In September 2022, Steve Brazeel found himself being pulled by a John Deere tractor through the fields of the University of California’s experimental farming research facility in Irvine, California. It was a typical day in the perpetually sunny, agricultural mini oasis tucked into the Southern California sprawl of freeways, strip malls, glass buildings, and beige suburbia. Brazeel was in a celebratory mood. He had every right to be.

Brazeel’s fellow passenger that day was USDA Under Secretary Robert Bonnie, who’d flown across the country to award a $20 million government grant to Brazeel’s company, Elevated Foods, a year-old platform for helping small- and medium-scale produce growers organize and distribute their products. Brazeel had submitted the Elevated Foods application to the agency’s new Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program — a $3.1 billion grant program to help farmers, ranchers, and foresters optimize carbon reduction benefits — as it aligned strategically with the vision he had for Elevated Foods. Bonnie, a twice U.S. Senate-confirmed political appointee, was impressed with Elevated’s connection between consumer interest and demand for regenerative or climate-smart practices and could see the longevity possible with its approach.

“Did you really come up with that proposal in the two weeks after we announced the Climate-Smart program?” Bonnie asked, as the two bounced along paths through fields of watermelons and squash. Brazeel took off his sunglasses, revealing the “raccoon eye” tan lines he’d acquired from many hours spent in cropland just like this. With an easy laugh, he looked at Bonnie and acknowledged: “Actually, we’d been working on the proposal for a couple years during the pandemic,” Brazeel said. “What we sent you was basically the investor pitch deck we were using to raise capital. It just so happened our idea for Elevated Foods aligned perfectly with the USDA’s program.”

That September day marked the latest stage in Brazeel’s 20-year push to transform how farmers — and farms — are organized, and how Elevated Foods thinks about its part in the overall food system. Brazeel wants to reimagine production across the U.S., giving farmers greater security — and more muscle — over the markets they serve. The grant from the $3.1 billion Climate-Smart Commodities initiative opened the door into a mega market he’d only dreamed about, one that would allow him to improve both the quality of produce in the food system and the lives of the people growing and harvesting it — all while implementing processes to help reverse climate change.

The original concept for Elevated Foods traces its roots to Brazeel’s first produce company, SunTerra Produce Traders, a conduit that connects farmers to food buyers. Brazeel founded SunTerra based on his conviction that there was a smarter way to organize this famously low-margin, high-sweat-equity industry. Nearly 20 years later, SunTerra’s success has shown he was right: By creating a collective of the top growers in each category — the best leafy greens from Salinas and Yuma, table grapes from Bakersfield and Coachella, citrus from the Central Valley, or cantaloupes from Arizona — and operating it like a collective of family-run farms, Brazeel has made his members more powerful than they were on their own, both financially and in terms of their ability to shape what had traditionally been an individualistic commodity market.

Initially, Brazeel envisioned that Elevated Foods would build on SunTerra’s success, using the collective power of America’s best farmers to negotiate mutually beneficial relationships with retailers like Costco, Walmart, and Whole Foods, whose customers increasingly require them to offer produce with a sustainable, regenerative, climate-aware pedigree. Brazeel would leverage each of his member’s strengths in their specific category to present what he calls “a full apples to zucchini portfolio.”

Brazeel also imagined that Elevated Foods would serve as something akin to a talent agent, a representative for the aggregated market power of all of its individual member-growers, taking a percentage fee for all the produce moving through the system. But when the USDA’s Climate-Smart grant was announced, he saw the opportunity to provide expertise and support to specialty crop producers to develop or expand their current climate-friendly practices, as a way to meet the requirements large retailers were now requiring.

Through the grant, Brazeel could build a collective under one Elevated Foods umbrella and supercharge the entire operation.

Bonnie and his team were so impressed with Brazeel’s privately driven strategy that they decided to make the Elevated Foods $20 million Climate-Smart grant one of a handful first showcased by the USDA. Which explains why Bonnie found himself being pulled by a tractor in Irvine.

“Steve is obviously very creative,” says Bonnie, talking months after his visit to Irvine from his Washington, D.C., office. “But the connection he’s making between consumer interest and demand for climate-smart practices as a business concept is a remarkable insight. We really wanted the parts of the Climate-Smart partnership to be bigger than the whole, so projects can live beyond the life of the grant. Elevated Foods really ticked so many boxes. Steve has collected these people that care about food and food availability and people that care about climate. And Steve and Elevated Foods and their project connect all of it.”

