The New Food System

00:00
Dylan Stone-Miller
Welcome to the very first episode of the Commonwealth Revolution. This podcast is all about viable fixes to systems that we as a society need to step away from and dissecting the new systems that we are stepping into today. And in future episodes, we're going to be discussing the food system, how it's broken, and a solution for fixing it that would reduce grocery prices, reduce food waste, and give ownership of the food system to the people who shop, work, and produce food for it. So today I'm here with Austin, who's been running his own food distribution company for seven years, and he recently went viral on TikTok for exposing some truths about the food system here in the US he's the leader of the Commonwealth movement and I'm excited to be working with him. How are you doing, Austin? 

00:46
Austin Hadley
I'm doing so good, bro. So good to get this finally up and going to where we can start shouting it at people. 

00:54
Dylan Stone-Miller
I'm pumped too, man. It's good to be here with you. And this feels like it's been a long time coming. Just to introduce myself briefly to folks, I'm Dylan Stonemiller. I'm the co founder and CTO of Commonwealth Grocers. I'm a Forbes 30 under 30 founder back when I was under 30, and a Y Combinator founding software engineer with more than a decade of startup experience. So, Austin, I just want to jump right into it. How did we get to where we are with the food system and what are some of the problems with the food system? System? 

01:27
Austin Hadley
So. So I actually got to the food system a little bit after I was analyzing another problem. I tried to look at what we are as a species. The theory is between 2 to 300,000 years is about the time that we've been here. So if you can just go into your mind's eye and kind of play a tape, and I'm going to start this tape about 200,000 years ago, and I'm just going to hit fast forward. So as we're fast forwarding, what you're seeing in this tape is our evolutionary journey, right? We're a social species, which means we're highly connected to one another. And what we did was we formed small bands, tribes, and were nomadic, which meant that we traveled constantly looking for food. That's pretty much what life was for us. 

02:26
Austin Hadley
And so since were always up and down, always on the go, you couldn't have everything your own. It wasn't like you had a set of pots and pans and so did everyone else in the tribe. Because that would weigh everyone down too much. Everyone carried different things. No one had a sense of saying, this is mine, this is yours. However, they did have a sense that this was our tribe's stuff, right? Our tribe's tools, our tribes. This. And this tape is still playing. We're still going. This is how we did things. For the most part. We didn't have this overall idea of, you know what I mean, one thing can be let to another person. Everything was for the benefit of the whole tribe. 

03:08
Austin Hadley
Because if one person kept something away from everyone else, the whole tribe suffered and that person would be cast out. And so as we're going, we've gotten pretty far in. I'm going to stop the tape. And this is. We've been going for 188,000 years now of this same thing happening. 12,000 years ago, roundabout, we had a revolution, the very first that changed the way our species operated on this planet. That was the agricultural revolution. We figured out that we could put the seeds in the ground ourselves. Instead of this being something that we relied on, we could now trust in the fact that as long as we got seeds in the ground, water in the ground, and then sunlight on it, those seeds would turn into plants that we could eat. We could also do the same with raising livestock. 

04:05
Austin Hadley
We figured out how to make that work. And so now our entire lives here, this entire time that we've been on this planet, we've relied on something bigger than ourselves to eat. And that thing that we relied on, whether it was the planet or whether it was God, it was fair. It was fair to everyone, and it still is to almost every other living thing here. And so as you start to look into, okay, something changed 12,000 years ago. Now, we didn't travel, we didn't need to. What you put in the ground was now your crops. And if you put that in your ground, then that ground was your property. 

04:46
Austin Hadley
And so now we had started to section these pieces of ground off and say, well, now, okay, this is mine and I can build a house here and do all this and that'll be yours over there. And we don't have to move, we don't have to travel. And so we started to develop these kinds of, kind of townships, right, where everyone had a different skill. You had a shoemaker, you had someone who could work with metal, you had someone who could work with wood. You obviously had a lot of farmers. You had the society starting to build, and we built that way. If we hit play on the tape again, those little Societies expanded, and we still had a lot of the tribal aspects of life. We still had everyone pitching in. 

05:28
Austin Hadley
And now we get to the late 1700s, which is about 265 years ago, which is the revolution we're currently in. And this was the industrial revolution, where now we've got machinery, we've got steam engines, which we need new economic models for. Like, capitalism suited it perfectly because if you could own the machinery that produced the shoes and the food and the things made of wood and the things made with metal, you could basically corner the market in manufacturing. Because if you were the only one that owned machinery, none of the human laborers would be able to keep up with you. And so as the rise of the machinery, the industrial plants and all of that grew, cities grew around them. 

06:18
Austin Hadley
People needed to travel to the industrial areas so that they could work there because they were outpacing the production of all of the small rural areas. This also introduced a major need for states to get kids into school. So where kids used to spend a lot of time with the family, learn the trade, learn the farm, not to say that was the best possible way, but capitalism introduced this new idea of saying, hey, you're going to need to learn all of these skills for the factory work. You're going to need to learn how to do all of these things, and then your future can be in that, right? If you dedicate to the company, if you dedicate to the corporations, right? If, if you give yourself to us, we'll make sure that we take care of you. 

06:59
Austin Hadley
You don't need to farm your own food, right? And so now, as the agricultural revolution came, we took our faith and our trust in being fed from the planet or a creator of some kind into ourselves. We kind of played God, and then we gave that power to the rise of machinery because it could outpace us. And so what we have now, 265 years later, if you look at the system that we're living in, we're stuck where our population has expanded to a completely abnormal level. We've outpaced every other life form in the way of being able to take this on ourselves. Where everyone else relies on a natural ecosystem to keep balance, our species is too large. So we're now stuck inside of a system that we've created. 

