68-year-old started 'about 50 businesses,' then 'stopped trying to get rich'—and built a $450 million egg company

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Inspired by Whole Foods, Matt O'Hayer launched pasture-raised egg company Vital Farms in 2007 with just 20 hens. Now, his company is worth hundreds of millions.

His biggest success came when he stopped "trying to get rich" and started a company he believed in — one with a "deeper purpose," he says. That'sThe business works with more than 300 family farms across the country, and can process up to six million eggs per day. It brought inO'Hayer launched Vital Farms in 2007 with 20 Rhode Island Red hens on a 27-acre farm near Austin, Texas.

It took two years for Vital Farms to turn its first operating profit. O'Hayer spent most of that time overcoming the mistakes of a novice farmer. In 2009, the company landed its "first big customer" — Whole Foods. Over eight slow years, the grocer expanded Vital Farms from Midwest stores to the rest of the country, which O'Hayer calls a "slog."

As sales picked up, Vital Farms expanded to retailers including Albertsons, Kroger, Publix, Target and Walmart. Today, the brand appears in more than 24,000 stores nationwide.O'Hayer's goal was always to partner with other farms: More eggs means higher sales. "The truth is that no matter what eggs you're buying, [there] are some ways in which we would like to see producing those products be made better in some way," Diez-Canseco says. "We face the same dilemma as any other egg producer does. Those are certainly not things we shy away from talking about, but they're not things that the industry has come up with a very different alternative for today.

 

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68-year-old who started ‘about 50 businesses': How I built a $450 million company that sells eggs at $10 a dozenInspired by Whole Foods, Matt O’Hayer launched pasture-raised egg company Vital Farms in 2007 with just 20 hens. Now, his company is worth hundreds of millions.
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