After discovering regenerative agriculture’s environmental appeal was not enough to persuade consumers to buy its products, natural and organic meat company Applegate Farms is looking for another way to connect the farming practice to what many shoppers value more directly: their own health.
The company recently joined a broad but disparate effort by numerous scientists, academic institutes and organizations to uncover whether regenerative farming not only enhances the health of the planet, but also positively impacts the nutritional composition of the food produced on land where the practices are implemented. And, by extension, the company wants to know whether evidence of a nutritional benefit could make shoppers more willing to support brands and farmers that use regenerative agricultural practices.
Research supported by Applegate is the latest turn in a multi-year regenerative agriculture pilot that the company began with the development and launch in 2021 of its “Do Good Dog.” Described by the company as a “humble” hot dog made with beef from verified regenerative US grasslands, the launch had a lofty goal of democratizing a farming system considered in line with nature, but which is difficult for consumers unfamiliar with agriculture to understand.
The hot dog featured packaging claims that company representatives said they thought would help consumers understand the benefits of regenerative agriculture, such as “beef raised with practices that regenerate the land.”
But a year after the product debuted, consumer research showed that while shoppers said they wanted more environmentally sustainable food - price and health, not sustainability – were their top purchase priorities.
“The regenerative messaging was appealing to consumers, but it still wasn’t enough to be a purchase driver for them,” especially if they didn’t fully understand it, said Carolyn Gahn, senior editor of mission and advocacy at Applegate.
“Ultimately, the Do Good Dog was pulled off the market, and from the experiment we knew there were two paths: We could either shut all this down and not do regen ag at all, or we could go all in and make all our beef hotdogs on the market with regeneratively sourced ingredients – just scale it and not ask consumers to pay a premium,” she said.
The company chose the latter.
“I thought that would be the end of the journey as far as our regenerative beef goes, but it is still going,” Gahn said. “Now we are exploring the nutrition piece and the hypothesis that what is good for the soil is also good for your health. We want to make that connection, because we think that is the golden ticket for bringing this to consumers in a way that meets them where they are.”
Today the company revealed the results of this next step by sharing the results of nutrition testing of its certified regenerative all-beef hot dogs conducted by the ISO-accredited food testing lab Edacious.
Does regenerative farming impact nutrition?
The results, while limited, are intriguing: Applegate’s certified regenerative all-beef hot dogs had a more favorable omega-6 to omega-3 ratio than the conventional and grass-fed beef ribeye samples in Edacious’ comparison dataset.
“The closer to a one-to-one ratio the more balanced a product is. We were hoping for a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, but what we found was better – it was a ratio of 1.3 to one. And we were super jazzed that this was consistent throughout all the sampling” of more than 120 natural and organic hotdog lots produced from cows that grazed on regenerative grassland during different seasons, Gahn said.
She explained that the company wondered if the type of grass available to cattle during different seasons would impact the ratio, but the study suggests it did not.
For comparison, grass-fed beef ribeye has a balance of two-to-one, and conventional grain-finished beef ribeye has a balance of seven-to-one. Farm raised salmon, which is often prized for its omegas, has a ratio of 0.7 to one, according to Applegate’s research.
The company used beef ribeye and salmon as comparison because that was the data available in the data set Edacious could access. Ribeye is a whole muscle cut and Applegate’s hotdogs are made with whole muscle trim, “so it is actually not that different,” Gahn said.
But, she added said, Applegate plans to conduct a similar test comparing its hotdogs to those made under different agricultural systems.
Does regenerative agriculture make food healthier?
Applegate’s research is the first step in better understanding the potential impact of regenerative farming practices on nutritional quality – but it does not prove the practices produced the more favorable profile.
Grass-fed beef raised without regenerative certification can also have relatively favorable omega-3 levels, Gahn acknowledged.
But even if regenerative agriculture can be shown to alter the nutritional composition of food, Applegate still has to establish whether those differences translate into measurable benefits for people.
“This is the big hypothesis and thing that we need to test,” Gahn said. “The human health component is the final link.”
To find out, Applegate commissioned a study with the Hormel Institute, which is part of the University of Minnesota, to measure human health biomarkers when participants ate a diet of meals made with conventional beef versus equivalent meals made with grass-fed organic regenerative beef.
The study involved 40 participants who ate frozen meals with conventional meat for four weeks, and after a two week washout period, ate meals with grass-fed organic regenerative beef for four weeks.
Researchers are compiling and analyzing the results, which Gahn said the research team was “really positive” about.
“We are going to keep talking to scientists and supporting research to really get to the next level and understand what this means for other food items and how soil health impacts nutrition and human health,” Gahn said. “That could really change how a lot of consumers think about their food and what information they have available about their own health. This is really important.”
Applegate isn’t alone
Applegate is not the only stakeholder investigating the impact of regenerative farming practices on nutrition and human health.
Researchers and organizations including the Rodale Institute also are investigating whether changes in agricultural practices can be detected not only in soil and ecosystems, but in the nutritional composition of food.
A prominent research team at the University of Washington also compared crops and livestock from regenerative farms versus conventional farms and found higher micronutrients and phytochemicals in regenerative produce.
Likewise, researchers at California State University, Chico and other global groups, like Soil Heroes Foundation, are examining how soil microbial life impacts plant mineral uptake.
Next steps
For Applegate, however, proving that regenerative farming can influence the nutritional composition of food is only part of the equation. The company also needs to know whether consumers will value the difference enough to change what they buy, particularly if demonstrating that benefit impacts farmers’ and companies’ margins.
“If it was proven out and shown there on the front … of the package, they could make that choice, and I think they would,” Gahn said.
For now, that remains a hypothesis, too.
“These things take so much longer than we always think,” Gahn concluded.