08:00
Austin Hadley
And the problems that arise from that system is that we don't have any control over it, but someone else does. Basically, if you can't control what you're able to feed your family with, who does control that? And more importantly, what are their motives? Why are they doing this? Why have they created this whole system for us to eat? Hopefully, if this was more of a tribal setting, you would think it was for the general goodwill, making sure that everyone had enough food that they could maintain a good life and doing that for as cheaply as possible, because we traded, our ancestors, traded this system for what we already had in the hopes that it would better. 

08:52
Austin Hadley
And some of the problems that we're looking at now as you go into the grocery store, is you're seeing prices go up and you don't know what that's based on. There's zero transparency in a system that we depend on this desperately. And not only that, but somehow the politicians are able to get involved in a way where we're going to them and they're actually telling us we'll get these prices down. But it's funny, because when we had a pandemic, all the prices went up. That was what the catalyst was. That's what they blamed it on. And the pandemic went away, but the prices never went back down. And now they're saying prices are going to raise again due to maybe tariffs or other kind of things like that. 

09:45
Austin Hadley
The prices are always going to rise due to a catalyst, but they're never going to come down that much, and we're not allowed to know why. The way they've been able to achieve this is by making sure that there's always a middleman that's controlling the producers and the consumers. They've organized all of the manufacturers, all of the people who deliver food to come to one building. Once that food comes out of a truck and goes to their door, the price changes in a way that we'll never know about. And then as we go into the front door and buy the food, they're generating millions of dollars per week, per year. I mean, just. And we don't know how. 

10:25
Austin Hadley
So with some of these systems and with our population being at a level of such despair in so many areas, could we do something to build a system that mirrored more of that evolutionary natural law that we've spent the majority of our time here working in? 

10:48
Dylan Stone-Miller
And so you're saying that when the agricultural revolution came about, were eating within our community, were feeding ourselves, we took control of our food system. As the Industrial revolution came about, that control went to these owners, the folks who were running these factories, and we shifted away from us all being involved in our food system to being sort of separated from it or put within a hierarchy within it 100%. 

11:23
Austin Hadley
I mean, the biggest thing is just we're seeing in actual historical text our reliance shift. And then now we're trying to measure kind of the human effects on that shift, you know. 

11:38
Dylan Stone-Miller
Yeah. And so to put it sort of in economic terms, this is leading to $218 billion a year of food waste that we're essentially throwing away. It's an incredibly wasteful system. And I'm wondering, like, how do we, how are we currently covering that amount of waste? Like, how are we paying for that, if you will? 

12:06
Austin Hadley
Well, I think one of the most important questions about that is who is we? Because a lot of people have this idea that when you go in to a grocery store or really any other business, that whatever cost they incur with the business is kind of their problem. And some of the times that's true if it's unexpected. But if you can plan waste, let's say that over the last 10 years you've been doing business, you know that you're on average going to lose this much money in waste, then the only way to make your business really profitable, which is your goal, even if you're selling something as basic as food for people that need it, is you've got to put that cost into the rest of the products. 

12:54
Austin Hadley
And so what people first have to understand is that this waste that's in the system isn't just like a whoopsie and we'll try and do better. It's, it's something that they know is going to happen, it's been happening, and you are paying for it. And then I think that gets down to more of the deeper question of why, how can this possibly be so inefficient, especially with us doing it for so long. How have we not figured this out? And the thing is, the waste is more or less there because that ensures profitability, which if you're running this to get more money, then if you can pack the shelves deeper, not having any idea of what the people walking in are going to buy, you've got to put displays at every single turn. 

13:45
Austin Hadley
You've got to put deals and low prices everywhere that everyone is looking so that they will impulse buy as much as possible. And if you don't have something in their face, they're not going to buy it. And if they don't buy it, even though it's in their face, they're going to waste it. And that's just the cost of doing business. 

14:06
Dylan Stone-Miller
And so these shelves, these displays that, you know, every one of them takes labels. Every one of them requires some labor to stock it. You're, you're kind of touching on some significant inefficiencies within these traditional grocery stores here. You've been working with these grocery stores for more than seven years now. What are, what are some of the other things that the grocery stores are doing that is costing us money? Because you're saying that we're paying the, for all of this food waste there. I'm assuming those prices go up to reflect the waste that they know is going to happen. The labor, the stocking, the labels have everything that goes into higher prices for us, correct? 

14:58
Austin Hadley
And this isn't anything that they've necessarily done wrong. This is kind of a Blockbuster before Netflix or a Taxi Cab before Uber situation where they had to do it this way because we just didn't have any other way to communicate. I mean, if you're getting different farms and everything like that, instead of having everyone go to each farm, obviously if you could create a system where all of those different products came to one building, then all of the people came into that building to buy, you deserve a little bit of a profit. You know what I mean? You've taken on the cost of doing all this and you're making the lives of people, everyday, average people, much easier to eat. And that is a worthy and noble goal. They've done really well at that. 

15:47
Austin Hadley
However, of course, the expense of that is if you want to be able to put your food in a shopping cart, you're going to have to pay for some guy to push that shopping cart. If you want to make sure that there's always food on the shelves, then not only do you have to make sure that someone is there to stock the shelves, you need to make sure that someone is in the store to receive the product and make sure the numbers match. You've also got to make sure that the truck that brought the food had gas. And so your food price is always in flux between what you're paying in labor to get all of the food there, hoping because that it will sell without any promise. 

16:24
Austin Hadley
And if it doesn't sell, you're paying for the waste and you're also paying in the flux of gasoline because ultimately they're not going to say, well, if you didn't buy these products, we're going to take off the cost of gas that we paid to get it here. Obviously, whether you buy those products or not, if they're in the store, you're paying for the gas. And the labor to get them in the store and on the shelf to. 

