“Steve runs multiple
“Project Food Box is a rocketship and became our ‘Food As Medicine’ program which I think will change the world,” says Brazeel. “But you have to understand, this is all happening in a parallel time frame. While we’re doing food box work with the Navajo Nation, I’m trying to figure out what Elevated Foods is going to be.” COMBINE & CONQUER The idea for Elevated first came to Brazeel in 2018. It was clear to him that creating a collective of the best farmers in a given commodity — those who’d been around the longest, and were the most respected — was the right strategy. He also saw an untapped opportunity. While these producers may have been considered best in class, consumers had little to no awareness of their brands. This made the producers vulnerable to a three-way squeeze: by mega-buyers, who pushed chemical-growing programs; by powerful retailers, who wanted to dictate price; and by government regulators, whose demands were becoming more complex every day. “The riddle to solve was how to aggregate enough supply to achieve what the buyers want, put growers in a position of power, and allow them to grow in ways that are good for their land and the environment,” Brazeel says. He quickly dismissed the idea of a roll-up. That would cost hundreds of millions
of dollars and, besides, he knew most of these farmers had owned their land for generations and wouldn’t sell. Unable to figure out a straightforward through line to bring everyone together and make money, he decided his idea for Elevated Foods wasn’t ripe. Around the same time, Brazeel met Peter Wells through mutual friends who were putting together a deal in response to the 2018 Farm Bill. The bill declassified hemp as a Schedule 1 drug and legalized cultivation and sale of hemp (defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% THC), removing it from the Controlled Substances Act. This declassification started another “green rush” and investment poured into the space. “I knew it was risky going in and had a high chance of failure, but I liked Peter and trusted him,” says Brazeel. “I knew that if it failed, it wasn’t going to be because he was a bad guy.” Wells had made his career in finance in New York City, but grew up in Washington State. He projects the solid confidence of someone who understands money while remaining the grounded son of multigenerational farmers. Something about Wells and his enthusiasm, emotional and cerebral intelligence, and native optimism inspired Brazeel to explore his own eclectic thinking. “He gave me permission to throw out a random idea and he would think about it through a different lens and be that one validator who gave me the confidence to believe it could be done,” says Brazeel. So, one day, Brazeel pitched Wells the idea for Elevated Foods. Wells, now a critical business partner in all of Brazeel’s companies, immedi- ately liked the idea of aggregation and imagined scenarios where Elevated Foods could convince, say, the ninth, 12th, and 16th largest citrus producers to band together to compete against the top three, respectively.
guy he is, he said, ‘We’re going for $100 million.’ So I was like, let’s rock and roll!” Larger USDA grants have historically been awarded to the giant commodities like pork, wheat, soybeans, and corn. Given that Elevated Foods was just two guys and an idea, they checked themselves and, after designing a program that aligned with Elevated’s vision and the USDA’s mission, applied for $30 million. Brazeel was optimistic about their chances. Fruits and vegetables, what the USDA defines as specialty crops, were underrepresented, giving the Elevated Foods proposal a unique differentiator. When they knew the announcement was getting close, Riley told Brazeel: “Whoever calls you from a 202 area code, just pick up the phone, no matter when it is.” In September 2022 on a Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Brazeel got a call from Washington, D.C. “The call was really scratchy and I could barely make out what was being said. Then I heard her say we’d been awarded $20 million and that Under Secretary Bonnie was coming to present us the award on Tuesday.” Brazeel texted Wells to share the news. “I was on my last day of vacation,” remembers Wells. “I was just like, holy shit: I’m going home to a completely different life. This is going to change everything.” THE GRANT WHISPERER “It was a no-brainer to take the grant,” says Brazeel. “Imagine we’re a company that creates rocket parts and NASA gave us a grant — it’s an incredible door opener. When it comes to agriculture, the USDA is the gold standard that gives you the credibility to meet with anybody.” But running a business through a grant is entirely different from running a for-profit. Elevated Foods is required
companies and is the visionary that builds community around him and has the connections to the farms. Peter is the visionary on our approach to all things sustainability.”
Delivering food boxes in remote Monument Valley was a challenge.
The $20M USDA grant supercharged Elevated Foods.
The Farmers to Families Food Box program ran from May 2020 to May 2021 and during that period SunTerra executed a $42 million contract, delivering 1.5 million boxes containing 52.5 million pounds of food to its food- bank partners — including the Orange County Food Bank, Second Harvest, and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank — and 250,000 boxes to the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities. Collectively, these boxes were sent to California, Arizona, New Mexico, up into the Pacific Northwest, and as far as Wyoming and Montana. The project also saved SunTerra and kept nearly 100 of its employees working. “This was an entirely life-changing moment for Steve,” says Riley, who, after introducing Brazeel to Studdert, started consulting for SunTerra and is now SVP of External Relations and Strategic Partnerships with Elevated Foods. “He was about to lose his business at that stage. Then he discovered how massive the need was and realized the amount of food he could move. It changed everything.” In fact, the food-bank work had been so critical to SunTerra’s survival, it seems to have become part of the company’s DNA: After the Farmers to Families program ended at the USDA, SunTerra gave it a new life as a branded initiative called Project Food Box that has delivered nearly 6 million boxes to communities in need, including medically tailored food boxes for Medi-Cal and Medicare members with qualifying conditions.
to distribute the majority of the $20 million grant directly to its grower- partners. And while there is flexibility around which practices farmers choose to implement to sequester carbon — whether it’s using cover crops, reduced tillage, or nutrient management — the grant has restrictions that require Elevated to report precisely how each dollar is spent. So, they needed to hire a grant administrator. That turned out to be Dr. Kelsey Hood Cattaneo. “Peter is really sincere,” Hood Cattaneo says, speaking from her Florida home office on a Zoom call in February 2024. “And Steve is really passionate. I could tell they supported each other.” A serial academic with a law degree in international economics, a masters in public policy, and an educational policy doctorate, Hood Cattaneo is a veteran of the United Nations who spent more than 10 years working abroad. At the U.N. she did everything from youth entrepreneurship education to running partnerships and communications for the World Food Programme. When Wells found the Ventura, California, native, she had just finished a stint running grants for a farm labor organization for indigenous workers in Oxnard, California, and had moved to San Francisco to take a job as the Director of Evaluation and Impact for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Hood Cattaneo has a force-of-nature quality that comes through loud and clear. (As one of her colleagues has said, “she accelerates decision making.”)
Together, Wells and Brazeel identified a common struggle: Producers were being confronted with increasingly high expectations around sustainably grown food, regenerative farming, and compli- ance with evolving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. Meeting those standards required time, effort, and money that smaller producers didn’t always have. “There are all these scary acronyms that are confusing, yet farmers need to know what they mean,” says Brazeel, speaking of terms like ESG standards. “Big customers like Walmart and Costco, Sunkist, Driscoll’s, and Dole can use these regulations and audits to bully smaller producers and weaken their negotiating power to the point where price becomes dictated to them. We thought, what if we could provide a protocol to help educate this collective, help them adopt these new ways, and make them more powerful so they can control their own destiny?” When the USDA announced the $3.1 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, Riley, who was consulting for SunTerra by this point, immediately saw the fit. “I called Steve and told him the grant was made for everything he wanted to do with Elevated,” she says. “Immediately he said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ And being the competitive
Born from the Farmers to Families program, SunTerra’s Project Food Box has delivered 6 million boxes to communities in need.
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ISSUE 01
ELEVATED NATION
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