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As wars continue to rage in different parts of the world, particularly between Israel and Palestine, achieving peace seems to be an impossibility. But despite the chaotic situations across the globe, there is always some way to push for a peaceful agenda – even if the main weapon is only regenerative food. Adam Hiner, co-founder of PACHA, returns to share how their business scaling efforts have transformed into using food as a force to promote peace. He joins Corinna Bellizzi to talk about his Palestinian heritage, particularly how it has influenced PACHA’s mission to continue elevating agriculture practices and forge a partnership with Sindyanna of Galilee. Adam also discusses how they continue to push the boundaries of what clean regenerative food can look like while committing to organic sourcing, compostable packaging, and farmer partnerships.

About Adam Hiner

Adam Hiner is a food entrepreneur and regenerative food systems advocate with deep roots in values-based business. As the co-founder of PACHA, a company creating sprouted, sourdough buckwheat bread and tortillas, Adam is on a mission to nourish both people and planet.

His journey in food began over two decades ago with ventures like Eco-Caters (San Diego’s first organic catering company), Local Habit (an organic farm-to-table restaurant), and Boochcraft (the nation’s first high-alcohol kombucha brand). Today, Adam applies that same passion and innovation to PACHA, a company he co-founded with his wife Maddie to bring clean, organic, allergen-free food to a growing audience.

Adam is also proudly Palestinian. His grandparents immigrated from Ramallah, and this heritage has guided PACHA’s recent collaboration with Sindyanna of Galilee, a female-led nonprofit that brings together Arab and Jewish women through sustainable agriculture. Together, they’ve created a limited-edition Fig & Olive “Peace Loaf” using Sindyanna’s organic olive oil, with proceeds from the release supporting Sinndyanna’s “Bees for Peace” initiative.

This biodynamic beekeeping program gets Israeli and Palestinian women working side by side to foster cross-cultural connection and ecological healing. Adam brings a rare combination of entrepreneurial savvy, cultural depth, and climate leadership to every conversation—and his story is a powerful one for audiences exploring food as a pathway to peace, justice, and regeneration.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhiner/

Guest Website: https://livepacha.com

Guest Social:

https://www.instagram.com/livepacha

https://www.pinterest.com/live_pacha

Show Notes:

• 03:54 – Looking Back To Adam’s Career Journey
• 08:58 – Scaling The Business And Expanding Market Avenues
• 14:25 – Improving Durability While Maintaining A Clean Label Standard
• 20:08 – Regenerative Agriculture A Business Model
• 23:01 – Committing To Zero Biofuel-Based Plastic For Food Packaging
• 25:25 – How Adam’s Palestinian Heritage Shaped His Relationship With Food
• 30:51 – Adam’s Partnership With Sindyanna And Bees For Peace
• 38:14 – How To Educate The Public About Regeneration And Sustainability
• 43:09 – How Soil Health Impacts The Quality Of Our Food
• 48:45 – PACHA’s Mission To Make Regeneration The Norm
• 52:27 – Take More Time To Pause And Listen To Your Heart
• 54:56 – Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words

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Food As A Force For Peace: Regeneration, Heritage & The PACHA Story With Adam Hiner

Welcome, Regenerators. Each episode, we explore topics of sustainability and regenerative thinking through conversations with leaders that are working to build a healthier future for people and planet. If you caught my earlier conversation with Maddie Hamann, you already know the story behind PACHA. It’s a company that’s reimagining bread through regenerative agriculture and sprouted sourdough buckwheat. Their story is accelerating. PACHA has expanded into roughly 250 Target stores out on the West Coast.

They earned recognition as a NEXTY Awards Finalist. They continue to push the boundaries of what clean regenerative food can look like. We’re going to go deeper into the entrepreneurial journey, the cultural roots, and the vision behind it all. My guest is Adam Hiner, co-founder of PACHA. Adam is a seasoned food entrepreneur, having founded ventures like EcoCaters, Local Habit, and Boochcraft, all grounded in values-based business and sustainability.

What makes Adam’s story especially powerful is how his Palestinian heritage and lived experiences have shaped PACHA’s mission. Including their recent collaboration with Sindyanna of Galilee, something that we highlighted in our last episode. This effort supports regenerative agriculture and peace building between Arab and Jewish women.

I can’t think of a time where something like that is needed more. They are also scaling rapidly, growing regenerative acreage by 50% year over year while maintaining a commitment to organic sourcing, compostable packaging, and farmer partnerships. In short, there’s much to tell. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Looking Back To Adam’s Career Journey

I have highlighted quite a bit of the updates in our introduction here. I would love for you to share where you are, how far you’ve come, and what you see as being your primary focus.

