Co-Founders Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez
Back to the RootsNikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez started Back to the Roots 15 years ago as college students with $5,000. Today, their gardening brand is sold in Walmart
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. They’ve 10x their growth, says Arora, with consumers spending approximately $100 million on Back to the Roots products. And while it’s not been a smooth ride all along, facing the bumps that any business is bound to hit, they have remained true to their desire for an eco-friendly gardening company.
The duo started with mushroom grow kits (made with used coffee grounds that they collected from coffee shops near their UC Berkeley campus). When the first batch sprouted, Arora recalls walking over with a bucket of oyster mushrooms to the famed farm-to-table Chez Panisse, excitedly. Then they took it to the local Whole Foods buyer, who was intrigued by Arora and Velez’s unique offering. That led to a successful partnership and the starting of a business. So the two passed up on lucrative jobs post-college to launch Back to the Roots.
Today, the roster of products is much more comprehensive: peat-free soils, American-grown organic seeds, packaging made from recycled materials, and organic plant food. “We’re sticking to our mission to make organic as mainstream and as affordable as possible,” says Arora, co-founder and co-CEO of the California-based brand.
One of the key steps to making it accessible is getting into big box retailers where people are actually buying gardening gear. “That’s why we’re building the organic alternative for Walmart shoppers in soils, seeds, seed starters, and indoor kits. And it’s comparable in price.”
During the pandemic, a resurging interest in gardening helped companies such as Back to the Roots. As more people spent time at home, they picked up hobbies to keep them occupied. And as a younger generation discovered the perks of gardening, they looked for products that fit their ethos: namely, more organic options and more planet-friendly.
In recent years, Back to the Roots, Arora says, has seen a growing interest in their organic range. Walmart, for example, put them in over 3,000 stores, showcasing their peat-free, organic soil and organic seeds. It went beyond just putting the product on the shelves. They put up displays next to the products, hoping to educate consumers on organic and regenerative farming alongside soil health.
These are topics that Ben Peterson, a garden merchant at Walmart, has immersed himself in. He, for example, clay self-watering olla pots on the shelves, which Walmart customers loved, he says, introducing them to a more eco-friendly, albeit ancient technology, that uses biodegradable materials. “Sometimes we find that our consumers are ahead of the trends, and in other instances, we can put products on the shelf that help hit environmental goals.”
Walmart started carrying organic produce in the early 2000s, and has been adding to that consistently over the years. “We recognize that to convert a farm to organic is a multi-year process,” says Peterson. “We talk to growers all the time, and ask them, how do we help you transition to that phase? How do we help you utilize that land till you become organic?”
This is why Back to the Roots’ organic seeds, 95% grown on organic American farms, appealed to Peterson. “That has value. And I know it’s not easy to do. But we want to tell that story and hope it inspires more people — customers and growers.”
Although Back to the Roots is in so many retailers today, it wasn’t a straight shot to success. Arora and Velez have continued pitching to stores, year after year, despite being turned down many times. “We just kept in the game.”
To get into Walmart took 4 years. Now, Arora says they’re the fastest-growing organic brand in the store.
In addition to pushing organics, they’re looking at their packaging. Bags of soil are typically sold in giant plastic bags. While Back to the Roots couldn’t deviate too significantly from that style of packaging, they decided to incorporate post-consumer recycled plastic. That’s a win for Walmart too, as it helps them hit environmental targets, outlined in their Project Gigaton, through which the company aspires to reduce or avoid one billion metric tons (a gigaton) of greenhouse gases from its global value chain by 2030.
Back to the Roots worked with ProAmpac, a flexible packaging manufacturer, to shift to recycled PCR content in their bags. The material “performs at the same high level as virgin resin-based film,” says Gary Koellhoffer, Product Manager at ProAmpac.
“Back to the Roots’ adoption of advanced PCR content in the lawn and garden industry is inspiring. This launch sets the trend, pushing more brands across the industry to embrace cPCR and work towards greater sustainability in packaging,” Koellhoffer adds.
Having a ripple effect is part of Back to the Roots’ broader mission: “We believe that small actions can inspire waves of change when done with a purity of intent and purpose. We’re excited to keep on pushing to get better every day and collaborating with our industry friends to turn this into a sea-change moment for the category,” says Arora.
That said, they’re also looking at how to transform garden centers altogether in the long-term future: “When we think about reducing the footprint of our soil packaging, we go back to the fundamentals we learned in elementary school – reduce, reuse, and recycle,” says co-founder and co-CEO Alejandro Velez. “This is just the start of our journey towards a more sustainable soil category. We ultimately envision a world where our community can bring back their own reusable totes into stores to fill up with soil year after year after year; but in the meantime, we want to reduce & recycle — each bag we sell should use less and less drilled oil/gas and virgin plastic.”
So could Back to the Roots finally start to disrupt an otherwise stagnant category? Industry leaders, such as John Foraker (of Annie’s and Once upon a Farm), Gary Hirshberg (of Stonyfield Organic), Michael Pollan, and celebrities like Gabrielle Union, Alyssa Milano, and Ayesha Curry, are betting on it.
Lawn and garden is reportedly a $48 billion category still driven by brick and mortar sales. Retailers are really doubling on Back to the Roots as the next-gen brand that can compete against and offer an alternative to legacy players, says Arora.