16:47
Dylan Stone-Miller
Piggyback off what you're saying. There are enormous expanses of shelves in these stores that have to be like lit and cooled and refrigerated and heated, sometimes 24, 7. And you're touching on just how complex the logistics of that system are. Now you're speaking about sort of the shopper experience here and what it's like to maintain a of these enormous grocery stores that pays for prime real estate and a lot of it in a lot of these places. So that's expensive. The utilities, the stocking, the labor, the distribution systems, everything. Tons of opportunities for optimizing in terms of efficiency there. But what about from the supplier perspective? You have ran your own distribution. What's it like to be a distributor and work with these enormous grocery stores? 

17:47
Austin Hadley
So, yeah, 100% shopper experience. You got people pushing the carts, we got people stocking the shelves, trying to make sure that you're getting the food that you need for your family. That is so pretty. It's cute. It's got roses around it. The supplier side, that is a war zone. When you're seeing displays change, you know that someone either lost a contract or is losing money and someone else got it. When ads change, companies are finding out who got featured in what company's ads. And based on the deals that they've made, they may get furious. The grocery store from the supplier side is a giant real estate market. And so you are not the only one as a customer paying into the grocery store. 

18:40
Austin Hadley
Actually, the suppliers pay a ton of money to get not only into the stores, but especially specific locations in the stores. Right? Because the stores, like you said, have a lot of space. They have dusty back corners where if you don't want to pay much money, but you just want to get your product into a store, that's probably the shelf you're going to be on if you've got enough money to make sure that you can consistently get into that store. Which is also, I mean, this is a pay to play, right? It's kind of like the mafia. You're not going to make any headway by doing small stuff. These are big operations. The people that are coming are like the million dollar poker player people, right? 

19:29
Austin Hadley
Like they're coming in with big money, big industrial advantages to get tons of product tons of locations all over the country. And that's what these stores want, right? And so they're doing business with the biggest fish who are of course coming in and saying, I Want the best displays, the biggest locations. And so anything that a smaller company who's making a food product or anything, they just cannot compete with that. There's only so much room in the building and if that's already been paid for by the supplier, you're out. 

20:03
Dylan Stone-Miller
So taking a step back, you, as an independent producer, you're up against these giant suppliers, these folks that work as distributors for companies like say, PepsiCo or some of these just giants of industry, right? Nestle, et cetera. 

20:21
Austin Hadley
So to make a distinction on that, I'm actually not, I'm part of the problem. I work for one of those big companies and the way that a lot of them will do it is they actually sell routes, right? So you'll actually be able to buy a geographic area where you're selling a name brand product. You've got distribution rights is basically what you're buying. So you own your own truck, you go. And so that's the only reason I'm making money. To be honest. If I, if I was smaller and doing my own thing, I would not have time to do this podcast because I would literally be in a warehouse 247 trying to manage all these things to get pennies. 

21:07
Austin Hadley
Because when you're in that situation and everyone that I've talked to that's tried to do this, you know, they're doing well at the farmer's market, okay, they're getting it into some smaller stores and you know what I mean, they just hit a wall. The bigger suppliers find out and they're pushing them back down. It's a losing battle. There's so many different levels to the food system as far as where you buy your food, but the majority of it is going to be your Walmart, your Costco, Sam's Club, you know, wherever is big out in your area, as far as the kind of medium ones go. But whatever products they carry, those companies will survive. They've paid enough to survive Their fighting every day with each other at war. 

21:56
Austin Hadley
They're not worried about a small fish because they've already captured the market and monopolized where most of the people buy their food and buy their goods. They're going to have all of those shelves and they're not going to give them up. 

22:09
Dylan Stone-Miller
And so you're competing with other suppliers or distributors for contracts with those major grocery store chains. 

22:17
Austin Hadley
Oh, 100%. If you're a supplier, you say, okay, let's say it costs, you know, 50 cents to make a can of soda pop. Rough, simple numbers that are super not real. And you're going to go and say, hey, I want to sell it for 75 cents. Make my 25 cents. And then you give it to the store at 75. And they might say, okay, well, then we'll sell it for a dollar per can, right? Those are not at all how it works. But just for rough math, however much it costs to make the soda would be the base price. Not necessarily. So what's happening is they're spending the money to make the products, right? And the stores are saying, you're not going to get in here for that price. Right? It's not competitive, it's not low enough. It's not. 

23:09
Austin Hadley
And so let's say that you're going to make cookies, right? And you're trying to get them. You can make a ton of them, you can get them in there, but yours are going to be $5. Where everything else on the shelf is 250. But you know that everything else on the shelf, it's got wax in it's got cardboard, it's got tons of these ingredients that you can't read. You know, you have no idea what's in these cookies, but somehow they've managed to make cookies that taste good and get them at that cost, whereas you, with all of your real ingredients, can't. 

23:44
Austin Hadley
The suppliers are going to make sure that you don't survive because you don't have access to all of the chemical and the manufacture process that it takes to make that kind of cookie for $2.50, meaning the market won't even get the option to eat a cookie that's baked with flour. That incentivizes a lower quality of food. Because obviously the less money that you put into your manufacturing to get the food, the lower prices you can offer, meaning a better chance of getting onto the shelf. 

24:12
Dylan Stone-Miller
I mean, I'm traveling right now. I'm out of my element. And I've had to shop at kind of the more traditional places, some different than the smaller chains that I usually shop at in Colorado. And I mean, I'm breaking out. I feel tired, I feel strange, I feel off. I'm literally feeling the effects of what you're describing right now. And it's kind of alarming how quickly we, we start to notice that on the consumer side of things. And it sounds like on the supplier side, it is a war zone that you are just fighting for pennies per unit. 

