Mission

RESTORING METABOLIC HEALTH

Our food system is broken. 99% of American crops are sprayed with toxic chemicals linked directly to chronic disease, hormone disruption, ADHD, and cancer. Over one billion pounds of these odorless, tasteless chemicals, including glyphosate and atrazine, are sprayed on our food every year. As a result, we've seen an explosion in chronic disease, infertility, healthcare overspending, and much more.

Regenerative farms don't use chemicals. Instead, they grow real food using sunlight, livestock, and nutrient-rich soil. Believe it or not, a burger can be healthy if it's made with regeneratively-raised grass fed beef, organic vegetables, seed oil-free sauces, and unprocessed flour!

TALLOW is a fast food startup that will serve our customers the most nutrient-dense food possible, sourced from local regenerative farms in the Hudson Valley: Chaseholm, Hawthorne Valley, Wild Hive, Yellow Bell, Common Hands, and more. TALLOW will serve 100% real and regeneratively-sourced smashburgers, tallow fries, seasonal sides, and more in-store and online. We will scale across the Northeast, then the United States, integrating vertically and growing our Sunday Dinner Club member network. Scroll to learn more about the biggest root cause issue we face in America, and how we're going to tackle it.

THE ROOT CAUSE

The American healthcare system focuses on treating chronic diseases without understanding or even discussing the root causes. Why? Because surgeries and drugs make trillions of dollars for the "healthcare" industry, while food and exercise do not.

93% of Americans are metabolically dysfunctional. 74% of us are overweight or obese. 60% have one or more chronic disease. The more we spend on healthcare, the worse our health outcomes get. Factory farming has depleted up to 90% of the essential nutrients we used to get from our food.

While not the only root cause issue America faces, factory farming is the leading root cause issue of many other issues we deal with: chronic disease from nutrient deficiencies, healthcare overspending from lifelong medical treatments, inflation from overspending on healthcare, carbon emissions from soil tillage, and much more.

Factory farming is destroying our metabolic health and our environment. You may have heard that cows are the main culprit of agricultural greenhouse emissions; in fact, cows are essential for carbon-negative regenerative farms.

Soil tillage – the mechanical digging of soils to suppress weeds – is the main culprit, releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from the soil to the air every year. It also kills the beneficial nutrients and microbial life necessary for growing healthy food. Tillage erodes farmland over time, ultimately leaving the soil barren and useless for farmers.

A simple solution

Before the introduction of herbicides and pesticides post-World War II, regenerative farming was simply called "farming". It's the way humans farmed for thousands of years, and it's critical we go back to it.

What is regenerative farming? It's the practice of prioritizing soil health over everything else, and using the full cycle of life to grow nutrient-dense food as nature intends. The sun feeds the trees and plants, which feed the soil and livestock, which feed humans the nutrients we need. Regenerative farming goes beyond organic farming by minimizing soil disturbance (i.e. tillage) and external inputs (like fertilizers), which results in the most nutrient-rich food and carbon-capturing soils.

Regenerative farming is good business too. Mark Shepard, owner of New Forest Farm and one of the pioneers of modern regenerative agriculture, spends less than 5x on inputs and makes 10x on profits compared to his conventional farming neighbors. Then why aren't all farms regenerative? Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes and guarantees income for the Big Five mono crops – corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice – which require billions of pounds of herbicides and pesticides to yield at scale.

HEALTHY FATS

30% of American calories come from seed oils – highly processed "vegetable" oils that come from canola, sunflower, corn, and other plant seeds. They might sound harmless, but they are processed with bleach, acetone, Butylated Hydroxytoluene and other toxic chemicals to make them "edible".

Processed seed oils are highly inflammatory to the body, which is the fundamental driver of metabolic dysfunction and many chronic diseases. Even worse, at high frying temperatures seed oils emit acrylamide, a known neurotoxin that negatively impacts fertility and our DNA.

Fast food chains used to fry foods in tallow, or rendered animal fat. Around 1990, fast food chains switched to seed oils as the government and Big Food worked together to shift public opinion toward "heart healthy" polyunsaturated fats. In reality seed oils were – and still are – much cheaper to use.

TALLOW makes fast food healthy by cooking local, regeneratively-sourced meats and chemical-free produce, with fried foods made in 100% grass fed beef tallow.

PRINCIPLES

Our focus at TALLOW will be to maximize nutrients delivered to customers. The most important factor for delivering nutrient-rich food is the time between harvest and consumption, as produce starts to lose nutrients immediately after harvest. The second most important factor is growing method, where rich soils and natural growing conditions are critical. Local regenerative farms address both of these factors together.

We will use minimal ingredients and list all of them on our menus to build trust through transparency. Cross-utilization of ingredients will also help minimize waste and reduce supply chain complexity.

Our first location will teach us how to build the "machine" that maximizes throughput without compromising on quality. Once we optimize the product, we will automate tasks with hardware and software. At every turn, TALLOW will be a mission-focused company. Every important decision we make will be for the sake of restoring metabolic health with real food.

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