For Love Or Meat

The hippie endurance athletes behind Epic Provisions sold their natural food company to General Mills for a reported $100 million. It began as an unexpected love affair. Then, it got complicated.

- Tom Fosterb

On a cloudless mid-April morning in Texas’s Hill Country, about 60 miles west of Austin near a legendary honky-tonk town called Luckenbach, Katie Forrest and her husband, Taylor Collins, eye a herd of bison grazing in a pasture on the 900-acre ranch they purchased last year. About a dozen of the giant beasts have formed a protective circle around two baby bison as they amble, en masse, in their owners’ direction. “Oh, my god, I can’t believe they’re coming over here!” Collins marvels, in the hushed,conspiratorial tone of a nature-show host. “This is crazy. This is as close as anyone will get to a week-old baby bison.”

This ranch, this field, this herd of animals, is what paradise looks like to Forrest and Collins. A couple of Austin natives, they bought the spread with money they made when they sold their startup, Epic Provisions, to the Minnesota-based consumer packaged goods (CPG) conglomerate General Mills in 2016, after a scant three years in business, for a reported $100 million. Barely into their 30s, they were suddenly rich beyond their dreams. They’d built the company, which makes meat-based snacks, without taking enormous amounts of outside investment, and managed to keep a majority stake in it when they sold.

They were also, like many founders of hip food and beverage brands, obsessed with making products that offered a healthy alternative to big food—healthy for consumers and for the environment, and humane to the animals. The ranch would not only be an outlet for their outdoorsy lifestyle, but also serve as a lab for regenerative grazing practices that they hoped to push more of their suppliers to adopt. They wanted Epic to be a force for changing America’s food system, and the ranch would help. They started raising bison, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and bees.