Arran Stephens: Following Nature’s Path

“I think we suc­ceeded way beyond our wildest expec­ta­tions,” Stephens told Organic Connections. “Considering that what we do had the poten­tial of being the norm some­day in the world, I wanted to build our company’s base—our strength—so that when the tran­si­tion inevitably came, we would be strong enough to not get swept off our foundation.”

An Organic—and Spiritual—Journey

Organic pro­duc­tion was in Stephens’ blood from day one. “The day I was born, my mom was unload­ing sacks of pota­toes off the back of a truck,” said Stephens. “She was a strong lady. We had a 120-acre farm. Later we moved to another farm where my par­ents home­steaded, cleared a for­est and cre­ated an 80-acre beau­ti­ful farm on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was a real life les­son on the farm, because we used to gather kelp from the ocean in the autumn and spread it on the field; that was our fer­til­izer. My father exten­sively mulched and even wrote a lit­tle book on it called Sawdust Is My Slave, all about his mulching pro­ce­dures. When I was a boy he told me, ‘Always leave the soil bet­ter than you found it.’ That has become a metaphor for life and a guid­ing prin­ci­ple that under­lies what­ever we do at Nature’s Path.”

Not far up the road, Stephens’ life mis­sion was made man­i­fest to him in a piv­otal trip to India when he was 23 years old. “There are some of us who are not sat­is­fied with mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions,” he explained. “I wanted much more out of my life and engaged in a lot of intense spir­i­tual prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion. I had a great teacher named Sant Kirpal [Sant Kirpal Singh Ji Maharaj], and I went and stud­ied with him in India in 1967. He was very well known and respected all over India and through­out the world. He treated me like a son, and I regarded him as my father. I’ve had sev­eral great men­tors in my life, but he was the first and foremost.

“The truth is not in India; the truth is not in the Himalayas: the truth is within each one of us. But it requires men­tors, I think, to stim­u­late and awaken that sleep­ing beauty that’s within all of us. I think each one of us has the capac­ity or capa­bil­ity to be an instru­ment. Like Saint Francis said, ‘Let me become a chan­nel of your peace. Where there is dark­ness, let me bring light. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is sad­ness, joy.’ I felt that my job, my respon­si­bil­ity, was to act as a trans­for­ma­tive cat­a­lyst when I got back to Canada.”

Upon his arrival home from India, he started right in. “When I returned, I wanted to cre­ate a great liveli­hood,” Stephens con­tin­ued. “I had $7 to my name and I con­vinced a cou­ple of peo­ple to loan me $1,500. That was start­ing cap­i­tal. I bought a failed restau­rant and moved the equip­ment to a loca­tion in Vancouver that I thought would be really good and opened this lit­tle restau­rant. It wasn’t to make money; it was to fill a need. There were no veg­e­tar­ian restau­rants in Vancouver at that time. It was just the right thing at the right place at the right time, and cus­tomers began com­ing in droves. Pretty soon we opened Canada’s first large nat­ural food store.”

The Lifestream Lesson

Prior to the suc­cess of Nature’s Path, Stephens had another thriv­ing organic prod­ucts com­pany called Lifestream. “Lifestream was a com­pany that I started in 1971,” he said. “Being under­cap­i­tal­ized I took on a cou­ple of part­ners over the next three years, and by 1981 it was the largest nat­ural foods com­pany in Canada, and we had some export sales into the United States at the time.”

But a con­flict occurred between Stephens and his part­ners that resulted in the loss of the com­pany. “A part­ner­ship prob­lem came about in 1980 or 1981,” Stephens recounted. “It got so bad that it became, ‘You buy me out or I buy you out—it’s not work­ing.’ My part­ners didn’t have the money to buy me out, and I wanted to buy them out but they wouldn’t sell. So we were at an impasse. I refused to guar­an­tee a loan from the bank until we could resolve this, and it forced the sale of the com­pany in 1981.”

Following that inci­dent, Stephens and his wife con­tin­ued on their own in Vancouver, oper­at­ing two nat­ural food restau­rants. Four years later, out of the back of one of them, they began the com­pany that would make its mark on the world: Nature’s Path.

Nature’s Path saw unprece­dented suc­cess, and very inter­est­ingly Kraft, the cor­po­ra­tion that had pur­chased Lifestream, one day came back to Stephens. “Fourteen years after I sold Lifestream, we had beaten it in the mar­ket­place with our lit­tle Nature’s Path com­pany,” said Stephens. “I got this call one day from a Kraft lawyer, ask­ing if I would be inter­ested in buy­ing my com­pany back. I looked at it and said, ‘It’s los­ing money. Why should I buy it back?’ The lawyer then asked if I wouldn’t make an offer. I did so, and they said, ‘It’s worth five times that.’ I said, ‘Well, good luck. Go and sell it.’ Six months later the lawyer returned and said, ‘I’m rep­re­sent­ing Kraft again, and they’re pre­pared to accept your offer.’ I said, ‘My offer has just dropped.’ So we actu­ally ended up buy­ing it back for the real estate assets. It didn’t make sense to mar­ket two brands, so we folded Lifestream into Nature’s Path and made Nature’s Path a much stronger brand.”

David and Goliath

The odds against his suc­cess have never been lost on Stephens—or on his sense of humor. “Not long after we started Nature’s Path, I was at a trade show in California show­ing some prod­ucts that we had exper­i­mented with,” he related. “A TV inter­viewer with cam­eras in tow was at the show. He was going past us and didn’t even notice our tiny lit­tle booth there. So I put the cereal in his face and said, ‘Would you like to see some organic cereal?’ He looked at it and looked at me, and the cam­eras were sud­denly on me, and he asked, ‘How can a lit­tle pip­squeak com­pany like you ever hope to sur­vive against the giants of Kellogg’s and General Mills?’ So I asked him back, ‘Well, have you ever heard of David? Have you ever heard of Goliath?’ That went all across California at the time. I’ve always had fun tweak­ing the noses of our much, much larger com­pe­ti­tion, thou­sands of times big­ger than us. That hasn’t stopped, and now they’re tak­ing notice.”

Click any image to enlarge.

Difference of Soul

Taking from the Lifestream exam­ple, it might be seen that there is a dif­fer­ence in ideals between the founders of nat­ural prod­ucts com­pa­nies and the cor­po­ra­tions that later pur­chase them. “The only way big cor­po­ra­tions would help the for­ward stride of the nat­ural prod­ucts indus­try,” Stephens said, “is if there were a top- and bottom-line profit and sales growth motive. The moment a com­pany stopped grow­ing or pro­duc­ing prof­its, they’d prob­a­bly dump it.”

Profit is often not a cen­tral dri­ving force when nat­ural prod­ucts are developed—a prime exam­ple being the first item Stephens pro­duced for Nature’s Path. “The first prod­uct we devel­oped in 1985 under the Nature’s Path brand was called Manna Bread, made from sprouted organic grains,” Stephens recalled. “It was based on an ancient Aramaic recipe attrib­uted to the Essenes, a mys­ti­cal Jewish sect that lived by the shores of the Dead Sea in the pre-Christian era. They left behind these won­der­ful scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which even­tu­ally found their way into the Vatican Library where they remained for the next 1,500 years or so and were translated.

“I was so inspired by them that I decided to try and make a prod­uct based upon the ancient recipe that was in these old scrip­tures. It described sprout­ing grain and grind­ing it and leav­ing it on hot rocks in the desert to bake. Then you make thin loaves of it, and you eat it like your fore­fa­thers did when they fled Egypt. They lived in the desert for 40 years.

“That’s how it was in the begin­ning. We were all very mes­sianic about spread­ing the gospel of eat­ing good food and regain­ing health. There was no ‘indus­try’ when I started; I don’t think that organic foods in 1967 were more than maybe a mil­lion dol­lars at most all over North America. It was a lit­tle cot­tage indus­try, mom and pop, with ide­al­is­tic owners.

“Today it’s a $60 bil­lion indus­try. Many of the peo­ple along the way maybe lost their ideals or maybe got enticed by the big dol­lars and they sold out. Then they were hor­ri­fied to see what hap­pened to their com­pa­nies after­ward. When you sell out a com­pany, it’s almost like the soul gets gut­ted from it.”

This dis­sim­i­lar­ity of view was also evi­dent in the recent bat­tle for California’s Proposition 37—the Mandatory Labeling of Genetically Engineered Food Initiative. “The inter­est­ing thing is that a hand­ful of ded­i­cated com­pa­nies sup­ported con­sumers’ right to know what’s in their food,” Stephens said. “Those big giant com­pa­nies that own nat­ural and organic brands—like Kellogg’s, which owns Kashi, Morningstar Foods and Bare Naked; General Mills, which owns Cascadian and Lärabar—dumped mil­lions of dol­lars in try­ing to defeat the cit­i­zens’ right to know what’s in their food. For some rea­son they aligned with Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer and all these huge global chem­i­cal com­pa­nies. It’s rather amazing.”

Remaining True

But Stephens him­self has arranged it so that his com­pany will never have this sort of expe­ri­ence. “I don’t ever want to have that hap­pen to Nature’s Path,” he asserted. “I don’t want some­body to close down a plant and dis­lo­cate a com­mu­nity sim­ply because they want to shift it to some other loca­tion, say, in the Midwest, to soak up the capac­ity of their plants. I want Nature’s Path to remain true to its organic roots and the ide­al­ism on which it’s based. My wife and I have been engaged in suc­ces­sion plan­ning for the last few years; we’ve got our son and daugh­ters involved in var­i­ous aspects, as well as a pro­fes­sional man­age­ment team. We cur­rently have close to 500 employees.

“I get about 50 inquiries a year—at least one a week—from ven­ture cap­i­tal com­pa­nies and those that are fronting for major inter­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions that want to buy Nature’s Path, but they end up in the round file. We’re just not inter­ested. We even say on our web­site, ‘No part of Nature’s Path is for sale.’

“I think what we all want is a bet­ter life, and a world that’s hab­it­able for our chil­dren, our grand­chil­dren and our great-grandchildren. That’s the bot­tom line. We want a safer, cleaner, health­ier world. PERIOD.”

More infor­ma­tion is avail­able at www.naturespath.com.