Redmond Heritage Farms

The Story

Redmond, Utah, is a salt town. The Roberts family has mined mineral salt there for generations, and the company that grew out of it, Redmond Inc., now sells Real Salt, electrolyte mixes, bentonite clay, and a long list of other products. The farm came later, and it came sideways.

By Redmond Inc.'s own telling, Rhett Roberts grew up on farm food: raw milk, whole eggs, pastured meat. After college he ate more like the rest of the country, and his health slipped. He and his wife Stephanie went looking for an explanation and landed on the work of Weston A. Price, the early-twentieth-century dentist who tied traditional whole-food diets to better health. Roberts decided to eat the way he had as a kid.

The problem was sourcing. You could not, at the time, walk into a Utah grocery store and buy raw grass-finished milk or genuinely pastured meat, and Utah law made raw dairy especially hard to come by. So Roberts began bringing food in from elsewhere: wild salmon from Alaska, raw dairy from Amish farms back east. Other Redmond employees asked to get in on the shipments. The orders grew large enough that, as the company tells it, someone bought a cow and started milking it in their garage.

In 2003, rather than keep crowding the office with food deliveries, Redmond opened a store. It was called Real Foods then, and it sold only nutrient-dense food to anyone who wanted it. Stores in Salt Lake City and Heber followed, along with cafes, a production kitchen, and the farm in Redmond that now supplies the dairy.

The Practices

Redmond is unusually open about how their food is made, and the beef in particular comes with a clear, self-stated explanation that's worth reading before you assume anything from the label.

Start with what they raise themselves. The farm in Redmond is built around a dairy herd that produces Grade A Certified Raw Milk. Redmond describes the cows as pasture-fed, moving to a roughage-and-fodder diet in winter, with no hormones or chemical feed additives and antibiotics used only to save an animal's life, after which, they say, that cow's milk is pulled from sale. The dairy is tested quarterly in state-certified labs, which is a real and unusual level of transparency for raw milk, and a requirement of selling it legally in Utah. They also produce six raw-milk cheeses, gather eggs from pastured chickens, and raise pork on a corn- and soy-free organic feed.

The beef works differently, and Redmond lays it out clearly. They don't raise their own beef cattle; the farm's grass goes to the milk cows. Instead they contract with local Utah ranchers and, per their published FAQ, bring in calves from auction at around three months old. Because of that auction origin, Redmond notes openly that they can't guarantee the animals ate only grass in those first months, so they describe the beef as "grass-finished" rather than certified "grass-fed." Grass-finished means no grain in the final 90 days or more before slaughter, which is the window their own research points to as mattering most for fat composition. Their meat page adds that each rancher signs an affidavit attesting the beef is grass-finished and raised without hormones, antibiotics, and steroids. Much of it comes from high-mountain grazing, supplemented with hay in winter. Carcasses are dry-aged two to two and a half weeks and cut by a USDA-certified butcher in Salina.

The grass-finished and certified-grass-fed distinction here is Redmond's own, drawn from their own site, and we haven't verified it on the ground. It's also exactly the kind of plain-spoken labeling that makes a producer easy to trust.