24:48
Dylan Stone-Miller
You're out Here against other guys with trucks who are trying to make a living, and you're all kind of racing to the bottom in terms of prices just to make sure that you can get some shelf space, that your cut, the company that you represent can get some shelf space. 

25:04
Austin Hadley
And this all happens on a much higher level than anyone you see. And this is the other thing that is just so hard to grapple with, especially when you take it in the context of our evolutionary, more natural way that we've adapted to live around one another, is I'm. I'm broke. Just as broke as the shoppers. I live next to them. I'm part of their community. I live next to the people that work in the grocery store. None of us have that much more money than any of the shoppers, right? And all of the other people that drive trucks, we all have about the same amount. We got the same kind of problems. You know, we're never too high, never too low, just getting by like everyone else. But these conversations that we're talking about are happening at a large scale, right? 

26:00
Austin Hadley
These are happening by people who not only see me as a distributor, but all of the customers in the store. Our whole community is seen as a spreadsheet. And you can break that spreadsheet down to our specific local community, and then you can scale it up to every location that you have in the country. But there's not a human element. So when these decisions get made on what we're going to do to make, what kind of ingredients we're going to use and what kind of cost that's going to get us, and then with that, what kind of shelf space that we're going to get. And at the end of the day, you've got so many numbers and so much data that you've forgotten the fact that people who are hungry and need to eat healthy food are coming into this location. 

26:43
Austin Hadley
They're not just concerned about the price, even though they are. And to make a incredible amount of profit off of that, I think is scandalous and sickening. But just like you said, this is real people's health. You know, this. We're not playing an economic game here like Monopoly. You know, we're talking about much bigger things. So, yeah, it's just hard for people to grapple with. 

27:10
Dylan Stone-Miller
You say big, and we talk about scale big. This is an $800 billion a year industry. That's as much as the US spends on defense. You can picture a society that spends as much on destruction as it does on, you know, creation and health and what that would mean for us to take back control of that amount of our society, what it means for healthcare, what it means for the economics, what it would mean for the money that gets extracted from those communities that, like you said, you're a part of. You live next to the people that shop there. You all are propelling this system. And yet the money is going to, you know, the industry owners. 

27:52
Dylan Stone-Miller
At a certain point, we've noticed this, the wealth distribution just becomes inviable for a healthy society and what a huge opportunity it is for us to seize back. So I think it would be this is a good time for us to transition into what some of the solutions to these problems are. We've talked about food waste driving up prices, suppliers being squeezed for pennies, and the money being extracted in these straight up parasitic systems. So what are some of the solutions here? 

28:28
Austin Hadley
The idea was very simple. This food can be sold to anyone, right? As long as there's a space to drop it off, we can get food to people. And as long as there's a large enough group to cover the cost of the cases, then they're getting it straight. Let's say you've got a group, a big group, let's say 500 people. 

28:47
Dylan Stone-Miller
And you're talking about having those 500 people put together their collective buying power in order to be able to afford wholesale units of food. 

28:59
Austin Hadley
I'm actually just telling them to do what they're already doing. So from the vendor's perspective, it's funny. I'll bring in a case of whatever product it is, and then I'll watch 10 people that probably live right next to each other come up. They each take one, right? If they did that, and before they walked in, the store just said, hey, hey. Do you guys each want one of these things? One of these, you know, one of whatever food product it is. Let's just buy a case. Because 10 come in a case, right? But instead they do it through the store. And then of course, they're paying the fee for the store to organize them. So this is just like if we organized ourselves a little bit, you know what I mean? 

29:42
Austin Hadley
Then of course you could do the thing that you just did at the grocery store, but you would save quite a bit of money. And if you did that on everything or the majority of things that you bought at the grocery store, I mean, you're just, you're saving mad money. Completely efficient. Because if you know that 10 of you want it and 10 come in a case, you're not paying for any waste. 

30:04
Dylan Stone-Miller
And this is a system that has been done just over and over again in a million different ways in the form of what are referred to as grocery co ops. What we've learned about these co ops is that oftentimes the logistics start to fall apart because there just isn't the scale that's needed to compete for the contracts from these bigger companies. When I saw your video, which yeah again 4 million views and counting, over half of a million likes, I was overwhelmed for you. I was so excited to see the response because it is such an obvious thing to be like hey, here are these people taking money from this system when like we could cut them out and do this ourselves. It's sort of a similar thing to health insurance in this country where we're paying a bunch of taxes. 

30:56
Dylan Stone-Miller
24% of our federal dollars go through insurance companies to provide health insurance that we still have to pay for. So something in that system is fishy where instead of getting health care directly it's going to companies and then those companies are charging us more. That's just like what's happening in our food system here. And that to see that not sitting well with people and to, and to sit down with you and be like hey, how do we solve this with a technology that scales enough to make it so that this is a logistically viable system. I was just so excited for the whole thing. 

31:39
Dylan Stone-Miller
I chilled right now just thinking about how many people that is and if we just got, if we got each of them to be a shopper in the system that would Capture half a percent of this 800 billion dollar market and that would be a 4 billion dollar a year company. If we took out these people that are owning this system and we took those $4 billion and reinvested it in the form of dividends and owners literally gave the people that are a part of that 4 billion system ownership, then that's a lot of money each year that people are saving. We're talking thousands of dollars that are going back into the pockets of the distributors of the shoppers of people that could really use it. 