This is a big pivotal time for us at PACHA. We did $5 million in revenue in 2025. We’re focused on expanding retail distribution through more stores, more places where people can find us. We’re less focused on our direct-to-consumer business. Which was what got us going in the first place and where we built the business. In addition to that, we’re focused on the team collectively. We have a lot of employees. We have about 25 employees. Building a structure and a solid foundation with our team, understanding the mission, and the purpose.

One of our big focuses is the Purpose Pledge. We took that commitment. We want the Purpose Pledge. The commitments within the Purpose Pledge to be understood and actualized by the entire team. Not just some top-down directive of a bunch of things that need to be done. I want everyone to take ownership of that. We’re just in the early stages there. That’s exciting for us.

You have built multiple mission-driven businesses. This Purpose Pledge is just leaning into that even further. What first drew you into food as a particular vehicle for impact?

That’s a good question. I was in the mortgage industry in 2007-2008 at the time of the crash in California, the whole country. I didn’t think I was going to leave that industry until that crash happened. It became clear to me that I wasn’t doing something that I was passionate about. The whole time, while learning the ropes there and learning a lot about business, finance and marketing. I was becoming very interested in food and eating organic.

It’s the move from the East Coast to California, shopping at farmers markets and becoming passionate about organic food. When that crash happened, it was a wake-up moment for me of thinking maybe I should do something different. I decided to do business to work on some business consulting. The first person I spoke with was a friend of mine named Nick Brune, who became my business partner in EcoCaters.

He was looking to grow his catering company. It was a little small niche company in LA. After a few conversations, we just immediately decided to partner up and grow through catering in all of Southern California. We had the same values. Everything was all organic and made from scratch. It was just clear that was my path. I never looked back. Once I started doing food for my work, it was clear that was what I would always do.

Everyone has to eat. The impact you can have can be quite incredible if you get everything dialed in.

Exactly.

I wonder what your entrepreneurship at Boochcraft taught you about scaling a values-based organization and if you might share some insights from that.

Boochcraft was fun. It was my first foray into manufacturing. I had been in service-based food businesses before. It felt hard to make a big impact there. We were supporting local farmers and making everything from scratch. It was just so localized. It was like the little footprint of the restaurant or the catering company and the events. We felt like pretty small fish. When we got into manufacturing with Boochcraft, I felt like, “We’re going to be big.”

As we started to scale, I started to see. We’re going to be buying millions of pounds of grapefruits this year. That’s the plan. I just realized the scale of this thing. We can make a difference here. We cannot just buy organic produce. Hopefully, we can buy regenerative produce. This was right at the beginning when even regenerative certifications didn’t even exist at this point. We were going out, talking to farmers, asking them about their practices and doing our best to ship the supply chain.

Even at Boochcraft, I felt like we were doing a great job and doing what we could. We also had gotten to a certain scale with some of the produce where it was just like millions of pounds of regenerative grapefruit. The supply chain just wasn’t even there at Boochcraft for some of these fruits that we were buying. We were doing everything we could. We were also working with the supply chain where it was. Not to jump ahead, but that’s what was exciting about PACHA when we founded PACHA.

Scaling The Business And Expanding Market Avenues

I can see so many through lines. Even just when you decide, for instance, that you’re going to make all your own bread. As I understand PACHA, when you got started, it was for yourselves, your community at first and then started to expand out from that. Even when you start just buying flour and making bread for your entire family or something along those lines. You realize pretty quickly how much you go through.

You start to think about how that scales to serve multiple households, a region. You’re working to bring bread to Target stores over the entire Western Coast. That’s a lot of business, a lot of through points. A lot of getting inventory into hands and ensuring that your product remains safe and fresh and all of that. Meanwhile, you’re scaling your business in other avenues as well. Shifting from being more direct to consumer to having to manage these multiple distribution sites. How do you feel like that’s going? What excites you the most about it?

We’re doing a good job for where we’re at. We’re at a time where we’re starting to refine things. We’re seeing where there was maybe some cracks in the foundation. We were scaling so fast, growing, and trying to figure out. Throwing things at the wall and just trying to figure out what was going to stick. It feels like we have our path.

We’re getting clear on our message. We’ve gotten so much customer feedback about why customers love our product. We’re getting clear on that piece. We’re also starting to get clear with where we need to grow up a little bit. Become more efficient and become a business that’s standing on their own two feet. Being able to carve out our path.

I’m thinking specifically about the fact that you’re in so many different distribution sites. You might have to address things like product shelf life. Ensure that is scaling with your business and that you’re not going to have to deal with so much spoilage. I wondered if you had to change the formulas at all to help it be more shelf stable or if you’ve been able to retain some of that product integrity.

With our original product lines, luckily and unlikely, they’re frozen all the way through distribution. The bread and the English muffins, generally, we don’t have to worry about shelf life. The tortillas are a little bit of a new foray and that they’re being slacked out into the refrigerator. We’re going to start seeing like, “How are we doing with shelf life?” the name, because they’re slacked out at the grocery store when they get to the final point of sale.

