The first step toward building a future is realizing the story of your past. I have heard this often across different industries, from artist and academic to tech innovators. We may not all end up where the tale of our lives took root, but sometimes the wrench in the machine is the gift we did not know we were waiting for.
When Robyn O'Brien told me how her ife took a turn, I was both amazed at where she had been, at aloss for what her family went through, and inspired by the way she saw potential tragedy as a beacon of not only hope, but direction.
“When my youngest was almost one, she had an allergic reaction to something in the food she was eating. Suddenly, all this amazing education and academic knowledge that I had when I worked in finance and the corporate world left me feeling like I had no idea what I was going to do now to protect my child. It was very eye-opening and it felt like it cut me down at the knees,” Robyn tellsme. “I realized there was a big gap in what I knew as a mother and my ability to protect my child.”
The experience was one that sent a cascade of events into action. Robyn started asking questions to anyone who would listen and reached out to different organizations for the answers she could not seem to find. Some were able to shed light on her fears, confusion, and questions, and some became very territorial, she shares. But, nowhere could she find a central source that talked about safety in the food chain in the way she wanted to understand it.
It is not just parents that need access to information, it is everyone who wants to be informed, especially those who are not making the food choices themselves quite yet. We are teaching children how to eat, shop, and decide on what to put into their bodies.
“If a child was diagnosed with diabetes, you’d get information. You wouldn’t have to pay a membership fee,” she reflects.“But, at the end of the day, sickness is a business for many.”
Robyn went on to start the non-profit AllergyKids in an effort to answer her own questions and, by extension, many others’ as well.
“The goal of this non-profit was to help families get basic information about food allergies that they could share with caregivers or preschools. At that point, in 2006, it was still one of those conditions where people rolled their eyes and would say that your child was simply sensitive,” she says.
All these paths led Robyn to the one that would help shape a new route for her passion: to impact the health of our world’s food supply chain.
Robyn is now a global speaker, bestselling author, researcher, and passionate produce lover, leading a powerful force that is guiding a food awakening among consumers, corporations, and political leaders as she seeks to rally support around creating a more secure and smarter food system. The niche she further occupies in our industry, one which aligns with the goals of many business owners is in her role as Co-Founder and Director of Partnerships for rePlant Capital, a company created with Co-Founders Don Shaffer and Dave Haynes. rePlant Capital is an impact investment firm deploying integrated capital from soil to shelf in order to support American farmers and reverse climate change.
The rePlant team is launching a Soil Fund. The vision includes providing scalable, innovative financing to farmers who want to convert to organic and/ or regenerative practices—practices that both build soil health and meet the demands of 21st-century food companies and consumers.
Before her days of helping growers build a better food supply chain and foundational practices that led to organic growth, she was at the top of her finance game having been recruited by institutions like Enron and the oil and gas industry. Robyn was a founding team member of AIM/Invesco’s first hedge fund of 100 million-plus dollars and a team member on its 20-billiondollar Constellation Fund. Robyn was also an advisor to Paul Hawken’s Drawdown (published in April 2017) and has advised startups, banks, and multinationals, while working with global CEOs and management teams in the food industry. Today, she is also the Founder of Do Good, a strategic advisory firm, and AllergyKids Foundation, which serves the one in three children with allergies, asthma, ADHD, and autism
Oh, how the book can turn the page for you. But this page was truly written for Robyn.
“It is my goal to change the way people think about food. We need to focus on restoring the health of American families and the American farm economy. But you can’t fix a broken food system with a broken financial system. All of the initiatives and the work that I put my passion behind align with the changing needs of American families, farmers, and our food system,” Robyn says. “The state of today’s consumer knowledge around food and their access to healthy options is critical to building a healthy food economy. Engaging with the fresh produce industry creates the perfect opportunity for us to discuss what initiatives we can create to impact the supply chain and its far-reaching potential with the consumer.”
rePlant Capital has cast its net far and wide into the upper echelon of visionaries to build its strong and diverse member mix. From humanitarian pacesetters and private equity gurus to financial and tech luminaries, the rePlant team offers incredible expertise with philanthropic capital that the company desires to bring to the supply chain and challenge change to take place.
“Only about one percent of our farmland is organic, yet everybody is wanting organic. What does this amount to? A massive supply chain issue,” Robyn tells me. “And for us, we recognize that not only is it going to help growers, retailers, and all of these different players in the industry impact the supply chain, but expand the supply chain quicker with access to a lower cost of capital.”
Another huge part of the vision behind rePlant is to build soil health—help it become more robust, a better resource, and a better tool for capturing carbon. The company is helping to convert the supply chain so that the industry, as it tries to grow organic, can have access to more affordable options here locally in the U.S., to double-down on what Robyn mentions.
“By investing in organic and building soil health, we are able to play a role in really tackling the climate challenges that so many of us are facing. Healthy soil serves as a powerful carbon sink with its ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere. Our goal has a wholistic approach as we can impact food from the soil all the way to—fingers-crossed— shelf-facing consumer packaged goods (CPG) product,” she shares. “As you go from a conventional operating system full of all these AgChem products to regenerative organic, you’re building soil health. And we can see that in the microbiome of the soil. We can see that in the nutrients. And we realized that if you could measure that, and tie the loan structure to soil health, you could create a real incentive for a farmer to convert. So, that’s what we’ve been able to do. The loans are then tied to soil health. The stronger those metrics are for soil health, the lower the cost of capital. We work with third party technical assistance partners to help capture the metrics. For us, we felt that it was really important to align incentives, and I don’t think anyone’s ever really done that—to align the capital incentives with soil health, success, and the outcome of the farmer. For the consumer to win, the farmer has to win, and that requires healthy soil.”
“It is my goal to change the way people think about food. We need to focus on restoring the health of American families and the American farm economy.”
-Robyn O'Brien
From what Robyn tells me, a lot of the conversations with farmers begin like this: Robyn, I don’t have the right relationships to convert from conventional to organic. I don’t have the expertise. I see my friends or the guy down the road growing organic or growing sustainably, but I really don’t know where to start.
Robyn realized that not only could the team offer this lower cost of capital because of its philanthropic dollars, but they could change the way the conversation happens around business relationships.
“We are not running our operation like a Wall Street company, meaning that our philanthropic investments are not demanding profit, profit, profit. Companies will have way less pressure on them to drive these quarterly returns and can instead focus on the growing at hand,” Robyn notes. “One of the most important pieces is the 20 years I’ve had with the food industry and the relationships there, which have enabled me to go back to the CPG companies— companies like Danone, or Applegate, or General Mills—and say, ‘Look, we know that you guys are looking to tap into a greater supply chain for regenerative and organic. Let’s work together to address this bottleneck. Come in as a guaranteed buyer for the farmer to mitigate his or her risk while we provide that low cost of capital on the front end.’”
Playing this out from the soil to the shelf is not the only expanse that Robyn envisions covering. For her, it is important for the growers they work with to see down the legacy line and have the ability to build a succession plan. The older generation is realizing it has to start learning about regenerative organic practices if it wants the younger generation to engage. It is a seed we plant that will not only be sown tomorrow, but for decades and families to come.
Robyn’s vision is a complex and multifaceted approach, with hurdles and risks inherent to any dream and to any story that is determined to affect change—it requires teamwork.
But words like multifaceted and complex are words I love. They have layers and muscle, are a beacon for the determined, and describe adaptability and infinite possibilities. The goal is to find a person to own such words and infuse them with passion. To plant a seed and help it grow.
Robyn is that rare breed of animal, with seed in hand and a heart to help plant the evolution. Complex, multifaceted, passionate, and all. 