32:19
Dylan Stone-Miller
Thinking about people actually owning a company and having a stock portfolio, some for the first time just from shopping. That's how society should operate. And it's been a huge part of our society. It's just accepting that there are these parasites at the top that maybe a long time ago or their ancestors built these wonderful systems and worked really hard. And it's not to say that those people aren't working really Hard. But they're taking a mildly disproportionate amount out of this system. And it's. We're all feeling it at the grocery store, we're all feeling it at the doctor. We're, we're feeling these effects pretty strongly. 

32:56
Austin Hadley
So, so, but to go back, because I want to know, please, how you did solve logistics. I mean, even if we got the group of people together, how would they get in touch with suppliers and get that all? Because you're the one that built it. 

33:12
Dylan Stone-Miller
So I'll go ahead and share my screen here just to show a nice visual here of the system we came up with. For folks who are listening, you can find this information@commonwealth grocers.com you can also join our discord to sees. These visual assets that the folks on our YouTube channel or who are seeing this visually are seeing now essentially working with you to pinpoint where the problems in the system are. I mean, it's a no brainer for a technologist here. It's, it's something I've been doing as a consultant. I've done in the education system, I've done for small businesses. This was an easy system to identify what things are wrong with it. I was blown away with the information that you shared with me. And yeah, we came up with this system where the people would own a much more efficient food system. 

34:12
Dylan Stone-Miller
So how it works is essentially you shop online from home brands, you like produce, you like everything. This is a typical shopping experience. I know a lot of people have always already moved to online shopping themselves. So what happens is you choose portions of the wholesale quantities, just like Austin was talking about earlier. If everybody gets together in the store and says, hey, should we each. Do you want some of this again next week? Let's all take a portion and cut out the store themselves. Let's put our buying power together. Buy wholesale quantities, but just getting portions of them and having the convenience of being able to shop without walking through the aisles, et cetera. 

34:52
Dylan Stone-Miller
So your orders get pooled together and once you reach wholesale minimums by a weekly deadline, then we place the bulk purchase directly with the wholesalers, folks like Austin and some of the other suppliers, farmers, and you get access to wholesale prices. Those then get delivered to our fulfillment centers. This was a big one that you and I were talking about. It's like, okay, you know, can we just deliver to farmers markets? Can we just deliver to local businesses? No, we have to have our own fulfillment centers because this food needs to be Processed, it needs to be handled in a food safe way. So we have these fulfillment centers where our team divides the wholesale cases into the individual orders. And you can just come by as a shopper and you can scan your QR code and just pick up your order very quickly. 

35:48
Dylan Stone-Miller
It's like an Amazon locker, but for food. So this means you're not walking through the aisles, you're not bagging groceries. It also means that we don't have to stock aisles and aisles of food or put labels on everything. It's a much more efficient system of shopping in a million ways. 

36:06
Austin Hadley
The other big problem that we faced once we figured out these logistics, even if we could all run it separately, was the buying power. Right now, buying power is held by the largest corporations. And so this is why when you go to Walmart, the prices are cheaper than when you go to a smaller store. They can't get as low prices as Walmart can because Walmart can flex more buying power. And this is one of the ways that Walmart is able to overtake a lot of the mom and pop shops. Same with Costco and Sam's Club and things like that, is they're able to get prices so low that they can even keep it at the same or lose money on it in a way that it would be stupid not to shop there because the other stores can't compete at all. 

36:55
Austin Hadley
And that's exactly what they would do. Excuse me. To us. And so even if we've got 50 of these different centers all across the country, each one is going to be totally isolated, which means that whatever bigger stores are in that area are just going to muscle each of us out. However, if were all collectively unified like our own tribe, then of course what we had to spend with these different manufacturers, these different, I mean, all of the different vendors would be able to keep up with these bigger chains because we'd be doing exactly what they're doing, networking under one umbrella frame that works with the manufacturers. 

37:43
Dylan Stone-Miller
So putting together all of these different locations and as a larger entity, we can then meet that economy of scale. Especially when, you know, those 4 million viewers of the video and then some sign on to a system like this. In the meantime, since we're cutting out all of the expenses, even things like, I know, Austin, you and I have talked about grocery stores factor in theft, food theft into the prices we're paying for the food that gets stolen from these places. This solution with these fulfillment centers and getting buying direct from the producers cuts out so Much inefficiency that we can actually start to compete on prices very early on. We don't have the overhead that these traditional grocery stores do. So as we achieve that economy of. 

38:42
Austin Hadley
Scale, it just gets better and better 100%. Because as more people sign on, as more power comes in, right? If, let's say, 10 million people shop at Walmart every week, if 10 million people sign on to us, we're Walmart, even if we're not spending the money, we can show the exact same buying power as Walmart without charging anyone a penny. All they have to do is say, I'd rather shop with the people. But then the main problem that we ran into was if. Because if it was just small groups in your community, you would be building that up and everyone there would have full ownership. There wouldn't be someone at the top that was running it. Whereas if we're all connected under one software, under one system, who's going to own that? 

39:37
Dylan Stone-Miller
And by putting it under one umbrella here, it actually makes it so that we can viably and legally distribute ownership to every single person who is a part of this ecosystem. So every monthly membership fee or subscription is actually purchasing stock in this company, which means it's like mortgaging food instead of renting it. You know, what is, what does a homeowner do? Every month? They are paying hundreds of dollars into their own equity. So what if we did that with food? You know, if we're paying, say $20 a month, and that's a $20 investment, that's going into our ownership, our equity back into our pockets, whereas renting, we're paying for all of these grocery stores, expenses in the prices of the food, and we're not even getting any ownership. 