The main piece there is velocity. They put them on the shelf in the refrigerator. There’s a clock that starts right then. If they’re not moving off the shelf, then we’re going to see spoilage. That’s where we have to step up and make sure that we’re not just opening up a bunch of stores. We’re supporting those stores. We’re doing the right promotions. We’re getting them out into the customer’s hands. We’re educating people through different ways, in-person with sampling maybe, as well as a lot of digital stuff and promotions.

We’re excited to grow the tortilla line. We’re excited about that line. There’s just a lot of white space in that category. It’s just a good quality tortilla that doesn’t fall apart. We did shift our recipe after launching the tortillas. We added a third ingredient into the tortillas to make them more pliable and more durable. We’re in love with them. They’re so good.

I’ve tried your earlier iteration. I don’t think I’ve had the most recent but I loved it, too. It became my favorite tortilla to make a chicken quesadilla. I just love the flavor profile. I like making my tortillas a little crispy on the edges. I felt like it was incredible. I got to try that before my interview with Maddie Hamann. You guys sent me some bread.

I had the seasonal flavor as well which was like a pumpkin. I don’t know if you do that one year-round. I got to experiment with them with my kids. One of the things I think is challenging in certain stores is a lot of times their tortillas are not necessarily in a refrigerated space. They might just be on shelving. Are you having to tackle that in any unique ways that you care to share?

For the most part, Siete has paved the way for the refrigerated tortilla. Siete is our biggest competitor and also, they’ve paved the way for our growth. There’s a few stores here and there that will say, “We don’t have refrigerated tortillas. We only have ambient.” That’s not the store for us. Any store that has Siete either has them in the fridge or the freezer. The freezer’s not ideal. We would prefer them in the fridge just because it gets more movement. People understand that it needs to be stored in the fridge at home, too. It’s easier to eat from the fridge.

Improving Durability While Maintaining A Clean Label Standard

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve seen about gluten-free products has been that they’re often ultra-processed. We understand on the natural side of the industry that it’s best to move the ultra-processed foods out of your diet. How did you improve the durability while staying true to a clean label standard with this tortilla?

That’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that. It opens up a bigger conversation too about ultra-processed foods which we don’t have to go too deep there. It’s a huge topic. There’s a new ultra-processed food certification coming out from the people that brought you the non-GMO certification. It was everything everyone was talking about at Expo West like, “Ultra-process, ultra product.”

I just saw it everywhere. It’s obviously clear that people are starting to realize the importance of that which is good. Our products are made from whole ingredients. We don’t get lab synthesized product ingredients and stuff them into our products. Buckwheat and sea salt was our original recipe. We’ve added some seeds to that with our multi seed.

Funny enough, the story is related to a dinner that I cook. It’s a peace stint for Palestine and Israel. I cook it every year at the Ecology Center with my good brother and chef and friend, Niv, who’s from Israel. I’m from Palestine. We come together and we cook a dinner. We just celebrate each other’s heritage. We do the dinner in the name of peace. It’s beautiful.

I was preparing for that dinner and I was making baklava. I wanted to make gluten-free baklava so I didn’t have to make two different baklavas for the whole event. I was like, “I’m going to make gluten-free baklava.” I got this recipe online. I was looking at different recipes. I saw a recipe that used psyllium husk. I started experimenting with psyllium husk and it was amazing.

I could get thin sheets of baklava dough using the psyllium husk with a gluten-free flour bun. At some point when I was making the experiment, I thought to myself. We were having problems with the tortillas. They were sticking. They were falling apart. My sales guy was calling me and was like, “We got to do something about this.” I had a wake-up moment where I was messing with the psyllium husk. I was like, “psyllium husk. We need to add psyllium husk.”

It’s a great fiber source. If you think about it, anytime you put it in a beverage, it gets goopy and gelatinous. Everything sticks together. It makes sense that it would be a good partner for that.

It soaks up all the water. It creates a gel form. Finding the right amount of psyllium husk is important. The texture is not great if you don’t know the right amount. I knew right away. I was like, “It’s going to work. This is going to be great. The first time I tried it, it was amazing. I called my wife Maddie and our sales guy. I was like, “Psyllium husk, it works.” As you said, it’s a great fiber source. We use whole psyllium husks.

When you look at ultra-processed foods, it’s interesting that the research is showing that every time you do a processing step, you degrade the quality. Maddie knows better some of the information because she was talking to someone about this. She’s relaying to me. Every time you do a processing step, you add more of a certain chemical or compound. That just keeps degrading the quality of the product and the health of the product.

Research shows that every time you do a processing step, you degrade the quality of the food.

