Meet Rachel Irons | Co-Founder and CEO of Nude Foods Market

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rachel Irons and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rachel, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?
Relentless optimism and problem solving – When a door closes, I immediately start to think about how to find the key…or bust through. The more I get backed into a corner, the more I fight to get out. Community building – People are everything, we couldn’t get anywhere without our support systems. I put a lot of energy into mine and they are there for me in return.
A love of hard work – Especially manual labor, no job is off limits.
Fierce dedication to my bedtime – Sleep is for the strong. You can’t get anywhere without it.

What should our readers know about your business?
Back in college, I completed an amazing marine biology study abroad program in Bonaire (a tiny island in the Caribbean). In Bonaire, I learned about Lionfish, a predatory invasive species that was wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem. Unlike most stories of ecological destruction, this one had a silver lining. Lionfish, while venomous, are also edible and delicious. There has been a massive effort throughout the Caribbean to encourage people to hunt and eat lionfish as a means of population control. An effort that has proven extremely effective. In areas that can be reached by divers, the lionfish population has been kept in control, allowing native fish populations to rebound.

I was obsessed. I love a practical solution and this one was a win-win-win. An invasive species was controlled, and people got to eat, reducing the number of native fish species that needed to be harvested to feed people. Our ecosystems are so complicated; it’s rare that a solution can be so simple.

I went on to do more work with lionfish in Panama and Florida, mostly around educating people how to eat these prickly fish.

After working with a marine conservation non-profit in Florida, I spent a summer hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Long distance hiking gives one a lot of time to think and it was a good summer for it because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

I started to formulate and idea for a business that centered around the idea of eating invasive species – the most sustainable way to eat meat imaginable. The more we eat, the better off the environment is. I would start by making wild boar jerky – since wild boar is an invasive species, and jerky is delicious. Again, I had a lot of time to think, so I expanded the idea, letting my mind develop it into the future. If everything went right, what could I turn this into? The answer was a grocery store. Where everything was sustainably sourced, especially the animal products. There would be a huge emphasis on local food and customer education and no single use packaging.

When I got back to real life after the PCT, I got a real job and started working on my new business on the side. After a few years of selling at farmers markets and some small grocery stores, I was still working on the side to support myself, managing shared commissary kitchens. Then my partner suddenly got REALLY into making hummus. He even started joking about selling it. So that got me thinking about selling hummus and how you would have to put it in plastic containers and how could you avoid that. That’s when I remembered my grocery store idea from the trail. My partner and I were spending Thanksgiving weekend refinishing a concrete floor at one of the kitchens, and again, had a lot of time to talk and think, so we started to hash out the idea. It just so happened that the kitchens I managed had an extra space available. It seemed viable so we called up my boss, “Hey Matt, could we start a zero waste grocery store in that extra space you have?” He said, “Sure!” And that was all we needed to dive in.
Seven months later, we delivered our first orders by bicycle (we pivoted from the store to a delivery service due to COVID), and 14 months after that we opened our brick and mortar store. I now run a zero waste grocery store and delivery service in Boulder, CO, with deliveries by electric car.
We receive items in bulk and package them in reusable containers. This allows our customers to shop like they would at any other store, they just bring back the containers and we wash them and refill them. Making it easy and accessible to choose sustainability. We source locally whenever possible, and have an amazing network of almost 100 local vendors. We’ve literally had customers cry when they learn about us, because they’re just so happy we exist and that we’re doing the right thing.
My proudest accomplishment is our meat section. We source meat in three ways – meat from invasive species, meat from regenerative farms (which I visit to verify their practices), and rescued meat that would otherwise not have found its way into human mouths.

My biggest goal for my life, and what I am working on with my business, is to eradicate the factory farming of animals. A mighty big goal indeed, but I am far from the only one working on it and I do think it is possible to accomplish in my lifetime. I think this because whether we like it or not, we must return to a state of harmony with our natural world. We have been working against the grain for too long, and we are starting to see the extreme consequences.

I want to help create a food system that makes sense. Mining for resources to turn into containers that get shipped around the world only to have a useful life of 30 minutes and then get buried in the ground for the rest of time does not make sense. If you explained that system to an alien they would be very confused. Instead, creating durable, long-lasting containers that get used and refilled over and over again and then made into something else at the end of their life; that makes a lot of sense. Using land in a way that makes it less productive and in need of more artificial inputs every year does not make sense. But working with the land in a way that builds up our soils, makes them more resilient, doesn’t require outside inputs and still produces a lot of food? That’s just intuitive.

I am motivated to create a more harmonious food system and I believe that is something we all want, we’re just not sure how to get there. By creating a grocery store with higher standards, standards that promote that harmony, and communicating those standards, I believe we can set a new baseline. We can change consumer demand which in turn changes supplier behavior. This is my goal and I have already seen significant progress towards it in my community.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Visit Nude Foods Market!

Hike into Eldorado Canyon from the Doudy Draw trailhead, this gives you the most amazing view of the rock walls as you enter the canyon.

Eat –
Breakfast – Tangerine and Lucille’s
Dinner – Ras Kassa, Acreage, and Jax (shellfish are and extremely sustainable source of protein, they take no inputs to grow and sequester CO2 from the ocean in their shells)

I have a friend coming this fall who I’m going to bring on a carbon neutral farm visit with me. I visit all the farms we get animal products from to verify their practices. I’ve also recently gotten into paftrafting, so I’m combining the two:
Bike to Lakewood – take the bus to Frisco, packraft the blue river to the Colorado river to Bond, bike to Yampa, packraft to Steamboat Springs, visit Moon Hill Dairy, bike back to Bond, hop back on the Colorado River to Dotsero, bike to Eagle, bus back to Lakewood, bike home!
That trip would take up the whole week, but it would be super fun!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The employees of Nude Foods Market! We have the most amazing team, their hard work and dedication to our mission is what makes us who we are.

Website: www.nudefoodsmarket.com

Instagram: @nudefoodsmarket

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-irons-b07b2088/

Facebook: @nudefoodsmarket

Image Credits
Haley Jensen Alexis Nyeki Herreid