The Wheat Grass People

In the fall of 1976, Ron Seibold and Steve Malone set out to make dehydrated cereal grass a staple in the American Diet. Their dream is not yet fully realized, but look in any large health food store. As a result of their pioneering work, you will find many cereal grass products and find that virtually hundreds of products now contain cereal grass as an ingredient.
Pines Wheat Grass first appeared on health food store shelves years before stores devoted shelf space to a category called “Green Foods.” Before the pioneer work of these two founders of Pines, the idea of using a supplement to increase the green in your diet was not a part of the consciousness.
Four years after publishing and promoting their message of “Eat More Greens,” another cereal grass product hit the market. Five years after that, scores of wheat grass and barley grass products were sold in stores. In addition, chlorella and spirulina were introduced. All used Pines’ message of increasing the intake of dark green vegetation by using a naturally concentrated food in a tablet or powder form.
Several of the new cereal grass products may currently outsell Pines’ green barley and wheat grass, but none have yet matched the label concentration of beta carotene and other key green food ingredients. I wanted to know more about this, so I asked Ron Seibold.

Q: I notice that the nutritional content on your food facts panel is considerably higher than companies who claim their dehydration method is revolutionary. How do you explain that?
Seibold: Processing methods vary between manufacturers for any food. The key factor is how good the food is before you start to process it. We follow a tradition in Kansas that goes back more than 70 years. We know how to do it right. We know the right way to grow cereal grass and the right time to harvest it. We know the importance of keeping product under nitrogen and in storage conditions that greatly reduce nutrient loss. Further, our processing method creates a denser product than those from some other producers. A teaspoon of Pines weighs as much seven times more than some other cereal grass products. Even if Pines were nutritionally equal to them by weight, Pines would provide seven times more nutrition per teaspoon because it weighs seven times more per teaspoon.

Q: I can see why a consumer would appreciate using only one teaspoon of Pines instead of many teaspoons of another product to get the same nutrition, but doesn’t Pines cost more?
Seibold: That’s a good question. Actually a bottle of Pines is very comparable in price with a similar sized bottle of other products. Our bottles simply have more nutrition in them, so it is really costs much less for equal nutritional levels per serving. For a comparable price, you can increase your nutrition with Pines by using the same number of teaspoons or tablets.

Q: You mentioned nitrogen. What is that?
Seibold: Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. There is really nothing special about nitrogen. The point is that nitrogen does not react with plant material. It is inert. Oxygen, which is about 20% of the atmosphere, is what causes dehydrated plant material to slowly lose nutrition through oxidation. We keep our raw product and finished product in a 100% nitrogen environment. That removes the oxygen. I don’t know of anyone else who does that. The nitrogen packaging in amber glass bottles helps keep the nutritional level high, even if the product sits on a store shelf for several months or years.

Q: What about after I open the bottle, won’t the nutritional level start to drop?
Seibold: Yes, it will, but it is a very slow process. Most people will use up a bottle of Pines long before any significant nutritional loss. When you consider that most green products are not nitrogen-packed and many are packaged in plastic bottles, which offer much less protection than glass, you are already getting a product that is much fresher than any others. If you really want to keep the level at the highest possible level, you could keep the bottle in the freezer, but it isn’t necessary.

Q: Pines is a very respected company in the Natural Foods Industry. People point to your commitment to organic farming, wildlife habitat, your feeding programs and other charitable work. Has that always been the case?
Seibold: It has always been the case that our primary goal has been those kinds of things. It took quite a few years of hard work to get to a point where we could make a real difference. For most of our first 15 years, Steve and I did most of the work. I slept at the office and took phone calls. Steve typed the orders and did the shipping. We both worked on making tablets and filling bottles, but we did use part-time college students to help.

Q: How did you get the product into the health food industry?
Seibold: Initially, Steve and I traveled through 35 States and walked into 2,000 health food stores. We would get the product on the shelves of a good number of stores and then contact local distributors to supply them. Once we had a good distribution network, we could then focus on mailings and attending trade shows to build on our initial work.

Q: Who ran the office and made your product while you traveled?
Seibold: We really didn’t have an office, but two of our stockholders volunteered to fill orders out of their garage. At that time we contracted with farmers, dehydrators, tablet-making and packaging companies, but that started changing as soon as we returned from our trip late in 1977.

Q: Wasn’t that expensive to do that much traveling?
Seibold: It should have been, but we stayed at KOA Campgrounds at first. When we started getting a little more money, we decided we could stay at motels as long as they didn’t cost more than $15 per night. We’d hit a town, make up cards for each store and mark them on a map. I’d navigate and Steve would drive. We’d hit as many stores as we could between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day.

Q: You mentioned stockholders. Were you well financed?
Seibold: Not really. We started with $50 that Steve contributed. With that, we opened a Post Office box and photocopied a prospectus. Within a few months we had about 40 stockholders. Most of those who invested money only invested a hundred dollars or so. We only had $8,000 in cash. Most of our stock was issued for services. We paid our landlord in stock. We paid the farmer in stock. We paid the dehydrator in stock. We paid our employees in stock.

Q: That’s interesting. Most companies start because of one or two large stockholders or from a single loan.
Seibold: It didn’t work out that way for us. Part of it was our philosophy. Our goal was to make a difference in the environment, in people’s health, in agricultural methods and in land use patterns. We wanted the company to be an example of using the capitalist system to do something for the common good. We wanted a broad number of stockholders. The year was 1976, America’s Bicentennial. Our Nation had just been through the transformations of the sixties and the Vietnam War. We wanted to prove that free enterprise could still work. We wanted a company that was broad-based and that cared about more than just the bottom line.

Q: It seems like you’ve done that. So what is ahead for the next twenty-five years?
Seibold: More of the same. So far we’ve brought about 2,000 acres into organic certification. We’ve set up a foundation to protect about half of that acreage as permanent wildlife habitat. Most of the rest is set aside for organic farming. We’ve provided several million servings of wheat grass to feeding programs around the world. We have supported scores of organizations dedicated to protecting the environment and helping people. Certainly, we intend to continue to spread the health message of “eating more greens” to people around the world.

Q: Continued good luck to you. I hope that you will see your dreams accelerate even faster rate in the years ahead.