Even taking whole psyllium husk and turning that into a powder Although, that might be a minute process step, it is a processing step. We’re using whole psyllium husk. It’s very minimally processed. We’re adding that to our original recipe with buckwheat and salt. We’re still going through the sprouting process with the buckwheat and the fermentation process. The psyllium husk is being fermented with the buckwheat. The whole thing is being fermented altogether.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking with doctors who work in this space of whole foods. No processed anything and all plant-based. No oil even, because they consider even olive oil to be a highly processed food. They then want to lead people to consume nuts and seeds and things. If you wanted to put that in a blender with some orange juice to make a salad dressing, fine.

You’re not going to the olive oil aisle in your grocery store and buying something like that. They’re able to demonstrate by shifting people to everything being completely homemade. Transform people’s health. Erase all of their needs for medicines. You see them shift from having diabetes and all these other health complaints to being a healthy whole person again.

It’s focusing on micronutrients and getting everything fresh. Which makes sense but it’s hard to live this way. That’s part of why I think it’s so important that companies like yours are focused on building products that are accessible, that are minimally processed. You make a bread. You could call that a process. You’ve got a few key ingredients. They’re all very recognizable.

Regenerative Agriculture A Business Model

I love that you’re tied in with the story of regeneration. Regenerative agriculture as a business model is something we’ve talked about quite a bit on this show. Many brands talk about regeneration without explicitly defining regenerative practices at every stage in their business supply chain. What does your practice look like?

With regenerative products, specifically our ingredients that we bring in. We bring in very few ingredients. Which is also a benefit of our model of simple small ingredient lists. We get the focus. Primarily, we bring in a lot of buckwheat. We have some other ingredients. We have some seeds. We’re focused on the buckwheat supply chain and sourcing. We source 100% regenerative, verified buckwheat through soil carbon initiative. We’re sourcing from about seven farms. That number is growing as we scale our buckwheat footprint.

Eventually, we are going to turn our sites to some of the other ingredients. Part of the Purpose Pledge process is we will turn our sites to some of the other ingredients. We’re already sourcing above the threshold for being certified. We’re already at the top tier, being probably above 80% of our supply chain as far as ingredients goes is coming as buckwheat. We’re already above that threshold of where we need to be. We can continue to improve.

That’s our main focus. We’re making sure that the buckwheat is intact, the supply chain. That we’re getting it from domestic US farms and that it’s verified regenerative. We’re working with one farmer. Maddie already explained this probably in the last interview. If people missed that one, we source from one farmer.

He goes out and he contracts with the other farmers. We just contracted with him for this coming growing season. We’re giving him our number for 2027. They plant it in April and then they harvest in October. That’s the buckwheat that we’ll be using in 2027. We have to be forward-thinking, looking at our business model and our projections and understanding where we’re going.

What retailers are you going to approach when.

He’s like, “How much do need next year?” I’m like, “Let me throw a dart out. This is the low number. This is the high number.” He’s like, “That’s a big range.” That’s where having long standing relationships with people that they care about what we’re doing. We’re not just another client number that’s like, “You need to tell me the exact number. If you don’t hit it, there’s going to be these penalties.” John, our farmer and our supplier, is just willing to work with us. If we need a little extra, he can go find it because he’s got other customers that need buckwheat. If we have too much, then he’ll push it to the next year. He helps us in that regard.

Committing To Zero Biofuel-Based Plastic For Food Packaging

I know that from an environmental stewardship perspective. You’re already doing a lot beyond ingredients. I have this statistic. I’m not sure if this is the most current. You’ve prevented about 850,000 plastic bags and clips from entering landfills through your compostable packaging. Even the clips that go on the ends of the bread are made of paper. Where are you and how do you see this growing?

I don’t have that number yet. That sounds like a 2025 number, potentially.

You were nearing a million.

We’re probably pretty close to a million at this point, I would say, if based on that number. I’ll tell you what. It doesn’t make our life any easier, using the paper clips, and the compostable bags. Our options for suppliers are very narrow. We have to get our stuff made in very specific factories that deal with these home compostable plastics. The options for clipping machines on the bags and ways that they clip is just a lot more. We have a lot less options. It becomes challenging but we are committed to using zero biofuel-based plastic in our packaging.

I love that commitment. I understand too. Those clip strings that typically the plastic clips go into are almost in an automation arm. It’s not like something people are manually doing. This means that you have to get something that fits in the same machinery. That can be used that way. It’s innovative. I haven’t seen a lot of that at other organizations, even in the bread space. It seems like it would be something that would be loved by more companies.

Our hope is that we will motivate other bread companies to do what we’re doing. We don’t want to be on an island by ourselves with compostable packaging and paper clips. We would love it if that just became the norm. That’s what we were doing in the industry. We’re hoping that our movement in that direction will motivate others to do so.

How Adam’s Palestinian Heritage Shaped His Relationship With Food

I’d like to talk a bit about food, identity and your cultural heritage. You shared that your grandparents immigrated from Ramallah. How has your Palestinian heritage shaped your relationship to food and the initiatives that you have underway?