40:39
Dylan Stone-Miller
You go to Costco, you know, they have the monthly membership fee, but that's not giving you stock each month. This, this is something completely. I, I have just not seen this before. And we've figured out a legal way to structure this company so that everybody owns it, including the producers, including the employees and the shoppers. So I'm just so excited about this, and I really hope that it pushes other companies to start to structure their subscription models like this, because really, it's the people that are propelling all of these companies. If Spotify or Netflix or Amazon is allowing you ownership, then that means that the Jeff Bezos of the world, you know, these people aren't extracting the wealth from us. And that, I think, is just really exciting. And I think that people are going to start to demand that type of system. 

41:45
Dylan Stone-Miller
Some other happy side effects of this system is if we're cutting out so much of the inefficiency, then what we can actually do is pay the people who are supplying the food a better, more fair price. So instead of squeezing our farmers, which I just hate to see these farmers like struggling economically and hardworking folks with crocs who deserve fair pay and not to, you know, I've heard horror stories of truckers going into debt because of these really pay parasitic systems, logistic systems, where they end up owing money and things like that. So for us to take a, a stand and say we're cutting out all of this overhead and we're going to give the producers a better price and still be able to give the people a much better price, it just makes total sense. 

42:39
Austin Hadley
And that also incentivizes the producers that are producing the food not to use cheaper ingredients. Because if we're constantly driving their prices down, then the incentive is always there for them to, you know, make the product cheaper in order to stay afloat. That's not, that's not going to happen with us. 

43:02
Dylan Stone-Miller
Whoa, that's huge. I swear, man, Sometimes you'll say some stuff that I haven't thought about yet and it just multiplies my perspective on what this all is. I think we should give them a sneak peek of the software just to show them how far along this stuff is. 

43:22
Austin Hadley
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm 100% down. 

43:26
Dylan Stone-Miller
This is what's been going on in the background. Again, I'm the CTO here. I've been building this tech and this, it's going to look like a typical online shopping experience. The differentiator here is you get to select which pickup location you're going to be shopping from. And you'll be able to see the progress towards that wholesale minimum threshold for the item at the pickup location. So if you want to add a couple to your cart, you know, these are, that's just two packages that you would find in the store. We're adding those to the cart. It'll give you some suggestions for what kind of other related products that are available at that same location. And you can simply and easily and quickly check out just as you would on any other online shopping experience. And use stripe to process our payments. 

44:19
Dylan Stone-Miller
This is what all the big boys use. You complete this and as soon as this form gets filled out, a wholesale order gets placed with the distributors. When it's delivered to the fulfillment center, then the distributor gets paid. The Shopper gets notified at every step of the way. I'm sure you have some questions about all of this, but we just wanted to show you that look, this is not that far away from being a reality, and the technology behind this is very doable and almost done. So this is something that we're really excited about and I'm happy to give a sneak peek there. Let's go right into the roadmap of how we're going to bring this to fruition, because the tech is there, the solution is there, the systems are there. 

45:05
Dylan Stone-Miller
But I want to share a little bit about the philosophies behind what we're doing. This is something from somebody in our Discord community, Jay Friday. She's amazing. She's been helping us with some of the marketing and put together this infographic for activists. Because I would say what we're doing is activism. It's sort of practical activism, which is we have all of these current systems and we can do all sorts of things that act on these current systems. Union strikes, protests, charity. And these things have some leverage. Right. And they're very important. They're a part of a successful movement for sure. But what we're talking about here is a little higher up in this infographic here. And again, these are available in our Discord community, if you are just listening to us right now. But a little higher up in this infographic are new systems. 

46:00
Dylan Stone-Miller
The graphic goes from lowest leverage to highest leverage and up towards the highest leverage. Part of the graphic are things like shifting our beliefs, I. E. Expecting our subscription payments to go towards ownership of the companies to whom we are subscribing. If we shift our belief in that, then that is creating a new system of thought, of belief, new expectations. The market is driving a more equitable society for all of us. Up there, in terms of highest leverage is social entrepreneurship. 

46:37
Austin Hadley
Social. 

46:38
Dylan Stone-Miller
So this is a concept where you build something that is financially sustainable so that you don't have to rely on volunteers to try and change the world. Because it's really hard as a volunteer when you have to go and earn money to work on something really important and actually have it last and grow and propel itself. It's something that Austin and I have been experiencing these last few months. So we are building something here that falls within this social entrepreneurship realm. It's a new system that is financially propelling itself. We have a business model behind Commonwealth Grocers that enables this to be a viable economic solution and something that can make the most change, more change than trying to operate within existing systems. So our theory of change here is we have a bunch of inputs and we're expecting certain outputs and outcomes. 

47:42
Dylan Stone-Miller
So our inputs being we're going to partner with local food producers, we're going to have our tech platform and we're going to track the ownership of the company on this tech platform. We're, we're going to jump much more deeply into what the ownership looks like legally and everything. We'll even talk about that more in just a second. But we'll have community fulfillment centers, we're going to have subscriptions, we're going to do some equity crowdfunding where we're not taking venture capital for this because we don't want people to own a disproportionate stake. We want everybody to own this as equitably as possible. So all of these things are going into this thing where we are going to be doing wholesale grocery sales and that takes local food logistics, it takes fulfillment center operations, it takes ownership management, and it takes a lot of community education. 

48:39
Dylan Stone-Miller
So those are kind of the inputs and activities that we're going to be doing now. Outputs, these are the metrics, these are the things that we're going to be tracking to make sure that we're doing what we set out to do. So some of our outputs, some of our KPIs, if you will, if you're familiar with that, Key performance indicators is the money saved by our member shoppers on groceries. How much are people saving monthly and annually using our more efficient grocery shopping system? We're looking at the total value created for shoppers through the ownership side of things. What are these stocks worth and how has that generated wealth for everybody and how much more is earned by the local producers and farmers under this system? 

