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# Drop the Word, Show the Practice
- URL: https://giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io/drop-the-word/
- Published: 2026-09-21T14:20:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T14:20:14.000Z
- Description: Climate Week opened with regenerative on every panel door. The Consumer Reports survey underneath the story says seven percent of shoppers have used the seal and three out of four have never heard the word.
- Author: giovanni gallucci
- Tags: Label Claims, Clean Label, Organic Social, Brand Positioning, Consumer Trends, Retail Distribution

*Listen to this episode of The Daily Trends Report, then use the piece below.*

Climate Week opened in New York this morning and the word on half the panel doors is regenerative.

[Regen House](https://www.regen.house/climate-week-nyc?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) runs through Thursday. Danone, Mars and Nestle are each hosting a panel on regenerative agriculture. The sponsor list includes ADM, PepsiCo and Walmart. JBS, the largest meat company on the planet, carries a public goal to support farmers adopting regenerative practices. Keurig Dr Pepper says it has supported regenerative agriculture and conservation on close to 200,000 acres since 2022\. [Climate Week](https://www.climateweeknyc.org/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) itself runs through the 27th.

On this morning’s show I said the word is free, that a term with no legal floor under it is one the biggest company in the category can buy cheaper than a rancher can earn it, and that the two of them end up on the same shelf using the same adjective. I want to correct a piece of that. I went and read the survey sitting underneath the story, and the shelf fight I described is not the fight you are in.

**Start with the number I got wrong.**

I said Regenerative Organic Certified posted a 22 percent buyer increase last year. The figure in the source is a sales increase, not a buyer increase, and that difference turns out to be the entire story. Caleb Hampton reported it in [Ag Alert](https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/september-2-2026/regenerative-label-payoff-remains-murky?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) on September 2: SPINS put 2025 sales of ROC products up 22 percent over the prior year, outpacing sales growth of Certified Organic and other sustainability labels, at a much smaller scale. Then comes the sentence nobody carried forward. Experts said those numbers may not directly reflect consumer demand.

Kelly Damewood runs [California Certified Organic Farmers](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ccof/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io), the state’s largest organic certifier, which is itself a certifier for the [ROC](https://regenorganic.org/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) label. She thinks the category’s growth is being driven mostly by large retailers’ ESG commitments. On where the pressure to certify actually originates, her words are that it comes less from the average shopper and more from buyers and retailers and folks in the industry looking for verification and traceability.

So the 22 is a purchase order, not a preference. If you have been reading it as demand, read it again. I did.

**Now the numbers nobody quoted.**

Consumer Reports fielded its American Experiences Survey from June 4 to 15 through NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel, 2,001 adults, margin of error 2.64 points. [Civil Eats](https://civileats.com/2026/09/14/can-big-food-make-good-on-promises-of-regenerative-agriculture/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) pulled one line out of it last week, the awareness figure: 24 percent of Americans have heard the phrase regenerative farming or regenerative agriculture, up from 18 percent three years ago. That got written up as momentum.

Turn it over. Three out of four have never heard the word at all. Organic sits at 67 percent, and organic went down, from 72\. The word you are building a Q4 calendar around is unknown to most of the people walking past your facing.

And then the question that should stop you cold. [The survey](https://article.images.consumerreports.org/image/upload/v1783706126/survey/Consumer%5FReports%5FAES%5FJune%5F2026.pdf?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) asked which seals people had actually used in the past 12 months to decide what to buy. USDA Organic, 48 percent. Non-GMO Project Verified, 31\. Fair Trade, 21\. Regenerative Organic Certified, seven. Certified Regenerative by AGW, three. A third of respondents said they had used none of them.

Seven percent. That is the seal I suggested you go get if the work is real.

**The gap that eats the budget.**

Same survey, a few questions later. Researchers described the practices in plain language, crop rotation, fewer chemical inputs, planned grazing, and never used the word regenerative. Then they asked whether people would pay more. Thirty percent said yes. Another 46 percent said yes for certain foods. That is 76 percent saying they would pay more for the practice once somebody explained it without the label.

And the market pays nothing. Damewood again, plainly: there is not a premium in the market right now, and what the return on investment is for most growers is not clear.

Both of those are true at the same time. Seventy-six percent of people say they would pay more, and there is no premium. The distance between a survey answer and a register receipt is where a lot of brand money goes to die, and the survey just told you why. They will pay for the practice described. They will not pay for a word they have not heard.

**The part I had backwards.**

I pictured a small maker and a multinational standing on the same shelf with the same adjective. Lisa Held’s reporting says otherwise, and it took a second read to catch. Inside Big Food the commitments are supply chain commitments, counted in acres, and the companies are mostly not putting the word on a package at all. General Mills has committed to advance regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres in the US by 2030\. PepsiCo said it hit 4.7 million acres in 2025 and raised its 2030 target to 10 million.

Those numbers live in a sustainability report. Not on a box.

Which means you are not sharing a shelf claim with them. You are the only one making one. The audit, the annual paperwork, the living wage line item and the job of explaining an unfamiliar term to a shopper who has never encountered it all sit with the small brand, by itself, while the multinational tells the same story with no label risk whatsoever. That is a worse situation than the one I described this morning, and it is more useful to know.

**What the farms actually got.**

The Ag Alert piece has the part that pays. Brian Park farms in Sutter County, California. Lundberg Family Farms asked its growers to certify back in 2021, and his account of it is that they more or less told all of their growers that if they wanted to keep sending organic rice, they were getting a regenerative certification. He understood it was about holding shelf space at Whole Foods, which began requiring certification in 2021 for anything in its stores labeled regenerative. Park found the yearly audits intrusive. He also said processing tomatoes were a lifeline for the farm, and that while most tomato growers were getting their contracted tonnage slashed, he sold more each year into a major processor’s line of ROC tomato soups.

No premium. Market access. Those are different things and only one of them showed up.

Rosie Burroughs runs the first Regenerative Organic Certified almond operation in the country, certified in 2022 in Merced County. Certification never fetched a higher price for her eggs, olive oil or nut butters. What paid was the farming itself. Minimal tillage and cover cropping cut her water, fuel, fertilizer and labor costs, and she credits those savings with keeping the farm in business.

[Straus Family Creamery](https://www.linkedin.com/company/straus-family-creamery/?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) in Petaluma went the other direction. Joseph Button, their VP of sustainability and strategic impact, says the 13 dairies supplying the creamery use regenerative practices and the company uses the term on its own website, but they declined to certify, to avoid stacking another label and to keep uncompensated paperwork off their farmers. He did not believe shoppers were ready to pay more.

Three operations, three decisions, and not one of them reports that the seal sold product.

**One more correction, and this one is mine too.**

I said regenerative has no enforceable definition, none. Too strong. Regenerative claims are not federally regulated, which is the real problem, but a floor is being poured. California adopted an official state definition last year, farming or ranching rooted in principles of soil health, biodiversity and ecosystem resiliency. Field to Market published its first definition in 2025\. USDA launched a $700 million pilot in December to support regenerative practices. And in the same Consumer Reports survey, 45 percent of respondents said the federal government should certify regenerative products the way it certifies organic, with 43 percent saying it should set the standards. The floor is coming. It is just not under you yet.

**The turn, and it corrects my own advice.**

This morning I told you to teach the category. Publish the three questions a shopper should ask anybody using the word, then answer them yourself, then pin it. The instinct is right and the target is wrong. That is a curriculum built for a credibility fight, and you are not in a credibility fight. You are in a vocabulary problem. Those have opposite answers. A credibility fight needs receipts. A vocabulary problem needs plain description.

The survey hands you the vocabulary for free. Sixty-eight percent associate grown without synthetic fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides with the word organic. Forty-six percent name reduced synthetic inputs as important to what they buy. Fifty-five percent name support for local farms. And 79 percent said they are concerned about soil health or land degradation, while only 17 percent connect soil health to organic at all.

Read those four numbers together. People care about the dirt. They have no word for the dirt. You have been handing them a word instead of the dirt.

So quit spending posts on the term. Describe the work in the sentences they already use, and let the seal sit on the package where somebody can find it after they already believe you. The certification is a receipt. Receipts get read second.

**Three things you can run this week.**

**1\. The pasteable post.** Fill the brackets with your own numbers and do not round them up. “We stopped tilling this field in \[year\]. A cover crop goes in after every harvest, on all \[N\] acres, and it has been every year since. Our water use is down about \[X\] percent since we started. Nobody pays us extra for any of this. We did it because the topsoil was leaving.” No seal in the copy. No word in the copy. If you cannot fill a bracket honestly, cut that sentence rather than estimate it.

**2\. The still.** Shoot the edge. Stand where your cover crop stops and the bare ground starts, whether that is a neighbor’s field, a road cut, or the untreated corner of your own place, and frame it so both sides are in one horizontal shot at knee height. The line between them is the photograph. Shoot midmorning so the texture reads. Do not tidy the frame, do not pull the weeds, and do not add a logo. A shopper who has never heard the word can still see a difference in dirt.

**3\. The video, 20 seconds, five shots, phone in hand.** Shot one, two seconds, boots walking into the field. Shot two, four seconds, hand pulling a plug of soil and breaking it apart on camera, close enough to see whether it crumbles or shatters. Shot three, four seconds, the same thing from the bare ground, and let the comparison do its own talking. Shot four, six seconds, you on camera saying exactly what you changed and what year you changed it. Shot five, four seconds, the product on the tailgate, no packaging hero, no music swell.

Three rules on that video. Nobody says the word regenerative. Nobody says sustainability. And if the soil does not visibly differ on camera, do not shoot it, because the whole point is that you are showing a thing rather than claiming it.

**The free internal move.** Ask your retail buyer, in writing, one question: is the certification a requirement or a preference, and does it change my cost or my facing. Save the reply. Everything above assumes you know which one you are answering to, and most brands paying for an audit right now have never actually asked.

This piece is the extension of this morning’s briefing. The show is where the desk gets read, the article is where it gets checked, and the post is what you do with it. Subscribe to The Daily Trends Report on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-trends-report/id1896763846?i=1000785549310&ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) or [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033jcZwbZNGKpeUTRJvt1J?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io) and it is waiting before you open the laptop.

If you are building or rebuilding a food and beverage brand’s organic social and every caption you draft could belong to anybody in the aisle, that is a positioning problem and more posting will not fix it. Come find me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/galluccinet?ref=giovanni-gallucci.ghost.io).