I would say that early on my Tete and Jido, which is Arabic for grandma and grandpa, were in the kitchen cooking all the time. From an early time in my life, all I can remember every time I was at their house. They were in Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia. I was in Richmond, which is about two hours south. Every time we would go up and stay with them for a weekend or a week or whatever.

We went and visited quite a bit and spent a lot of time with that family. Tete, her entire family came over from Ramallah when there was war breaking out. They all immigrated over here. All of her siblings were there and all of our cousins. We had a big family there. We got together a lot. We celebrated with food. I might be biased, but my Tete’s cooking was better than all the other relatives. It was a thing in the family. Everyone knew that Tete’s cooking was the best.

I was lucky in that regard. My grandfather Jido’s cooking was also incredible, even though he wasn’t doing as much as Tete. Every time I’d come in the kitchen, they would be cooking. They were always making everything 100% from scratch. The grape leaves, the warak enab, were being rolled. She had a grape vine outside. She would pick the leaves and roll the grape leaves. She’d be in there making baklava and brushing the dough, rolling out the dough from scratch. Everything was made from scratch.

That was something that at the time, I don’t know that I appreciated that fact. I know I appreciate it once I got to the food industry and I started doing that. I understood why she was doing that. It’s because of the quality that comes from that. Her attention, her care for everything. When we went grocery shopping, she would go through the grocery store. She would inspect every piece of every vegetable, every fruit. She would look at them. She would put some of them down because they weren’t perfect. She’d pick all the best ones.

She’d go to the butcher. Even if it wasn’t a butcher, even just a regular grocery store. She’d just grab the best steak she could find. She’d take it into the butcher. Ask him to grind it for her ground meat rather than taking the ground meat that was sitting in the package for a few days. I remember thinking as when I was younger like, “Oh my gosh, Tete. What are you doing? This is embarrassing that you’re asking him to do this.”

It comes from the cultural heritage though because that would be the norm where she was from.

She just cares so much about quality. That was the number one thing that came through in my heritage. It was just that care for quality. What’s happening in Palestine and Israel is heartbreaking. Anyone with any sense can see that that shouldn’t be. There should be peace there. We shouldn’t be fighting the way that we’re fighting.

We’ll do anything we can to support peace. That’s not our major initiative but in some ways, regenerative agriculture and peace are linked. They can’t be taken apart. With the Purpose Pledge, one of the big pieces is fair wages. Fair wages and regenerative agriculture can’t be taken apart. We need those things to be together. The same goes for peace and regenerative agriculture.

I’m just reminded so much of how I was raised too. I have a mother who was very fond of cooking. We would always go to the grocery store and select the ripest, freshest looking food. It would dictate what we would cook that week. This is part and parcel of the reason that I can never order groceries online and have them delivered to my home.

I agree with that.

The bananas aren’t the right ripeness. They picked cucumber but this cucumber doesn’t look super fresh. I might’ve chosen a different vegetable had I been there in person. You’d change what you’re buying based on what looks the best and perhaps also what you already have at home. Who can make those decisions for you?

The primary difference between how we do food in America and how we do food in Europe or elsewhere in the world. Even heading out to Israel is this close connection with food, with how you interface with it, where you’ll shop for it. The relationship with the butcher or the boulangerie or something to this effect.

Adam’s Partnership With Sindyanna And Bees For Peace

It’s more close and less divorced than we are from just picking our meats out of a refrigerator with plastic sheeting over it. It’s how we do things here. I got to dive into this a bit before and learning about the partnership with Sindyanna of Galilee. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about how this came to be. If there’s any recent developments, Fig & Olive PEACE Loaf, and things along those lines.

This manifested in a few different ways. The relationship with Sindyanna was through my good friend, Niv, who I cooked that dinner with. I had the idea to make a fig and olive PEACE loaf for Palestine and Israel. I was racking my brain to think, “What can we do? What can we do that can make any difference over there.”

He’s like, “We can find a good organization. We can send some money, some resources to put some resources in the hands of people that are doing good work over there to create peace and to support peace.” The beauty was that we found Sindyanna. I was looking for ingredients. I was also looking for a nonprofit partner. In Sindyanna, we found both.

We got to source some of our ingredients for the loaf. The olive oil and the za’atar for the loaf came from Sindyanna. We got to support an organization that was supporting peace and collaboration with the Israeli and Palestinian women. We supported a beekeeping project where they brought the women together and taught them beekeeping in an effort to foster more collaboration.

Already the women there in the organization are working together and harvesting olives, making a za’atar, and doing everything with all the products that they make. It’s a beautiful partnership. We don’t have a plan yet for 2026 for what we’re going to do. We’ll pick a month. We’ll pick a recipe. We’ll do something. We haven’t looked that far out yet. It will probably be towards later of 2026.

