Lundberg Family Farms: Committed to producing the finest quality rice and rice products for your family
- KLS
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
For the 229th feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Lundberg Family Farms and Chief Growth Officer, Suzanne Sengelmann. For four generations, the Lundberg family has been dedicated to caring for the land responsibly and sustainably. Our farming methods produce healthful, delicious rice while respecting and protecting the earth for future generations. Today, our spirit of environmental stewardship continues to grow with every grain of rice.
"Together Talks" feature # 229: Lundberg Family Farms presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
What separates you from your competition? What have been the biggest challenges? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business? How have you dealt with being the face of the company?
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur? What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most? Share a decision that you made that was detrimental? What is your why?
Story of how it was created?
A lot of people don’t realize there’s a real farm and a real family behind Lundberg Family Farms. But, in 1937, Albert and Frances Lundberg left Nebraska in the wake of the Dust Bowl. When they moved to California, they brought with them their four sons, a flatbed Chevy truck, a Farmall tractor and a new farming philosophy: “Leave the land better than you found it.”
In the late 1960s, a company called Chico-San approached about 150 farmers in California and asked if they’d be willing to grow organic rice for them. Albert’s four sons (Eldon, Wendell, Harlan, and Homer) didn’t know what “organic” meant, but they had a copy of Rodale’s Organic Gardening Magazine and realized they had been basically farming that way already. As it turns out, “organic” looks a lot like leaving the land better than you found it....
Soon, they began selling rice not only locally but also up and down the West Coast. They also sold rice to a man named Michael Funk, founder of Mountain People’s Warehouse, which went on to merge with Cornucopia and become UNFI.
A couple generations later, Lundberg Family Farms is still family owned, with 43 family members as shareholders. However, we are not family operated. In 2022, Lundberg’s board of directors hired Craig Stevenson as CEO to help evolve the business to be more consumer and customer oriented.
What separates you from your competition?
If you want your rice to stand out, it comes down to taste and quality; which ultimately is linked to how you grow it.
More than 50 years ago, Harlan Lundberg started his own rice breeding program to improve and develop varieties of rice that not only taste delicious and cook up consistently but also thrive in our regenerative organic farming system. This program is currently run by our nursery team today.
We develop our own breeds for both taste and quality but also, to develop rice that is specifically conducive to how we farm. For example, most rice farmers use chemical herbicides to manage weeds. But we use water to drown grass weeds and dry up our fields to manage aquatic weeds. We need rice varieties that are compatible with that system and can outcompete the weeds, which means they need to grow tall to reach the oxygen. Otherwise, it won’t matter how tasty or nutritious they are because we won’t be able to grow them!
We’re also vertically integrated, which means we grow, harvest, dry, store, mill, pack, and ship our rice right from the farm in Richvale, California. It’s capital intensive; there’s no way around that. But that also means we control every step of the process and therefore do things the way we want. The right way. Which tends to also be the hard way! This increases costs and means our rice comes at a premium, but we genuinely believe it’s worth it. And so do our loyal consumers.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
In 2023, we implemented a strategy to elevate our entire portfolio from organic to Regenerative Organic Certified®. We also set a goal to certify all the organic rice we grow by 2027. It wasn’t a huge shift in practice because we’ve been farming this way for generations, but it was still a lift. We’ve worked with the Regenerative Organic Alliance to certify 19,000 acres, and we’re using Regenerative Organic Certified® rice across our rice, rice cakes, ready-to-heat rice (our 90-second rice), and rice chips. We used this elevation in certification as an opportunity to revisit our package design. We call it "Super Nature" as the intent is to provide the consumer a holistic net takeaway on how our rice is grown in partnership with nature.
We’ve also heavily invested in ready-to-heat rice. When Craig and I joined Lundberg Family Farms, the brand had just two SKUs, white and brown jasmine, with very limited distribution. We saw it as an emerging category and expanded with flavors like coconut, cilantro lime, a Fly By Jing Chili Crisp collaboration, and Spanish rice. Our ready-to-heat rice business has doubled every year since we elevated it to regenerative organic and relaunched it a couple years ago, and it remains a major focus for us.
We’re also focused on rice cakes, particularly our hexagon-shaped mini rice cakes. We know consumers want healthy snacking along with ways to indulge without guilt, so we recently launched Sweet Cakes in three nostalgic flavors (Birthday Cake, Salted Caramel, and Apple Pie) with more flavors coming in December!
Take us through your career prior to Lundberg and what attracted you about joining Lundberg?
I was born and raised in Seattle, on a small lake with all kinds of critters (beavers, otters, ducks, geese and bob cats), and that connection to the outdoors and nature stays with me.
I left Seattle and attended Santa Clara University and joined Clorox, where I spent 25 years in brand management, leading innovation for the cleaning division and later overseeing marketing for brands like Kingsford and Brita. Clorox was also incredibly supportive of my flexible schedule requirements. I worked 3 days a week for 15 years and was promoted to vice president on a part-time schedule. Mentoring women and partnering with companies to create schedules, cultures and opportunities that work across employees diverse needs continues to be a passion for me today.