Brazeel is from the small town of Brawley in California’s Imperial Valley, a fertile crescent in the middle of the desert just south of Palm Springs and the Salton Sea, about 30 miles north of Mexicali.

“There’s not much to do in Brawley besides agriculture,” says Brazeel. “It’s the traditional ‘Friday Night Lights’ kind of town where football and farming are the main activities.”

Brazeel’s dad was a farm labor contractor, but had a number of side jobs. “He seemed to be reasonably successful in various different things, but it was never one thing,” says Brazeel. Sometimes it was distributing fertilizer, and, like many in Brawley, he was a farmer. “He was just a really hard working guy and just kind of a cowboy,” says Brazeel.

As a labor contractor, the elder Brazeel created a pickup truck staffing agency of sorts, connecting migrant laborers to the many local farms that needed help harvesting crops. Early on, he’d wake Brazeel, his sister, and two brothers at dawn, drive them out to the farms, and introduce them to what a hard day’s work looked and felt like.

“We learned how to pick fruit and vegetables alongside these workers,” says Brazeel. “They were some long days, but there was an odd joy and pride. It also instilled a sense of respect for the workers, the farmers, and the effort and care it takes to grow food.”

Brazeel still recalls the desert heat, sticky dirt, flies, and the musty rancid smell that clinged to him from cleaning up piles of rotten melons. He also remembers being on break one day when a red Porsche 944 pulled into the field kicking up a cloud of dust. Leaning on his shovel, Brazeel recalls watching as a guy with a paunch and a big cigar emerged and walked out among the vines: “It was like that Porsche in ‘Sixteen Candles.’ He just nonchalantly picked up a cantaloupe, gave it a squeeze, and kicked a couple. Then he got back in his car and peeled off.”

Brazeel says that when he asked his dad who the guy was, he told him: “That prima donna son of a bitch? He’s one of those guys that works three hours in the morning, drinks cocktails for lunch, plays golf all afternoon, and makes $100,000 a year.” “My dad had no respect for the people that traded and sold produce,” Brazeel says. “But in my mind, I thought, that guy is winning. I’m standing in 120-degree heat covered in cantaloupe scum and he’s driving a red Porsche. That’s the life I wanted to have.”

Brazeel attended Cal Poly Pomona for two years before transferring to the University of Arizona. When he graduated with a degree in agriculture in 1992, he sent out 100 resumes. The only response he got was from Sun World, a specialized distributor of exotic produce varieties like seedless watermelons and grapes and U.S.-grown mangoes. “They were among the first to focus on taste and develop unique varieties that nobody else had,” says Brazeel. “They knew if you control the market on a specific item, you dictate the price.”

Brazeel’s experience at Sun World, compounded by the tech-obsessed climate of the first dot-com boom, led him to start SunTerra in 2000. SunTerra began as a one-man operation that built partnerships with small growers in Southern California, represented them, and sold their crops to retailers, food distributors, and, as Brazeel says, “anyone we could.”

In the 20-odd years since, Brazeel has built SunTerra into a company with 50 employees, a massive refrigerated distribution facility in Imperial County, and customers like Trader Joe’s, Costco, Sprouts, Walmart, and Dole. “But there’s really nothing incredibly exciting about it,” Brazeel says of SunTerra. “Just the day-to-day of business highs and lows, with some really good years, and some really bad. We stayed ahead of the game for 20 years, but SunTerra sort of just became a widget factory doing consistent volume.”

SunTerra delivers 3,000-plus 18-wheelers’ worth of perishable produce every year and earns $70 million in annual revenue. And while the company may be miniscule compared to the likes of Archer Daniels Midland ($94 billion in revenue in 2023), or Conagra ($12.3 billion), building SunTerra led Brazeel to develop close personal and financial relationships with the farmers he worked with. “Our business marries buyers with sellers and makes investments with farmers to both guarantee supply and have a stake in the crops,” he says. “In this industry there’s considerable risk and you’re gambling on a lot when you put that seed in the ground. It’s less risky when it’s shared.”

When Brazeel talks about “highs and lows” in SunTerra’s business, or about having “skin in the game” to reassure his partners, he’s talking about the day-to-day perils of the produce industry. But nothing prepared him for what would come in 2020. COVID-19 almost sideswiped everything Brazeel had been building for two decades. “It was like a light switch went off,” he says. Brazeel had thought SunTerra’s business was a 50/50 split between food service and retail. But it turned out, 70% of its customers sold to schools and hotels — which had effectively disappeared overnight. “We began plowing nearly three-quarters of our product into the fields because we couldn’t sell it,” he recalls. “It was a scary time.”

Salvation came in the unlikely form of Sonny Perdue. It was April of 2020 and Brazeel was sheltering in place in Palm Springs when the then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture appeared on CNN to announce a Farmers to Families Food Box grant program to purchase fresh produce, dairy, and meat products to help food distributors getting slammed by COVID’s closure of restaurants, hotels, and food-service companies. As Brazeel under-stood it, if he won a contract, SunTerra could package preapproved boxes of fresh produce and deliver them to food banks, community and faith-based organ-izations, and other nonprofits to help feed hungry Americans.

Just as Brazeel was putting the final touches on his initial Farmers to Families proposal, he got an urgent call from a man named Stephen Studdert. Studdert is an international problem solver who has advised nearly every president since Reagan; he had been tasked with solving an emerging food scarcity crisis among the Navajo Nation and called Dawn Riley, a former USDA chief of staff who’d become an agency translator. “I’m working with the Navajo Nation and these folks are starving,” Studdert told Riley. “I need some of that free food the USDA is giving away.” Even in the best of times, the Navajo Nation struggles with food shortages. When COVID hit, they chose hunger over extinction, chained their roads, and didn’t let anyone in or out.

Riley knew that if anyone could help, it would be A.G. Kawamura, California’s former Secretary of Food and Agriculture. She then connected Studdert to Kawamura, who was working with Brazeel on the Food Box program.

“Out of nowhere I get this blast call from Steve Studdert,” recalls Brazeel. “He says: ‘We need to get food to their reservation.’ I said whatever I can do to help. Then he asked me: ‘What do you need?’” Within 24 hours Brazeel had letters from representatives, senators, and governors granting SunTerra all the permissions and access he needed. SunTerra would receive geolocation coordinates to specific locations in the middle of sacred Navajo grounds in Monument Valley and direct its trucks into areas completely off-limits to anyone outside the tribal inner circle. Brazeel was blown away by Studdert and his organization. “Nothing would deter them,” he says.

The Farmers to Families Food Box program ran from May 2020 to May 2021 and during that period SunTerra executed a $42 million contract, delivering 1.5 million boxes containing 52.5 million pounds of food to its food-bank partners — including the Orange County Food Bank, Second Harvest, and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank — and 250,000 boxes to the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities. Collectively, these boxes were sent to California, Arizona, New Mexico, up into the Pacific Northwest, and as far as Wyoming and Montana. The project also saved SunTerra and kept nearly 100 of its employees working.

“This was an entirely life-changing moment for Steve,” says Riley, who, after introducing Brazeel to Studdert, started consulting for SunTerra and is now SVP of External Relations and Strategic Partnerships with Elevated Foods. “He was about to lose his business at that stage. Then he discovered how massive the need was and realized the amount of food he could move. It changed everything.”

In fact, the food-bank work had been so critical to SunTerra’s survival, it seems to have become part of the company’s DNA: After the Farmers to Families program ended at the USDA, SunTerra gave it a new life as a branded initiative called Project Food Box that has delivered nearly 6 million boxes to communities in need, including medically tailored food boxes for Medi-Cal and Medicare members with qualifying conditions.

“Project Food Box is a rocketship and became our ‘Food As Medicine’ program which I think will change the world,” says Brazeel. “But you have to understand, this is all happening in a parallel time frame. While we’re doing food box work with the Navajo Nation, I’m trying to figure out what Elevated Foods is going to be.”

The idea for Elevated first came to Brazeel in 2018. It was clear to him that creating a collective of the best farmers in a given commodity — those who’d been around the longest, and were the most respected — was the right strategy. He also saw an untapped opportunity. While these producers may have been considered best in class, consumers had little to no awareness of their brands. This made the producers vulnerable to a three-way squeeze: by mega-buyers, who pushed chemical-growing programs; by powerful retailers, who wanted to dictate price; and by government regulators, whose demands were becoming more complex every day.

“The riddle to solve was how to aggregate enough supply to achieve what the buyers want, put growers in a position of power, and allow them to grow in ways that are good for their land and the environment,” Brazeel says. He quickly dismissed the idea of a roll-up. That would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and, besides, he knew most of these farmers had owned their land for generations and wouldn’t sell. Unable to figure out a straightforward through line to bring everyone together and make money, he decided his idea for Elevated Foods wasn’t ripe.

Around the same time, Brazeel met Peter Wells through mutual friends who were putting together a deal in response to the 2018 Farm Bill. The bill declassified hemp as a Schedule 1 drug and legalized cultivation and sale of hemp (defined as cannabis with less than 0.3% THC), removing it from the Controlled Substances Act. This declassification started another “green rush” and investment poured into the space. “I knew it was risky going in and had a high chance of failure, but I liked Peter and trusted him,” says Brazeel. “I knew that if it failed, it wasn’t going to be because he was a bad guy.”

Wells had made his career in finance in New York City, but grew up in Washington State. He projects the solid confidence of someone who understands money while remaining the grounded son of multigenerational farmers. Something about Wells and his enthusiasm, emotional and cerebral intelligence, and native optimism inspired Brazeel to explore his own eclectic thinking.

“He gave me permission to throw out a random idea and he would think about it through a different lens and be that one validator who gave me the confidence to believe it could be done,” says Brazeel. So, one day, Brazeel pitched Wells the idea for Elevated Foods.

Wells, now a critical business partner in all of Brazeel’s companies, immediately liked the idea of aggregation and imagined scenarios where Elevated Foods could convince, say, the ninth, 12th, and 16th largest citrus producers to band together to compete against the top three, respectively.

Together, Wells and Brazeel identified a common struggle: Producers were being confronted with increasingly high expectations around sustainably grown food, regenerative farming, and compli-ance with evolving environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. Meeting those standards required time, effort, and money that smaller producers didn’t always have.

“There are all these scary acronyms that are confusing, yet farmers need to know what they mean,” says Brazeel, speaking of terms like ESG standards. “Big customers like Walmart and Costco, Sunkist, Driscoll’s, and Dole can use these regulations and audits to bully smaller producers and weaken their negotiating power to the point where price becomes dictated to them. We thought, what if we could provide a protocol to help educate this collective, help them adopt these new ways, and make them more powerful so they can control their own destiny?”

When the USDA announced the $3.1 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, Riley, who was consulting for SunTerra by this point, immediately saw the fit. “I called Steve and told him the grant was made for everything he wanted to do with Elevated,” she says. “Immediately he said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ And being the competitive guy he is, he said, ‘We’re going for $100 million.’ So I was like, let’s rock and roll!”

Larger USDA grants have historically been awarded to the giant commodities like pork, wheat, soybeans, and corn. Given that Elevated Foods was just two guys and an idea, they checked themselves and, after designing a program that aligned with Elevated’s vision and the USDA’s mission, applied for $30 million.

Brazeel was optimistic about their chances. Fruits and vegetables, what the USDA defines as specialty crops, were underrepresented, giving the Elevated Foods proposal a unique differentiator. When they knew the announcement was getting close, Riley told Brazeel: “Whoever calls you from a 202 area code, just pick up the phone, no matter when it is.”

In September 2022 on a Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Brazeel got a call from Washington, D.C. “The call was really scratchy and I could barely make out what was being said. Then I heard her say we’d been awarded $20 million and that Under Secretary Bonnie was coming to present us the award on Tuesday.” Brazeel texted Wells to share the news. “I was on my last day of vacation,” remembers Wells. “I was just like, holy shit:  I’m going home to a completely different life. This is going to change everything.”

“It was a no-brainer to take the grant,” says Brazeel. “Imagine we’re a company that creates rocket parts and NASA gave us a grant — it’s an incredible door opener. When it comes to agriculture, the USDA is the gold standard that gives you the credibility to meet with anybody.”