The amount of unrest in that region is just sad. I have friends who are there as well who live in Israel. It’s interesting to get the behind-the-lines perspective that we’re not seeing. We don’t see through media. We get this perspective. It’s very Israel versus, whether it be Gaza or Libya. These people must just all hate each other.

That’s not the truth. There are so many people who have been struggling for years wanting peace to thrive. They are wanting to have more stability. They’re essentially living in a war zone. They are struggling. That’s just it. They are emotionally wanting things to be over, to extend an olive branch in some way, to have some mending. That keeps getting kicked further down the road. More people want peace than is coming through.

What I find is just exuding the vibration of peace. It’s probably the most important thing we can do, holding the vibration of peace. We sing song circles with peace songs. We’re sending out the vibration of peace. I was just thinking of this. It’s like we’re at war with each other. We’re at war with the pests. We’re at war with the weeds. This idea that we should just kill the thing that’s in our way rather than figure out the way to live in harmony with it. It’s time to shift that.

The way we shift it, that I feel we shifted it, is holding the vibration of peace. That vibration is contagious. More and more people can hold that together and then we can grow. When we do that dinner, it’s palpable. When we’re all holding that peace prayer, you can feel it. I know that’s doing more than I could ever do by watching the news. Getting upset that there’s war and talking to people about how bad it is. It’s like, “Great, what are we going to do about it?” We can hold the peace vibration instead. I feel strongly that that’s the way for me.

Adam, That’s absolutely beautiful. I found myself feeling like, “What can I do for these people? How can I feel like I’m affecting change?” I spent a week of Ramadan observing the fast and just trying to hold space. Every morning with a cup of tea, I think about that more peaceful thought like, “How can I bring forward an energy that is more respectful and loving for people that are under siege?”

That’s something that we can all take part in in our own small ways. Discover something that helps you feel like you are putting that energy into the universe. That in itself will have a positive effect in some way. Talking about it, reaching across, and asking how people are doing. It’s showing that you care, sending resources if you can afford to do so. That’s critically important as well.

Efforts like this where you’re getting people to collaborate who come from disparate backgrounds is important, too. Connecting through food is incredible. Thank you. The Bees for Peace initiative is such a powerful example of regeneration beyond food, too. Can you share just a little bit more about what that collaboration is and what you plan to do in 2026 and beyond?

As I said before, we don’t have our plan for 2026. We have been in contact with Sindyanna. We’ve been focused on some big changes here, the company and the big launches. We are planning on doing something later in this year.

I think I misunderstood. I thought you were referring to the PEACE loaf.

The Bees for Peace initiative and the PEACE loaf were tied together. We haven’t figured out the next loaf, whatever that’s going be. Is it going to be a peace loaf? I don’t know. Maybe we need to keep doing a peace loaf every year until there’s peace and then we can shift somewhere else. That might be the thing. We need to figure that out. We’re going to do something. In all likelihood, we’ll continue to work with Sindyanna if we are doing a PEACE loaf. We would probably continue to foster that partnership. It feels good. They just reached out, which is funny timing, just shared their gratitude and asked if we were planning on partnering this year.

How To Educate The Public About Regeneration And Sustainability

I was hoping you could share your perspective on what it takes to educate within the category, specifically for terms like organic, regenerative, and clean label. I know regenerative has been a huge buzzword for years on the Natural Channel. I feel that people still misunderstand what it means. How are you involved in this process? Where do you see silver lining or even threat points to the initiatives?

Education is tough. It’s tough to be a leader in a new category or in a space. To your point, the consumer does not understand regenerative. They’re not willing to pay more for it. A lot of brands that we know, ourselves included, are not even putting regenerative on front of pack yet. The value proposition is not there for the consumer.

We’re doing it. I know a lot of brands that are doing regenerative. They’re sourcing regenerative and us included. We’re not leading with it in our marketing because the consumer is not there yet. They’re not making buying decisions on regenerative. It’s a nice feather in the cap but it’s not the thing. Organic is certainly important. Clean label, 100%.

People are still in the, “I’m buying for me and my family. Does it taste good? Is it good for me?” I think that’s where people are at. The things like compostable packaging and regenerative agriculture are like add-on benefits that the consumer hasn’t fully closed the loop on. We can’t separate those things. “What’s good for the planet is good for me. In the long run, I need the things that would be for the planet, too.”

With regenerative, because there’s a lot of different certifications, it’s not a fully regulated word yet. There’s a lot to be figured out there. Thank goodness for the work of the people that have launched their certifications and are putting them out there. Regenerative Organic Alliance is doing a lot of work to educate. Soil Carbon Initiative and then the other certifications, which I’m not as familiar with. Regenified and some of the other ones. They’re all out there doing the work of bringing more awareness to that.

