Vital Farms, an Austin-based "ethical" egg producer, made its Wall Street debut Friday, with shares soaring 68 percent after trading began.
Husband and wife team Matt O'Hayer and Catherine Stewart founded the company in 2007 as a small urban farm in south Austin with 20 hens. It has since expanded distribution into 13,000 stores, including Target, Whole Foods Market, and Walmart, and become the number one producer of pasture-raised eggs and butter.
"They saw an opportunity to bring food to Americans in a more ethical way with better outcomes for all stakeholders, most notably the animals that produce the food," CEO and president Russell Diez-Canseco told Cheddar shortly before the closing bell.
The pasture-raised label is not officially recognized by the USDA, but it generally refers to the amount of space afforded to livestock. Vital Farms' hens are provided 108 square feet of space and "plenty of fresh air and sunshine year-round," according to the company.
Diez-Canseco noted that Vital Farms is currently in just 2 percent of U.S. households and that the company plans to expand beyond its main product categories of eggs and butter.
"Beyond that, you could certainly imagine us continuing to expand within value-added dairy, which is a really big and growing market," he said. "Consumers we've talked to would love to have lots of different kinds of food produced by Vital Farms."
Vital Farms' high price point compared to competitors does present a challenge amid the ongoing economic downturn brought on by coronavirus.
"We certainly put a lot of thought into that every day," Diez-Canseco said. "The truth is, producing food in a way that's sustainable for all stakeholders, meaning that delivers on better outcomes for small family farms (who often lose at the end of the movie in this country), for consumers, for our employees, for communities, and for shareholders, isn't a cheap endeavor."
CES 2024 starts this week in Las Vegas. It's set to feature swaths of the latest advances and gadgets across personal tech, transportation, health care, sustainability and more. Here's a list of the coolest announcements so far.
Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and another few years before landing on it. NASA on Tuesday announced the latest round of delays in its Artemis moon-landing program.
The Biden administration has enacted a new labor rule that aims to prevent the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. The labor department rule going into effect Tuesday replaces a scrapped Trump-era standard that lowered the bar for classifying employees as contractors
The KC-46 was to be the ideal candidate for a fixed-price development program. Instead, it has cost Boeing billions, and made industry wary of such deals.
Dave Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Orangetheory Fitness joins Cheddar to chat trends in the industry for 2024. He updates us on the company's plans to expand and what the state of the economy has meant for business.
One of the world's largest renewable energy developers will be getting hundreds of wind turbines from General Electric spinoff GE Vernova as part of a record equipment order and long-term service deal.
A moon landing attempt by a private US company appears doomed because of a fuel leak on the newly launched spacecraft. Astrobotic Technology managed to orient the lander toward the sun Monday so its solar panel could capture sunlight and charge its onboard battery.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has announced that 100,000 businesses have signed up for a new database that collects ownership information intended to help unmask shell company owners. Yellen says the database will send the message that “the United States is not a haven for dirty money.”
