The Story of Redmond Heritage Farms

Did you know that there’s more to Redmond than salt, clay, and Re-Lyte? Redmond Life is just one member of the Redmond Inc. family. Other Redmond brands sell everything from horse supplements to soil amendments to backyard fencing.

One of these brands is Redmond Heritage Farms, a Utah-based farm that provides real, natural farm products to local people through farm-to-table stores and cafes. (Redmond Hertiage Farms Stores also carry Redmond Life products if you’re in Utah and want to buy them in person!)

The farm and stores have a unique origin story we thought you would appreciate because it aligns so closely with what we do here at Redmond Life and the way of living our customers are so passionate about.

From Farm Beginnings

Rhett Roberts, CEO of Redmond Inc., and founder of Redmond Heritage Farms grew up on a farm, eating natural, full-fat food like raw milk, whole eggs, and pastured meat. (Not to mention the mineral salt mined in his hometown of Redmond, Utah, but that’s another story.)

Rhett and his family enjoyed great health, so he was puzzled to see those same foods being demonized in the health industry.

According to the current diet books, news stories, and doctor recommendations, fat was the enemy. Red meat was a no-no. Whole eggs would give you a heart attack. That was the health messaging of the day.

Rhett saw people around him following this advice and going on low-fat diets to lose weight and get healthier. Sometimes they’d achieve the results they wanted in the short term, but he rarely saw those diets result in true, long-term health. Something just wasn’t adding up.

But Rhett wouldn’t investigate this conundrum until much later when he saw a decline in his own health after he no longer had easy access to farm-fresh food.

A Return to What Makes Sense

After college, Rhett got married and ate more processed food in line with the Standard American Diet. As a result, he gained weight, felt sluggish, and got sick more often than he ever did eating food from the farm.

So Rhett and his wife, Stephanie, set out to figure out how to be truly healthy. Before long, they stumbled across the work of Dr. Weston A. Price.

A little background: Price was a dentist who observed that diet seemed to correlate with his patients’ oral health and even facial structure. The diets of past generations even appeared to influence the health of subsequent generations.

He found that those with the healthiest, strongest, straightest teeth and most well-formed facial structures ate foods humans have been eating for thousands of years. This did include plants (in most cases, but not all), but also red meat, whole eggs, seafood, and fresh, raw dairy like milk and nutrient-dense butter. He also noted that the animals from which these products came enjoyed their natural diets and a lifestyle where they could carry out instinctive behaviors. (In other words, they were not factory-farmed, but wild or humanely raised.)

This food was free of modern pesticides, antibiotics, and artificial hormones. It was in its natural state. And, most importantly, it contained a high concentration of nutrients from being grown in healthy soil, or, in the case of animal products, from eating food grown in healthy soil and storing those vitamins and minerals in the fat.

Conversely, populations with the most dental caries, crooked or crowded teeth, and jaw malformations had been eating highly processed, sugar-laden, or factory-farmed modern foods for generations.

Coincidence? Maybe. But the correlation was strong.

Rhett actually wasn’t surprised to learn this, since it confirmed what he’d witnessed in his own health and in his community growing up. He reasoned that if humans have been eating these foods for thousands of years…doesn’t it make sense that those foods would be good for us?

So, Rhett decided to return to what makes sense: food the way it used to be before modern production practices took hold of our food system.

Meat, whole eggs, and full-fat dairy from healthy animals. Organically-grown plant foods raised in healthy soils. Unadulterated oils with their molecular structures intact.

In other words, if you can’t find it in nature, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.

Making It Work in the Modern Age

As it turns out, these traditional, nutrient-dense foods can be tricky to find.

As Rhett soon learned, you can’t simply walk into a chain grocery store to find raw, grass-finished milk or truly pastured meat. In fact, at the time there was strict legislation in place to prevent the sale of raw dairy in Utah.

Still, Rhett was determined. With a lot of effort, he managed to locate sources for this high-quality food, but it had to be shipped in from all around the country. He ordered wild-caught salmon from Alaska, raw dairy from the Amish, etc. (which was inconvenient, expensive, and not exactly sustainable, but it was better than nothing).

Rhett soon discovered that he wasn’t alone. Other Redmond employees started asking Rhett if they could get in on those food shipments, and before long, we were getting massive loads of food brought in. Someone even bought a cow to start producing fresh, raw milk from their garage!

Expanding the Community

Soon, demand rose to the point that Redmond decided to open a store that sold only real, nutrient-dense foods. It made a lot more sense than crowding the office, and this way, we could provide these foods for the wider community, not just Redmond employees.

After a lot of work and legal hoops to jump through so we could sell raw dairy, the first Redmond Heritage Farms Store (then called Real Foods) opened in Orem in 2003.

We then expanded to stores in Salt Lake City and Heber, Utah, and added cafes specializing in delicious farm-to-table cuisine. We also have a production kitchen to produce our House Made items as well as a Milk Truck to take our products to even more customers.

Today, Redmond Heritage Farms Store is our main outlet for selling our raw, grass-fed dairy, meats, and free-range eggs sourced from our farm in Redmond, Utah. We’ve also expanded to selling delicious House Made items like spicy tortilla chips, cookies, kombucha, salad dressing, granola, soups, and more.

Redmond Life products are also available in our stores along with some of our favorite goodies from local vendors who appreciate real food and natural products as much as we do.

Everything in our store is carefully vetted, and much of it comes from local vendors who are as passionate about healthy food as we are.

The Future

The overall mission of Redmond Inc. and its various companies is to “Elevate the Human Experience” in body, heart, mind, and spirit.

Redmond Heritage Farms, along with the stores and cafes, plays a big role in this mission by supplying food that deeply nourishes the body, with love and care that fulfills our hearts.

With our new bigger and better production kitchen and the recent expansion of our dairy herd, we’re expanding our capacity to connect our customers with delicious, nutritious food.

We’re excited to see what the future holds!