a perfect match for the sellers, who were looking for a buyer to restore the greenhouses on the property and not just mow everything down to build another giant house.
We were scared, excited, overwhelmed with possibilities. 2.6 acres seemed like paradise after living in small 1/8th urban lots. We literally asked ourselves what the worst thing was that could happen. We had to protect the downside, as Tony Robbins says in his book Unshakeable. We determined the worst that could happen was bankruptcy, and that was a risk we could tolerate, looking at all the upside.
That’s how our adventure began. People liked at us like we were crazy. They told us we were crazy. And we got such a kick out off telling people “we bought the farm”… it was euphoric and unbelievable.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The thing I’m most proud of in our business is that we’ve been able to bring together incredible groups of people to make things happen that other’s have said were not possible. We have the best staff, people that are working because they are passionate about local food and environmental sustainability. Our staff has a ton of experience in farming, gardening, we have professional chefs, leaders, and hard-working people that bring a very diverse amount of experience to our team. In our food hub, Profound Foods, we’ve simply created a platform then brought together farmers, ranchers, and producers. Our Chef customers have been hugely supportive and told us everything we’ve needed to build our business. Our retail customers are incredibly supportive of everything we do from weekly grocery delivery to attending our farm-to-table dinners, farm tours, cooking classes, and vendor open houses.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

To be a farmer you must embrace resilience. We’ve had so many things come up in the last 8 years to test our resilience. So many times when we’ve been close to quitting but knew that we had to continue to push through the hard times to create a better future. We’ve killed hundreds of fish in our aquaponic systems from different failures, we’ve lost other farm animals, we invested over $20k in a rental property to expand the farm only to have it yanked away after only a few months. We’ve had storms rip the tops off our greenhouses, we’ve had power outages that killed all of our plants due to no water or getting too hot in the greenhouse. Every time strong winds blow through the farm it’s stressful. But that’s all just part of farming and the benefits and knowing the difference we’re making in the world are all worth it.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

The biggest two things we’ve done to help build our reputation in our market is to say “yes” to our customers, then figure out how to deliver. The second thing is to be consistent, we strive to be consistent with everything we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.profoundfoods.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/profoundfoods
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/profoundfoods
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffbednar/