Épisodes

  • Farming for Flavor: How Maker’s Mark Is Scaling Regenerative Agriculture

    Farming for Flavor: How Maker’s Mark Is Scaling Regenerative Agriculture
    Feb 19 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Rob Samuels, eighth-generation whiskey maker and Managing Director of Kentucky bourbon brand Maker’s Mark, about embedding regeneration at the core of a global business. Samuels explains how Maker’s Mark connects its stewardship of soil health, grain varietals, water stewardship, and American white oak forestry directly to flavor and product integrity. The conversation explores the company’s transition to regenerative practices across 50,000 acres of partner farmland, and its investment in mapping the genome of American white oak to safeguard the future of bourbon barrels. Samuels also reflects on the firm’s “purposeful inefficiency”—from hand-dipping the tops of millions of bottles in the company’s iconic red wax to rotating barrels for consistency—and why operating with what he calls an infinite mindset reshapes decisions about people, community, and long-term value. The episode offers a concrete case of how regenerative principles can move beyond rhetoric and into supply chains, governance, and product design, suggesting a different model for resilience in legacy industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    41 min
  • Measuring What Matters: Inside Davines’ Regenerative Strategy

    Measuring What Matters: Inside Davines’ Regenerative Strategy
    Feb 12 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Davide Bollati, Chairman of Davines, about what regeneration means for a global beauty company. Davide reflects on Davines’ evolution from performance-driven cosmetic chemistry toward a regenerative business model grounded in measurement, balance, and long-term purpose. The conversation explores decoupling growth from emissions, regenerative organic agriculture, packaging responsibility, and the role of pre-competitive collaboration in transforming the beauty industry. Davide also offers a philosophical view of regeneration as a pursuit of meaningful value creation—one that integrates environmental limits, social wellbeing, and cultural responsibility rather than chasing growth at any cost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    32 min
  • Inside Rodale Institute’s Vision for Regenerative Change

    Inside Rodale Institute’s Vision for Regenerative Change
    Feb 5 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Jeff Tkach, CEO of Rodale Institute, about the roots, science, and future of regenerative organic agriculture. Drawing on Rodale’s decades-long research comparing organic and conventional farming systems, Jeff explains why soil health sits at the center of human health, farmer livelihoods, and climate resilience. The conversation examines how regeneration differs from sustainability, why organic practices are essential rather than optional, and how weak definitions of “regenerative” risk enabling greenwashing across the food industry. Jeff also reflects on Rodale’s growing engagement with major food companies and governments, highlighting both the opportunities and tensions involved in shifting large-scale supply chains. Ultimately, this episode reframes regeneration as a process of continuous improvement: one that challenges extractive models of agriculture and asks what it would mean for food systems to genuinely get better over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    31 min
  • Regenerative Organic Rice and the Power of the Long View at Lundberg Family Farms

    Regenerative Organic Rice and the Power of the Long View at Lundberg Family Farms
    Jan 29 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Brita Lundberg and Bryce Lundberg of Lundberg Family Farms, a fourth-generation family business and pioneer of organic and regenerative rice farming. They explain why organic is the baseline, not the endpoint, of responsible agriculture, and how Regenerative Organic Certification deepens commitments to soil health, biodiversity, and social fairness. Drawing on decades of experience, Brita and Bryce describe how rice farming practices like cover cropping, water-based weed management, and wetland restoration rebuild ecosystems while reducing climate impact. The conversation also explores generational thinking, risk-taking, and how communicating regeneration to consumers can help shift food systems toward long-term resilience rather than short-term extraction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    38 min
  • Supply Chain Resilience Starts in the Soil: A Conversation with Salar Shemirani, CEO of Regenified

    Supply Chain Resilience Starts in the Soil: A Conversation with Salar Shemirani, CEO of Regenified
    Jan 20 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, host Chris Marquis speaks with Salar Shemirani, co-founder and CEO of Regenified, about the difficult work of making “regenerative” mean something concrete in food and agriculture. Shemirani traces his shift from corporate finance to soil health after watching the documentary Kiss the Ground, and explains why he sees regeneration less as a fixed endpoint and more as a question of continuous improvement on whether a farm is adding to its landscape or extracting from it. Together, they explore the tension between rigor and scale: why binary certification models can remain niche, what it would take to build credible on-ramps for the current 99% of conventional acres, and how Regenified’s “6-3-4” framework attempts to ground claims in measurable ecosystem processes. The conversation also connects regenerative verification to business fundamentals, including risk, accountability, and supply chain resilience in the face of climate extremes, while asking what it would mean for markets to reward real progress without turning regeneration into another box-checking exercise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    30 min
  • “Rescue, Transform, Donate”: Rethinking Circular Business with Elvis & Kresse

    “Rescue, Transform, Donate”: Rethinking Circular Business with Elvis & Kresse
    Jan 10 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Kresse Wesling, co-founder of Elvis & Kresse, about what it really takes to build a circular business that treats waste not as an inevitability but as a design failure. Wesling reflects on how encountering mountains of end-of-life industrial materials, beginning with decommissioned fire hoses, pushed her toward a model anchored in “rescue, transform, donate,” where product design, longevity, and shared value are built into the operating logic rather than added on later. The conversation explores why circularity cannot be reduced to recycling, how businesses can “sell better” through repair and resizing instead of simply selling more, and what it means to move beyond harm reduction toward a regenerative frame that prioritizes long-term system function. They also discuss the realities of collaborating with large brands, the role of policy tools like extended producer responsibility, and how to shift whole industries toward durable, accountable models that do not depend on perpetual waste. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    30 min
  • Market-Driven Regeneration: How Yerba Madre’s Business Model Delivers Net Positive Impact

    Market-Driven Regeneration: How Yerba Madre’s Business Model Delivers Net Positive Impact
    Jan 6 2026
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Christopher Marquis speaks with Ben Mand, CEO of Yerba Madre, about what it means to build a truly regenerative business. Ben introduces Yerba Madre’s model of market-driven regeneration, explaining how commercial success is used to deliver tangible benefits to Indigenous farmers, forest ecosystems, and supply chain partners across South America. The conversation explores living wages, biodiverse shade-grown agroforestry, third-party certifications, and why regeneration must extend beyond farming into governance, incentives, and value chain relationships. Ben also reflects on his own background in conventional agriculture and food manufacturing, and how those experiences shaped his conviction that business must move beyond sustainability toward systems that actively improve over time. Together, the episode offers a pragmatic blueprint for how regeneration can be embedded into how companies operate, grow, and lead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    30 min
  • Regenerating Forests and Farms: Conservation Finance with Paul Young of Conservation Resources

    Regenerating Forests and Farms: Conservation Finance with Paul Young of Conservation Resources
    Dec 16 2025
    In this episode of Journey to Regeneration, Chris Marquis talks with Paul Young, CEO of Conservation Resources, about what it means to treat forests and farms as living systems rather than extractive assets. Drawing on his background in timber and alternative investments, Paul explains how Conservation Resources built a model that partners with conservation groups and ecologists to meet return targets while protecting high-value habitats. The conversation then widens to regenerative agriculture, native pollinators, and why healthier ecosystems become lower-risk, higher-value assets over time. Paul also shares his view on soil carbon and emerging biodiversity credits, the role of smart policy in making nature investable, and why, even with high tech advances like GIS, drones, and traceability tools, he still prioritizes “natural intelligence” in the field to generate hard evidence that regeneration is simply a better business model.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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    33 min