Simple Mills Founder Katlin Smith Is Advocating for a Healthier Planet and Better Food System—One Box of Crackers at a Time

It was about a decade ago when Katlin Smith remembers not feeling her best. At the time she was a management consultant at Deloitte, working long hours and making frequent business trips. “I was certainly eating a lot of food on the road, eating out at restaurants quite frequently, probably not getting enough sleep,” she says. She wanted to figure out how she could feel better—so she took a hard look at her diet and took out all the processed foods and sugar. The result was life-changing.

For many, that change would stop there. But for Smith, it resulted in her founding Simple Mills, a food company focused on clean, nutritious, whole ingredients. Simple Mills offers crackers, baked goods mixes, and other shelf goods that boast ingredients lists you can pronounce. Things like almonds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and cauliflower get top billing.

Recently, Eva Yazhari and Ed Stevens caught with Smith to talk about her business—which has products now in more than 27,000 stores nation-wide—and how caring for how our food is grown, and our soil, is reflective of caring for our wellbeing at-large. “As I cleaned up my diet, I realized so many other effects that has as well and wanted to positively impact what people are eating,” she says.

Editor’s note: This conversation has been slightly edited and condensed. To listen to the complete original version, visit The Beyond Capital Podcast.

A Conversation with Katlin Smith of Simple Mills

What does clean food mean to you?

The way that we think about clean eating is around real food. We make baking mixes, we make crackers, we make cookies. Out of the Simple Mills whole food ingredients, things like almonds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, we recently came out with crackers where the number one ingredient is vegetables. So it's sweet potato and parsnip and celery root. So clean food is thinking about the purpose of food and making sure that everything we put in our products is purposeful and brings vitamins, minerals, protein that your body needs to the table instead of the fillers or things that we want to be eating less of.

You've grown this company a greal deal, which means you’ve have to have been a good manager and a good leader. How do you see those two things as being different from one another?

One of the big things I've learned and building this company is just how different than needs are for the company at different stages of the business. At times, the company needs you to be a great manager and a great executer and making sure that all of the little things are getting done. Other times, it needs you to be a great leader: someone who's inspiring building other leaders in your organization and motivating others. And it really depends based on the size and scale of the business. Today, we're probably around 80 people and my has shifted much more onto the leadership end. I focus quite a bit on communicating and making sure that the communication is clear across our team. In the earlier days, I really was thinking about, okay, how do we just get from point A to point B, how do we get this trade show executed? How do we make sure that that we have a manufacturer to make this product. As an entrepreneur, you shift quite quickly from being the one who does everything to the one who is helping other people do things and make sure that they have what they need to succeed.

How would your people describe your leadership style?

I'm fortunate to be surrounded by a highly qualified, smart, experienced leadership team at this stage. I think that's part of the key to the leadership style that I'm about to outline is hiring people that you trust to make great decisions and to represent the business well. Once you hire people like that, it's really about getting things out of their way, and making sure that they have what they need to succeed.

Social impact side requires its own kind of leadership skills or skills to lead a socially impactful company. What do you view the impact of Simple Mills to be?

I think about two things. When I think about our impact, I think about us first advancing the holistic health of the people on this planet, as well as the planet itself. And we do that by changing the food that people eat and helping to influence the way that that food is grown. I really want us to impact all ends of the food chain. If you think about it, it's how the food is growing in the soil that positively impact the farmers who are growing the food, as well as what is actually going in people's bodies. And that's been something I've been excited to watch over time.

When I started this company, the baking mix category had sugar as, oftentimes, the number one ingredient in the products. And even thinking about that today, nine years later, is kind of crazy to think that that was normal. And I tell our team often that we help change that expectation by starting the conversation about the amount of sugar that's in our in our food and the sources of those sweeteners and the impact that has on our bodies.

I think part of our job is to really lift the standards of what people are eating and what they expect from their food. I really believe that a rising tide raises all boats. And the next chapter that I see us embarking on is doing more to advance the way that our food is grown. So our food system and our agriculture system has the opportunity to have a really positive impact on our planetary health to sequester carbon to improve the soil health and to improve the health of our farming communities. As a company that procures a lot of ingredients and a lot of crops, we have the opportunity to shape that. We’ve partnered with several farmers across the Midwest to use regenerative agriculture principles in their growing techniques and provided them with financial incentives with crop purchase guarantees to help de-risk some of that transition. And we [recently came] out with our first organic cracker focused on advancing regenerative agriculture.

How do you navigate kind of those tensions of being a next generation food company and, and living in and working in an environment where you are dealing with big food lobbies and food giants?

We’re fortunate to exist in a time when consumers are valuing what we bring to the table. And they're valuing the health impact of the ingredients. For example, as quite important in their purchase decision, they are prioritizing, eating less sugar, they're also prioritizing the planet impact in their purchasing decisions. And this is something that wasn't as true 10, 20 30 years ago, as it is today. And as a result, it's really paved the road created a path for for companies like mine, where we can't build an alternate model and create a profitable high growth company in this space.

How do your employees fit into the equation?

They really care about our mission. It's something that we screen for and look for as we hire people onto our team, because it also influences what products we develop and the decisions we make. The other side of that, too, is really the cultural aspect of how do you think about the impact you have on your on your team. I met our leadership coach when we had probably three team members. She has brought the question of culture to me since a very, very young starting age of the company. Throughout our growth, we’ve thought about: What impact did these decisions have on our team? How do we help our team balance both the work and their home lives? And how do we how do we leave them better than we found them?

What do the next 10 years has in store?

We see a huge amount of opportunity and other categories. So expanding beyond the baking mixes, the crackers, and the cookies, I think there's many aisles in the grocery store where people are hungry for real food, and where we can help make it easier and also make it tastes better to eat real food. And then the farming space. Not just the partnerships with the farmers, but also working through some of these complex supply chains that that you see internationally. Working to clarify those and working directly with the communities, for example, that are making coconut sugar that are making cassava and helping enrich those communities.

As a leader who is blazing the trail in her industry, what advice would you give to young leaders and founders?

I think they must stay hungry for feedback and open to change. I've changed so much since I started this business because it's what the business needed. I also learned some of the things I was doing were not effective, whether or not effective for the time or not effective in general. And feedback can be really valuable. And so the way that you receive it is really important because it determines how often people give you feedback. Growing a company requires a lot of continuous adaptation.

To learn more about Katlin Smith and Simple Mills, visit simplemills.com.

 
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