For us, as I said, the clean label, minimal ingredients. We’re all so focused on gut health. We don’t know what that looks like yet in our communication. That’s something that we have heard from our customer. It’s important to them. That’s why they eat our bread. They’re like, “I eat your bread and it feels good in my belly. I couldn’t eat bread before. Now, I can eat this and it feels good. I don’t feel bloated.” We’re looking at ways to communicate that a bit more as well.

One of the reasons is low inflammation foods. Buckwheat doesn’t tend to create a negative reaction within the gut as much. A lot of the wheat that people are used to consuming is full of glyphosate too. I know we talk about organic and non-GMO. Many of the sourdoughs you see out there are not organic. They don’t even bear a non-GMO.

If they bear a non-GMO sticker or seal, it doesn’t mean that they’re organic. What do you do? It’s a real challenge. A lot of people are reacting to the rampant use of glyphosate in food sources. That creates other issues. Even people who are mildly gluten sensitive will have a reaction to wheat. They might not have that reaction to buckwheat at all. They wouldn’t because it’s not a gluten issue.I also agree with you with regard to the terminology. I have done my own backend research because my research, as I pursue my PhD, is focused on a lot of this regenerative messaging. How companies are bringing their entire business processes to life as regenerative organizations.

How Soil Health Impacts The Quality Of Our Food

Where the disconnect is between what they’re doing and what people understand about it. This is why I am not an advocate for abandoning sustainability language. For those that are deep in the work, they’re like, “I don’t even like the word sustainable anymore.” I want to see where they go. You have to bring the consumer along. It takes time, effort, money, energy to educate around these things. You’ve helped build multiple brands around functional living. How do you define food as medicine?

Food is medicine. It’s interesting. I’ve been diving deep into just learning about health in different ways. One of the things that I’m understanding is that minerals are so important to the way our body functions. The way our mitochondria functions and the way we create energy in our body. One of the things I’ve come to learn is that our soils are mostly depleted of copper. Which is an incredibly important mineral for our body to take in.

Most people are overloaded with iron, even though they might appear as anemic, because they don’t have enough copper. The copper drives the recycling system in the body. It’s fascinating because we can take all the supplements we want. We can do X, Y and Z. We don’t realize there just could be one crucial mineral that our body’s not getting. It’s because the soil doesn’t have it.

You can’t necessarily supplement it that easy. You can supplement it but we should be getting most of our minerals from our food, if possible. Those are the most bioavailable sources. How do we get copper in our soil? Our farmers have to be putting copper sulfate on the soil. Mostly through animals grazing, pasture-raised, the meat and dairy. It can be in vegetables too. You’re getting higher concentrations in meat and dairy if they’re pasture-raised and if there’s copper in the soil.

I see a lot of people. I’ve been one of these people that’s like, “I’m going to take every supplement because I don’t trust that my food is going to give me everything I need.” I used to be there. I’ve scaled way back. I take the only ones I think I need. Magnesium is one of those. We need to figure out how to get our medicine from our food.

We do need to figure out how to get it. A big part of that’s regenerative agriculture. A big part of that is building healthy soil, understanding how the body works, what minerals we need, and what we’re devoid in. That’s how I see it. I see that there’s an understanding piece. We didn’t used to need the understanding.

We used to eat all 100% whole food. It was all regenerative because that’s the way we farmed. We’ve gone through this industrial revolution where we use chemicals and now we have to understand what we’re doing. The understanding needs to be there because we need to be able to separate between, “This is farmed this way. That’s not medicine, but if it’s farmed this way, it is medicine.”

To your point as well, we used to have copper pipes commonly in homes. We don’t have that anymore. We have PVC pipes usually, plastic pipes, and that introduces other pollutants. My earlier point to this whole conversation around whole foods is that we need to get a wider variety of foods. We need to eat more plant foods because when you eat whole plants, you get a lot of micronutrients that you can’t supplement with in a pill.

Too many people in America assume that they need to eat meat to get the minerals when most of the minerals come from the plant-based foods that they’re consuming. The soil puts that directly into the plants. If you’re eating a wide variety of plants and eating beans and legumes and things along these lines too. You’re getting more of those mineral bases into your diet. You’ll have a healthier whole digestion because you’ll be eating a wider variety of foods. Also, eating foods that aren’t that processed like the beautiful breads you create is key, too.

To add to that, knowing how to process your foods. A lot of people have forgotten about the importance of sprouting and fermenting and those unlocking the nutrients in the food. Soaking, sprouting and fermenting are essential things for your food. Especially for seeds and grains, if you’re eating, and legumes. Always want to soak and sprout if you can.

A lot of people have forgotten how sprouting and fermenting unlock the nutrients in the food. Always want to soak and sprout if you can.

