From milk to snack foods, more products are going ‘regenerative — Fortune

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

When Michael Ham first began handing out samples of his company’s tea to Whole Foods shoppers in 2024, explaining that it was grown using regenerative farming on South Korea’s Jeju Island, he was often met with blank stares.

That didn’t last long. By the following year, “People were coming up saying, ‘Oh, you’re regenerative!’” says the co-founder and president of Westchester, New York-based Wild Orchard Tea Company.

Regenerative agriculture, an approach to farming that aims to improve soil health through practices like reduced use of pesticides and plowing, is having a moment. Championed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and propelled by increasingly health-conscious consumers, regenerative products now generate some $2 billion a year in retail sales, and some in the industry are positioning the fast-growing category as the next organic.

Big food producers and retailers like Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc, General Mills Inc and Walmart Inc have made regenerative agriculture commitments, often as part of ESG goals. And late last year agencies including the US Department of Agriculture announced a $700 million pilot program to support regenerative agriculture projects on farms.

But unlike organic, regenerative agriculture is only lightly regulated at the federal level in the US. To earn US Department of Agriculture organic certification, producers must comply with detailed federal standards, including strict rules about synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and undergo annual inspections. There’s no such equivalent for regenerative agriculture, and many products can be labeled as regenerative without having to verify their claims.

With the boom have come increasingly pressing questions from within and outside of the industry about what the label actually means and concerns from advocates about consumers being misled, especially because regenerative products tend to be more expensive.

Nora Brown, a 47-year-old who works in international development in Washington, DC, buys regenerative products when they’re available. She sees them as healthier for the environment and herself, especially since recovering from breast cancer.

But “I do have a fear of, we just love to label stuff for marketing. There’s pink washing, there’s greenwashing,” she said. “And I hope it doesn’t go the way of that.”

Certifying organizations like Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) aim to bring more rigor to the space. Last year, dollar sales of ROC-labeled products grew faster than those labeled certified organic, fair trade and non-GMO, according to the data provider SPINS . But across the broader landscape, regenerative agriculture standards can vary widely, differences that are not always evident to shoppers. As more of them encounter the label at grocery stores, experts worry that this variability could undermine the growing category.

The term “regenerative agriculture” dates back to at least the 1980s, but it didn’t pick up steam until the 2010s. Backed in the early days by organic farming advocates, regenerative agriculture may also cut down or eliminate synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but puts a sharper focus on soil health and biodiversity. Proponents say in some ways it’s a return to old-school practices, including rotating crops and using plants like hedgerows as a living fence around fields.

Advocates “started to use the term, ‘We’re regenerating our landscapes, we’re regenerating our farms, regenerating the ecosystem,’” said Gabe Brown, a retired farmer sometimes credited as the movement’s godfather, who co-founded and serves as a board member of a certification program called Regenified. “And now you hear the word regenerative everywhere. Before, the buzzword was sustainability.”

The term’s appeal has been rapidly expanding. With products from baby food to snacks, bath care and pet food bearing the label, the regenerative agriculture category saw in-store retail dollar sales grow 10% over the last year and nearly 22% the year before, according to NielsenIQ data. Dairy is the largest category by dollar sales, and some of the fastest growth has been in regeneratively grown produce.

Advocates for regenerative agriculture say that it’s healthier for the planet and people. Among the environmental benefits they cite is that by deploying practices like no-till farming, which avoids plowing the land, and planting cover crops between growing seasons, farm soil can store more carbon. Other regenerative farming techniques include moving grazing animals around pasture to let the remaining portions recover, and planting trees and shrubs on working agricultural land next to crops or livestock. Experts, however, say that the climate change benefits may have been oversold.

The term regenerative has also been embraced by MAHA advocates, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy , Calley Means — an advisor to Kennedy — and Kelly Ryerson, who goes by the moniker “The Glyphosate Girl,” a reference to a widely-used herbicide that many in MAHA want to restrict.

“There was so much press that went around vaccines, but actually this is just as, if not more core to the issues that we really care about,” said Ryerson, who is co-executive director of the advocacy group American Regeneration.

MAHA supporters say food grown using regenerative agriculture has more nutrients and fewer chemicals and is therefore healthier, but those claims are challenging to evaluate, scientists say, including because regenerative practices aren’t applied evenly across farms.

Even as the US government pushes to facilitate such practices, there is still little regulation for products bearing regenerative claims. Where federal oversight does exist, it remains limited: Meat and poultry sellers making claims like “raise...

From milk to snack foods, more products are going ‘regenerative — Fortune | AIPROPX