49:27
Dylan Stone-Miller
We're going to look at the number of community members who are owners, these are how many people that are participating in this system. We're also going to look at the volume of food, we're going to look at the number of food products, and we're going to look at some of the environmental impact that we're having, like reduced food miles and the CO2 and other indicators associated with that. And ultimately what we want to see is a more equitable food system where the value created by the food system is flowing to the people, to the producers, the consumers. Instead of intermediaries. We're looking for a more democratized ownership of what is an essential service, this food system here. And, and we want that to lead to economic resilience within communities. And more shared prosperity. 

50:15
Dylan Stone-Miller
And there are so many opportunities within this new system to start to have mutual aid networks form within these fulfillment centers. In these communities, we can vertically integrate and strengthen the security of our entire food system. We can make sure that these smaller producers are able to contribute their food and benefit economically. You know, that's a brief overview. Again, this, there's a graphic associated with this for the folks who are listening and you can access it in our discord, which you can find a link to on our website here. But let's quickly go into our strategy for bringing this to life. This is our growth road map here. Right now we're in phase one, which is to build demand for this new food system. 

51:01
Dylan Stone-Miller
If this is something that you want to see in your area, then we need you to sign up@commonwealth grocers.com that's what we need from you. Today. We're launching our wait list. And the more people that get on this wait list, the faster that we can bring this food system to your area. So if you recruit a thousand people in your area, then what we can do is go to crowdfunders, go to our community and say, hey, this place has a thousand people ready to shop. We can tell the producers in that community, hey, we have a thousand people worth of buying power. Then those suppliers, those crowdfunders folks are going to contribute more quickly to the areas that have bigger demand. The area that has the most demand, we're going to secure our first fulfillment center there. 

51:52
Dylan Stone-Miller
And we are going to hone our processes in this launch city. We're going to refine that playbook. And in months 10 to 16, we're going to be ready for expansion into three more cities. From there, we'll expand into 10 more cities. And so this is all within three years here. And this has a really promising financial future for folks who are looking to become investors in this early on, like I said, we're going to be doing equity crowdfunding. So it's like I said, if we capture half a percent of the $800 billion grocery market, then that's $4 billion a year. So imagine what we could do with 50% of this. Or if we shift the entire food system to this model, it's a $20 monthly investment for members. 

52:35
Dylan Stone-Miller
Think of it as the Costco fee, but it's buying you stock instead of just getting you into the store. Then we need to cover our expenses and pay our humans that are working for us. So we do a 7% price markup on the food, so you're getting 7% above wholesale. That's still a savings of 30 to 50% on typical retail groceries. Each fulfillment center has a 12 month break even time. And all of this is community owned. So this price markup isn't going to these owners that are extracting it. It's a part of what fuels this economically, allows us to grow and expand to those three new cities to borrow the money we need to cover the cost of fulfillment centers in those 10 expansion cities that we go to after that. This is just a simple, viable way to propel this forward. 

53:26
Dylan Stone-Miller
And again, 100% community owned. For right now, what we're looking for is $1.2 million of investment, looking for a business loan until we can qualify for the SEC's Regulation A Plus, which would allow us to provide equity tokens, provide ownership to the investors here. We need 1.2 million to get started and then we can hire our CFO who can manage the financial regulatory things. We can hire all of the people we need to get the first fulfillment center going and we can make sure that we get to the 12 month break even here for that first fulfillment center. 

54:09
Dylan Stone-Miller
Then everyone after that is much cheaper, about 3/4 of a million with a 10 month break even timeline for us to again expand and grow and lead to this being a really good investment for everybody involved and for the people who are buying in each month. So we'll talk a little bit more about how the dividends increase with time. I'm really excited to share more about that in the future, but I want to be respectful of people's time here. So tune in future episodes for us to break down exactly how that ownership looks. I did kind of want to bring it back to the human side of things, Austin, and put you on the spot for just a second and ask like, why are you doing this? Like, what is the motivation behind this? What got you excited about this project? 

54:55
Dylan Stone-Miller
And, and being a leader of this movement with millions of people behind it. 

55:03
Austin Hadley
Yeah, no, I, it's super cool. It's a super cool position to be in. Ultimately. I want posterity, right, to be able to have the choice between who do you work with? Is it the people or the elite? Is it that small group that you know is going to profit from every move that you make, whether you're buying or working there? Or is it a large group of people in your community who actually care about who see your kids, who see the people that you care about your aging parents, whatever it may be, and they understand your situation in the tribe. That's how it was you. You could not fire someone without still having to sleep within 20ft from them. Right. The disagreements. 

55:54
Austin Hadley
And so I would like to create a world where we have the choice in that we're not subject to all of the things that we're living with. And it's especially crucial right now at this exact moment, because we are actually coming to an end of what we've called the industrial revolution, which was essentially the rise of the machines. And now, from what I hear, we're looking at the next one to five years, beginning the new revolution, the third revolution of humanity, which is in the technical aspects. AI is going to be one of the biggest pieces of that. If you think about how companies operate right now, you have an incentive structure at the top that says everything that is done, every action that is made, needs to profit us. 

56:45
Austin Hadley
With the food system, for example, if you run some of these bigger companies in the food system, the way you're looking at this is if people are eating, are you the one profiting off that? If not, if it's not you, who is it and what are they doing that you could come in and get away from them? Right. That's what the war is every bite that you take, every meal that you feed to your kid, someone has to make money off of that. And if they don't, they're not incentivized to either make it healthy or make it provided easily. 