I almost exclusively now do dry beans that I soak and then will cook. You get so many more of the micronutrients present in them as well. If you’re doing canned beans. You don’t know how long that’s been sitting. It’s not necessarily the same. I’m in love with the texture that I’m able to get from a chickpea that I’ve stewed as opposed to having to be completely mush. It’s still got some tension to it. Learning a few key tricks how to use something like a slow cooker to make a stew in the winter months. You can get a lot of different foods into your diet that way. It makes for, I’d say, a visual exploration as well. It’s like bringing art into your life.

That’s super fun to experiment too.

PACHA’s Mission To Make Regeneration The Norm

I love that. I wonder if you could share what you hope PACHA will contribute to the next generation as you grow and scale your business.

I have a toddler daughter and I think about that a lot in general. What am I contributing? What is this generation leaving for the next generation? I think about that in terms of PACHA as well. My hope is that we do progress to a point where regenerative agriculture is the norm. That’s what I hope. If I could have one single pointed focus, it’s that regenerative agriculture is the norm.

Rather than 1% of farmland being organic, only 1 % is still spraying glyphosate. How do we flip that? We do it one farm at a time, one acre at a time, one consumer at a time. It’s not going to come down from a government mandate. There’s no way. That’s not the way, at least not from what I’ve seen of the government.

Not with consistency, anyway. We saw they’re going to allow us to spray PFAS on food.

It’s just so much more powerful when it comes from the people. When we decided, we were going to do something because we know that it’s what’s best for us and for the planet. That’s so much more powerful. We don’t need the government to tell us what we need to do or not. If we get together and we just understand that this is what’s needed for the next generation, for our children. If everyone understood the importance and what’s at stake for the future generations.

We do not need the government to tell us what we need to do or not. We must get together and understand what needs to be done for the next generation.

I can’t think how anyone would want to end up in a place where we can’t grow food anymore. That’s where we’re headed if we keep spraying. Back to your question, it’s just that regenerative agriculture is the norm. We don’t have to waste so much of our energy trying to fight for that. That’s just what’s happening. We can spend more time being creative, loving each other, caring for each other, and spend maybe a little less time working and a little bit more time with our families.

Hear, here to that. I completely agree. It would be lovely to be at that point. It’s hard to keep that level of hope at the same consistent spin when you see things like suddenly the Environmental Protection Agency saying it’s okay to put forever chemicals in pesticides. It just blows my mind. There’s a reason to shop organic. There’s a reason to shop regenerative organic.

Take More Time To Pause And Listen To Your Heart

If you can look for both, you’ll be better suited to keep your microbiota healthy. You won’t be ingesting some of the pesticides that could otherwise kill off the healthy microbiome in your gut. You need that to be healthy in order to absorb all the helpful nutrition in your foods in the first place. Adam, thank you so much for joining me. If you have any closing words, I’d like to offer you the floor.

First of all, my gratitude for having me here on the show. It’s been a nice conversation, feels good to share some thoughts, and hear your feedback. It just felt like a good conversation. I appreciate the work you’re doing to spread this information and taking the time. I know that this is a labor of love as well. I appreciate the work that you’re doing and getting this information out to more people.

In closing, I would offer people a practice that I would like to do more of. Take more time to be still and to breathe and to listen to your heart. Feel into what’s needed and rather than thinking about what we need to do next. I don’t think we’re going to think our way out of this conundrum that we’re in. We can feel our way out of it.

Our intuition is so much more powerful than our brain. Our heart is so much more powerful. When our brain is subservient to our heart, we’re on that journey, societally, as a human population. We’re on that journey to the heart. We’ll be so much more clear and powerful and in harmony with each other when we arrive there.

Lead with love. Thank you so much for sharing that. Not just the story of your journey, but your vision of food. Food that can nourish people, restore ecosystems, and even create pathways for peace. All of these things are interconnected. Food can be a celebration of our connection. If we get closer to that, then the journey becomes something we can look at as a celebration too. Thank you.

Thank you.

Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words

To all of you, you can find PACHA products at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and select Target stores across the West Coast. Learn more at LivePacha.com. That’s also their Instagram handle, @LivePacha. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend listening to my earlier conversation with Maddie Hamann, Breaking Bread For A Better Planet, The PACHA Story.

As a note, this season, we are proudly supporting our cause partner, Prescott College. An institution that is leading the way in sustainability education, regenerative thinking, and justice-centered learning for the next generation of changemakers. Together, we can care more. We can be better. Through the food we grow, share, and break together, we can even cultivate peace. Thank you.

Important Links

• Adam Hiner on LinkedIn
• Adam Hiner on Facebook
• Live PACHA
• Live PACHA on Instagram
• Live PACHA on TikTok
• Live PACHA on Pinterest
• EcoCaters
• Boochcraft
• Sindyanna of Galilee
• Purpose Pledge
• Nick Brune on LinkedIn
• Regenerative Organic Alliance
• Soil Carbon Initiative
• Regenified
• Breaking Bread For A Better Planet: The PACHA Story With Maddie Hamann – Previous Episode