Snacktivist founder Joni Kindwall-Moore explains why regenerative agriculture is ready for innovative technology to better connect growers with processers and new markets
Acres U.S.A. Can we start with your background?
Joni Kindwall-Moore. Sure. I grew up in a small fishing-timber-farming community in rural Oregon, rooted in that economy. But I went into the hard sciences, and then I went into healthcare until I was 40. I started Snacktivist, our first company, when I was 40. I’d always been involved in food-system activism — usually nonprofit-type roles — and I always had a very deep awareness of where food comes from. I was one of those kids who grew up with “subsistence living” activities, so it is part of my thinking. I’ve always been passionate about getting people reconnected with bioregional food systems.
My education was in ethnobotany. You take the field of botany, add some medicinal chemistry, and then a little splash of anthropology. I was documenting indigenous knowledge systems and how people use plants for food and medicine. My expertise was looking for medicinal plants that could contribute to novel therapeutics — solving for difficult-to-manage diseases.
I love science. I always consider myself a scientist at heart — but I also like people! I hated being trapped in a lab. I didn’t want to pursue my Ph.D., and a lot of the funding dried up in the nineties because of a bunch of lawsuits that changed the trajectory of the pharmaceutical research industry. So, I went into nursing for 15 years — in the ICU, the ER, and diabetes education.
We have a trillion-dollar healthcare epidemic that is largely fueled by corruptions in the food-ag complex. I started to realize that this is crazy. We have to take our staples back. We’re never going to win the public health war if we’re telling people to eat raw almonds and kale. That’s just unreasonable. It’s not affordable. It’s not equitable. And a lot of people don’t like it — it doesn’t taste good. And if they don’t like it, it will fail.
When I left healthcare, I was on a mission to realign food and agriculture with positive human health impacts and resiliency. Resiliency is both environmental and economic — you can’t have one without the other. So, we started innovating around staples. How do we make a better flour? How do we make better pizza? How do we make better bread? That migrated into things like potatoes and other commodities.
After 10 years of building supply chains and doing value-chain consulting, I’ve realized there’s a fundamental lack of visibility and market connectivity out there. I feel like that holds the whole system hostage. We live in 2025, but food still uses the same playbook from the 1980s. We have not embraced a lot of the market structures that dominate the economic landscape of this century. Nobody buys a plane ticket by calling the airline and booking it — you go to a platform and book a ticket online. It’s a consumer-driven experience, and there’s a lot of transparency. You can see the competition in front of your eyes. We don’t have that in B2B food systems at all.
Acres U.S.A. So, your idea for a platform to better connect regenerative farmers and buyers has been in the works for a while.
Kindwall-Moore. Yes — what’s become The Ryzosphere was actually first developed and written out in 2016. Snacktivist was brand new, but I was frustrated at what we were up against, trying to do something new and novel. And then at one point I was at the Washington Small Business Development Center office and was sitting down with the bankers and the business development people there, and they had a huge project working on grassfed cattle that had specific finishing requirements. It was all going to a really bougie export market, and it was a huge contract. And their biggest barrier was that they couldn’t find enough qualified feed to secure the contract for the cattle. They had the cattle, but they didn’t have the non-GMO feed. And I thought, “This is just stupid. Why are we still doing business like this?”
That’s how the idea for The Ryzosphere got started. At that time, it was a little too early. We circulated the opportunity to some investors, but they basically said, “No offense, but you’re a mom and a nurse from Idaho.” They said that the last thing I should do was to get involved in a disruptive technology. I should just make cookies, or something that’s more aligned with my stereotype.
Acres U.S.A. Snacktivist wasn’t that type of disruptive technology, in their minds?
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