57:19
Austin Hadley
This system has been built in a way that when new technological advancement comes in, we are going to be at the bottom of the totem pole, because as you've seen with some of the technology that's already come into this system, we used to have a cashier, which was a financial burden to have every single one of these checkout lines have a cashier. And then they brought in the self scan. Did it make prices go down even though they were able to cut out the employees? Of course not. Did it make their profits go up? Of course it did. That's why they kept the policy in place. That's why we see new stores doing it all the time. If it wasn't making them money, they wouldn't keep doing it. 

58:03
Austin Hadley
Obviously, whatever theft occurs is not as much as the profits made from saving on the labor, but all of those profits get sucked out of the community. That you shop the store in your community, it sucks all of that money out. It doesn't pay the people in your community. To work the checkout register, Nor does it give you cheaper money on groceries. When this new technology comes in, they will cut out more humans, which will make them more profitable, and you will not pay a penny less. The more companies that are owned by a small group of people, when those technological advancements come, we will be the only ones to benefit. 

58:42
Austin Hadley
Whereas if you have an equal share in the company that you're buying from or that you're working in, you'll be able to say, yes, we want the latest technology, we want the most advanced technology, and when that benefits us, it will benefit all of us equally, and we get a democratic vote on how that benefits us. 

59:03
Dylan Stone-Miller
Chels, again, every other time you talk, it's. It's amazing to think about what can happen from that. I mean, I've, you know, I've marched in the streets, I've donated to causes, I have boycotted. I've done all of these things. But this feels like something that we can really do to almost provide a sort of universal income for people that participate in this system. We know the government's not going to do that for us. We know that this government is designed for centrism and that nothing radical is really going to emerge from it. For us to be able to seize control, to almost play this economic game for the benefit of us, is. 

01:00:02
Austin Hadley
A. 

01:00:02
Dylan Stone-Miller
Very viable way for us to. To do something more substantial than walking around. 

01:00:08
Austin Hadley
When we take this on ourselves, that we're going to do a march, we're going to do a protest, we're going to do a boycott, we're going to do something that's going to impact the system. The man, right, We're. We're falling into the plot of they're saying, you know, they're biting the hand that feeds. That's what we say, too. We're biting the hand that feeds. As long as we keep ourselves in that position, we are acknowledging that they feed us. We are literally acknowledging that while we may have the ability to bite their hand, without their hand, we starve. And so any action that we do against them only acknowledges that they have the control over us, Whereas we're the only thing that provides that control, being the 99% of us are the consumers and also the labor force. 

01:01:03
Austin Hadley
And so to bite a hand, that is just kind of the wizard of Oz behind a curtain and have them say, oh, you got us. Okay, we'll give you a dollar off or we'll give you some small thing is ridiculous. When you see, well, if we just took our power back we'll actually just have you guys come and beg from us. And if you want to be owners in our company on an equal level with everyone, you're welcome to. You know, we don't even need to play the games with them. We can just take it all over. 

01:01:33
Dylan Stone-Miller
And Commonwealth Grocers is not just a theory or a, an idea that can happen. This is a viable legal framework for us to seize this power back to the tune of $800 billion should we as a society choose to seize it here. So what we need from everybody right now, I have to jump into these calls to action because there's some really simple, quick, 30 second things that you can do to be a part of this. We need folks to sign up@commonwealth grocers.com first and foremost. If we can't demonstrate that there is a demand for this system, that then this stays as just an idea. But the more people that sign up in your area, the higher the likelihood that we are going to launch in your area sooner rather than later. So the more people that you can get. 

01:02:28
Dylan Stone-Miller
There's a referral reward system in place. Sign people up. As soon as you sign up, you get your unique link. You can send that, share that, spread that around as far and wide as possible all over the US And Canada. For now, before we talk about international politics here later on, we also are looking for that initial fundraising so that we can bring in that CFO to get the legal financial framework for us to be able to distribute ownership legally without the SEC bankrupting us out of existence. So there are a bunch of different ways that you can help, really. We're looking for folks to sign up and spread the word as much as possible. Join our discord if you want to be a little more involved in that word spreading context. 

01:03:14
Dylan Stone-Miller
Austin has built an awesome community that keeps growing and keeps getting more defined as far as who's on what team and how people want to contribute. There are a million different ways to actually take some action. And I can tell you it was one of the first times when I started building this software I was like, this is action. This is what we really need to do. I don't feel frustrated like I have felt for years, trying to figure out exactly what to do to make a real impact. This is it. This is a huge vehicle for wealth creation, for health reform, for all sorts of things. And I just, I want. Yeah, Austin, you. You rule, man. 

01:04:01
Dylan Stone-Miller
Thank you for bringing this to the world and bringing shining a light on it because it's not something that I knew anything about, nor did I think those 4 million people. No. 

01:04:13
Austin Hadley
Well, it's. It's a spark. We've definitely sparked it. And. And with you building out the technological base to actually make it happen so we have something to work with. We've got a solid Spark. And you're 100% right. The fire is going to come from the people. This is the first time that I know of where this many people have the option to own their own system or continue relying on the people that own them. And so every signup is power to the people. Every single person that joins on and says, hey, when this gets built, I will use it because I want my prices turned into dividends that come back to me, my family, and my community members, which will lower crime, lower poverty, lower hunger, make life better for everyone. We have that choice, and it's a simple signup. 

01:05:09
Austin Hadley
That's all we have to do. And we've got this. We've got the system. It's there. Just hit the link and sign up. 

01:05:18
Dylan Stone-Miller
Awesome, Austin. This is awesome. We're going to get back to work. We're also going to take care of ourselves because this is a marathon. And just thanks, everybody, for tuning in. If you made it this far, we love you. 

01:05:33
Austin Hadley
Yep. So much love and respect.