I left on my 25th anniversary. My boys were in middle school, and I realized if I was going to do anything different, it was time! I then became Chief Marketing Officer for Angie's Boomchickapop and had the absolute pleasure of working directly with the founders, Dan and Angie Bastian. The best people I know. They created a product, brand and culture in their own image; one of integrity, courage and a little feminista thrown in. That experience fueled my passion for truly mission-driven brands.
Then, I ran a startup focused on safer cleaning technology. Products actually safe for the people doing the cleaning. Now that was a steep learning curve! I learned about cash flow, investor pitching, D2C, and the importance of retailer partnerships (specifically, not all distribution opportunities are the right opportunities....).
In March 2022, Craig Stevenson became CEO at Lundberg. I knew him from Clorox as his wife and I had worked together for close to 20 years. He sent me a box of products, and I was amazed by the full Lundberg portfolio.
Craig asked me to help develop a 5-year business strategy along with his leadership team. When I drove to the farm for the first time and saw the fields being flooded, birds landing everywhere, and beauty of farming and nature coming together, this sounds corny, but it felt like coming home. It also felt important and it aligned with my childhood, my career experience, and my desire to work with a purpose-led company.
How do you balance a portfolio and which products get the focus, push, investment?
I’m a big believer in making strategic choices. If you don’t make a choice, someone else will make it for you. When you have a portfolio like ours, which is pretty broad, you can’t win everywhere.
We have dry packaged rice, which is the majority of our business. We also have ready-to-heat rice in a pouch that you make in 90 seconds; and what we call “rice in a box” with rice & seasonings ready in 20 minutes on your stovetop. We also have amazing rice cakes; the big thick round ones, thin square ones, and hexagon minis. And we have rice chips.
When we started the strategy process, we said there are only so many places you can truly win. Some businesses you maintain. Some you harvest. Some you may even exit. For example, we used to grow quinoa. At some point, we said, you know what? We’re not in the quinoa business. We’re in the rice business.
Then for the businesses you decide to keep, you decide: are you going to overinvest in the resources you need to “win” or are you going to “play” or maintain? To decide, you look at: size and importance to the business, category growth and brand growth, margin structure, competitive landscape, and where you believe the puck is going.
With that framework, we made our choices.
Share a detrimental decision and what was learned from that?
One of the biggest challenges in agriculture, which was new to me, is that you plant product about 18 months before you sell it. That means you have to predict what you think will sell in the market long before it ever reaches a shelf. That’s pretty challenging; not to mention scary.
Getting the balance right between having enough inventory that we don't run out of supply for our customers hasn't been easy. And then you add predicting the varieties on top of that. There have been years where we have too little of a variety and too much of another; and then too much of your cash can be tied up in inventory. I think this is every Ag business challenge.
That experience mirrored something I dealt with at the startup. Ideally, you never want to short a retailer, particularly when you are building momentum. You always want a 100% fill rate. You never want to disappoint them. But when you overcorrect for that, you can end up over-investing in inventory. And when too much money is tied up in inventory, you don’t have access to the cash needed to invest aggressively in building the business.
Every year we agonize over that balance. Some years we’ve nailed it. Other years, we haven’t. But it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in this business.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
When I first joined Lundberg, I was interviewing our VP of Farming about one specific thing that Lundberg does differently than the competition. I was looking for a silver bullet to build an entire campaign around. I kept asking him, “Well, why do you do that? Why do you do this? Why is it so important?” Finally, he said, “It's just because we just care more!” He was so frustrated with me. He said, “Okay? We just care more.”
I handed that over to our creative agency and said, how do we bring that to life? They came to the farm to see all the ways we care more. One of those ways we care more? Rescuing duck eggs by hand.
During the winter, we plant cover crops on a portion of our fields. Cover crops help restore nutrients to the field and also provide nesting habitat for ducks. So, when we’re getting ready to plant our rice and we see a duck’s nest, we partner with California Waterfowl Association to rescue the eggs by hand. We bring them to safety, where they’re incubated, hatched, raised, and then released into the wild. Super cute.
The creative agency came back with a whole manifesto about all the extra steps we take because we care more. But there was one step that was especially adorable and that’s the one we featured: saving baby ducks.
In 2023, we launched our Ducking Good Rice™ campaign.
We started with a modest campaign, including an ad in the New York Times that read, “Every Ducking Day is Earth Day.” It leaned into the idea that if we care this much about ducks, imagine how much we care about our rice. We also invested in a television (or video) campaign during October and November.
When we went to Expo West that year, we won “Best PR or Social Media Campaign” at An Organic Night Out. Then, the following year, we won “Organic Company of the Year” for building on our generations of industry leadership by elevating our portfolio to Regenerative Organic Certified®, rolling out our Ducking Good Rice™ campaign, Super-Naturing our packaging and continuing to educate consumers on benefits of rice that is grown in partnership with nature. This links to our purpose; the health of our bodies and the planet depend on it.
That was definitely the highlight.
Piece of Advice
A brand is a choice and it takes courage. You must decide not only what you will do, but what you won’t do. It takes courage to commit and follow through. And to spend some money!
Community Callout
I am in awe of Sarela Herrada at SIMPLi, and Emily Griffith at lil bucks—their courage, what they’re doing, and how they’re partnering with farmers globally and changing the way we eat.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Lundberg Family Farms and Chief Growth Officer, Suzanne Sengelmann, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!