But running a business through a grant is entirely different from running a for-profit. Elevated Foods is required to distribute the majority of the $20 million grant directly to its grower-partners. And while there is flexibility around which practices farmers choose to implement to sequester carbon — whether it’s using cover crops, reduced tillage, or nutrient management — the grant has restrictions that require Elevated to report precisely how each dollar is spent. So, they needed to hire a grant administrator. That turned out to be Dr. Kelsey Hood Cattaneo.

“Peter is really sincere,” Hood Cattaneo says, speaking from her Florida home office on a Zoom call in February 2024. “And Steve is really passionate. I could tell they supported each other.”

A serial academic with a law degree in international economics, a masters in public policy, and an educational policy doctorate, Hood Cattaneo is a veteran of the United Nations who spent more than 10 years working abroad. At the U.N. she did everything from youth entrepreneurship education to running partnerships and communications for the World Food Programme. When Wells found the Ventura, California, native, she had just finished a stint running grants for a farm labor organization for indigenous workers in Oxnard, California, and had moved to San Francisco to take a job as the Director of Evaluation and Impact for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Hood Cattaneo has a force-of-nature quality that comes through loud and clear. (As one of her colleagues has said, “she accelerates decision making.”)

“Steve runs multiple companies and is the visionary that builds community around him and has the connections to the farms. Peter is the visionary on our approach to all things sustainability,” says Hood Cattaneo. “I present things to them in a way they need it presented so they can make critical decisions. I just consistently check in to see how things are going, what’s unfinished, and how I can help move things forward.”

From the moment he met Hood Cattaneo, Brazeel was impressed by her energy and critical-thinking skills and had no doubt she’d be able to manage a $20 million government grant down to the penny.

“Peter found her and it was immediately apparent she has this ability to just get stuff done and not need direction,” says Brazeel. “She would just go do stuff and tell us after — beg for forgiveness, not ask permission. Which we like!”

Elevated Foods is still quite lean and Hood Cattaneo’s role is something of a hybrid between chief of staff and chief operating officer. The critical part of her role is signing farm partners, working with them to collect data on the climate-smart practices they are implementing, and helping farmers connect with retail partners to increase sales or direct a percentage of their crops to food banks and food box programs. As of July 2024, Elevated has enrolled 6,385 acres of specialty crops and has committed $3.88 million in incentive funding to more than 23 partner farms in the West and the Southeast.

“I’m a process builder and we need to build processes that are going to work for us long beyond this grant for when Elevated Foods activates its commercial enterprise,” said Hood Cattaneo. “We are a farmer-centered organization and I’d say we are 99% about the farmer. But Elevated Foods is 100% about making business decisions through a lens that elevates the entire food system.”

Brazeel worked for years in the produce industry before he realized what it was missing: a defining narrative. Storytelling. Something for consumers to care about. Then he met Austin Brown.

At the time, Brown was the branding chief for a cannabis company called Hits. Hits was the result of the cash wave that came after marijuana legally became recreational in California, and Brown and some partners decided to create a company that stood out from the entire landscape.

“I saw that there were a bunch of things missing in the industry, so we decided to take a new approach,” says Brown. “We were going to cater to affluent adults and make the product experience more luxurious.”

Brown grew up in Southern California and in his teens took photographs of the Orange County music scene and showed his work at group shows with the Beautiful Losers street-artist collective. Now, Brown lives at the confluence of art and commerce, where he channels the outlier influence of alternative cultures and captures that spirit for global lifestyle brands such as Paul Frank, Sonos, Quiksilver, and Stance.

“I believe that 85% of the stuff in your life is a product or label that’s just a thing that does something just fine,” says Brown, as he picks up items off his desk in Park City, Utah. “Like scissors or a water bottle, whatever it is, it’s just a thing. Ten percent of companies are really good at talking about the thing that they make. Sonos make great speakers — so, a great product company. Now, 5% jump this Evel Knievel Snake River and make it to the other side which is Brand. Brand to me is a fully formed, fully realized entity that has opinions and a point of view on everything. It is essentially like sitting across the table from a human being. My intention is to build brands, not to build companies, and sure as hell not to make stuff.”

Brazeel was an early Hits investor and was looking for someone to help Elevated Foods. He invited Brown to his house in Palm Springs — a mid-century masterpiece tucked into the mountains right under a cliff — and since he’d never seen the Hits brand bible, Brown presented the full 150-slide pitch on his big Samsung flat screen.

“Austin’s Hits deck was just insane and the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen on my wall,” says Brazeel. “My daughter Cassidy was there and Cassidy was like, ‘This guy is cool. You need to work with him.’ She was 28 at the time, so I’m like, if he can speak to that consumer…”

This was before the USDA grant and Brazeel took Brown through the early business concept for Elevated Foods. Afterward, Brown couldn’t shake one thought from his mind: “I don’t have any experience in agricultural produce, I probably wasn’t the best person for these guys.”

But he decided to sleep on it and the next day, when he was walking through the produce section at a grocery store, he had an epiphany. “At Paul Frank we had the concept of everything as a canvas whether it was furniture, or bicycles, eyewear, and watches; we did stuff that no one had ever done before and we made it our own. What if we did that to the produce section of grocery stores?”

After meeting Brazeel, Brown started seeing the produce section in a new way. He realized there were no real logos, just a couple Chiquita and Dole stickers, things most people are blind to. He looked at the boxes and it was all nondescript line drawings: an avocado, a berry.

“I don’t remember seeing anything worth remembering,” says Brown now. “And then it came to me: I could turn this part of the grocery store into an art gallery. All those different colors, shapes, and sizes. And I couldn’t turn it off. Then I remembered Steve and Peter telling me that Elevated Foods is a produce company that will do good, and there it was in the name: Elevate.”

Over the next few months, Brazeel and Wells would meet with Brown to brainstorm and talk about the produce section as a white space ripe for takeover. As Brazeel puts it, “Right now an apple is just an apple and an orange is just an orange. We knew they can be transformed through branding and reinvention with creativity and a story.”

They riffed on different cross opportunities like functional foods and an Elevated Foods drink and maybe even a health sports bar.  It was then that Brown was recruited to run the Elevated Foods brand. (One of his first moves was to create and become publisher of The Rooted Journal.)

“Austin was thinking out to 2050 and I’m just trying to see if we can raise a few bucks to keep this thing going,” says Brazeel. “He was like: You can Elevate anything.”

It’s an early summer day and Brazeel is sitting at his desk in his house on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, California. He’s been talking about his journey from picking fruits and vegetables with his dad and siblings in Brawley, to Porsche dreams, to running a successful produce company that almost went bust. Then he gets back to the mission ahead.

“I think we have the opportunity to work with these larger growers and larger retailers to move the needle,” he says. For exponential change to occur, however, big operators have to move in the right direction. Brazeel is convinced that will happen. “If you’ve met any of these farmers, they’ll do anything that is best for their land and their production as long as it has merit and is financially sustainable. Because of the grant, we have the opportunity and visibility to make an impact at a higher level and have it resonate throughout the growing community.”

Asked how he would define success, Brazeel first mentions executing the grant in a way the USDA intends and showing what Elevated Foods can do. For next year, success is launching a premier brand that lets consumers know what they are getting, who produced it, and how it was produced when they buy an Elevated Foods product.

“We’re building relationships with the retail side of things and I’m excited to place Elevated Foods branded products throughout the fresh fruit and vegetable aisle,” says Brazeel, whose goal is to see this concept live in 2025. “But more importantly, it’s about creating relationships so these growers can build more resilient and profitable relationships with retailers and food-service buyers to stay in business.”

As Elevated takes shape, and support for his vision consolidates, Brazeel feels like all the threads of his life are coming together. “I recently spoke to one of the potential early investors for Elevated and I was telling him about the grant and where we are taking Elevated Foods, SunTerra, and Project Food Box. He said to me, ‘You’ve found your ikigai.’”

Brazeel didn’t understand so he pulled the word up on his phone and saw that “ikigai” is a Japanese term that refers to doing what you love, what you’re good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs.

“And so I started thinking about that. I’m good at produce, I love food and agriculture, I’m good at connecting people, and what the world needs is healthy food and sustainable growing systems,” Brazeel says. “And I know I can get paid for it, that’s where the for-profit part comes in, right? It’s like this nirvana of being where your life encompasses all those pieces and is just magic.”