The snack bar maker Kind uses tens of millions of pounds of water-thirsty almonds every year — which may just be enough to prevent you from being hangry at 2 p.m. And the company is looking to make its almond farming process as sustainable as possible with innovative tech like heat-mapping the soil through AI and natural water efficiency methods.
Kind aims to source 100% of its almonds from farms that use regenerative agriculture by 2030, and it created the Kind Almond Acres Initiative (KAAI) to test out the best sustainable farming practices to get there.
This October, after two years running the KAAI, the Kind team has additional funding from the Department of Agriculture to ensure over 30% of its almond supply chain uses regenerative practices by next year.
But first, let's back up for a second. What does regenerative agriculture even mean?
"It's a way to grow the foods we love, like almonds, that helps replenish the soil — that helps grow the food," explained Lindsay Philpott, who runs sustainability communications at Kind. And while regenerative farming isn't a new concept, using it at the massive scale Kind is looking to reach is pretty novel. So, Kind is using its almond initiative as a "learning ranch" to figure out which regenerative practices will work best for its almonds before it then applies those insights in its snack bar production process.
The Cool Down chatted with Philpott, as well as Caitlin Birkholz, who focuses on sustainability agriculture for Mars (Kind's parent company), to get the full scoop on what they've learned about regenerative almond farming so far — and what's next for the project.
📣 The 411 on the KAAI
"We started this program because Kind and Mars together are a top global buyer of almonds," Philpott told us. "We took it as our responsibility to learn how to grow one of our top ingredients more sustainably."
Kind launched the three-year regenerative agriculture pilot project with one of the largest almond suppliers in the U.S., Ofi, in 2022 on 500 acres in central California. In 2024, the KAAI expanded to a second location in southern California, doubling its "learning" acreage, to test those regenerative agriculture practices in a region with half as much water available.
"We really wanted to create this project in a way that informs how we're engaging our suppliers to work towards our larger goal of 100% of our almonds being sourced from farms leveraging regenerative agriculture … by 2030," Philpott said. "… This farm is helping inform how we scale to the rest of our supply chain."
Kind will measure success on a "mass balance basis," she said, which is a way to source ingredients at scale rather than one by one.
The program focuses on five different regenerative farming practices, including:
🌻 Cover crops: These build healthy soil structure, increase soil carbon levels, and create pollinator habitats.
🍂 Compost and biochar: This decreases the need for excess fertilizer and improves soil water retention.
🚰 Subsurface irrigation: Drip systems are buried underground to ensure more of the water applied is used directly by each tree.
🤓 The almond learnings so far
"We're really excited because we've already seen improvements in soil health," Birkholz said, adding that it typically takes around three to five years to see improvements in soil health. "We've also seen some water-use efficiency benefits, but it's a little bit too early to tell."
"The other big learning that we found is around some of the technology," she continued. "Some of the technology is really succeeding, and some of it is really flopping. And those are great learnings, especially when you're trying to lead an industry."
Birkholz explained that's because it's "really risky for growers to adopt things like this."
"Technology is not cheap, so taking on a little bit of that 'learning messiness' upfront and seeing why things work or don't work is incredibly valuable, even if you learn that they don't work," she said.
🤝 New partnership on the block
In addition to the two existing program sites in California — or "learning ranches," as Birkholz put it — the KAAI has also just launched a new partnership with Wolfe's Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, which will unlock an additional $300,000 in regenerative agriculture funding for the program via the Department of Agriculture.
"With the grant, we'll be able to reach just over 30% of our supply chain practicing regenerative practices for the 2025 crop year, which is fantastic," Birkholz said.
"It's our biggest first move after our pilot, and we're really excited to partner with the Wolfe's Neck Center because they also are able to provide growers with technical assistance," she continued. "Bringing together these resources to help growers learn how to do these practices if they've never done them before is super, super valuable."
🌊 Dealing with water scarcity
California grows 80% of the world's almond supply — almonds are a thirsty crop — and it's no secret that water is often in short supply in the state. So, collecting insights on water efficiency is critical for the program, especially for the KAAI farm in southern CA.
"In California, every drop counts," Birkholz noted. "The California almond industry is incredibly advanced when it comes to precision irrigation technology. I am constantly blown away by all the work that the almond growers are already doing around water."
But given how many almonds California grows, "we could be doing the best we possibly can today, but we have to figure out a way to do better, and that's why we're looking at those practices." One of the side benefits of improving soil health is that it enables the ground to retain more water.
"We're also working with the California Water Action Collaborative," Philpott mentioned, "which is a collaborative of both nonprofit partners and corporate partners in the state of California, to work toward water security in California … so that we're not the only ones learning, but we're also able to share that with the wider industry, because we're all using the water."
💚 AI for good
Artificial intelligence has taken a lot of knocks recently for its extensive energy usage — but sometimes that power-hungry nature can be justified as a force for good. Take LandScan, for example, an AI platform that Kind has been using as part of the pilot program to get a much clearer picture of soil data.
Here's how it works: "When we're using LandScan on our orchards … they're basically going and taking these huge probes down into the soil and getting crazy amounts of data and metrics and just tons and tons and tons of data about that soil — so much that it would take one person years to analyze all of that data — and we're taking hundreds of samples across multiple fields," Birkholz explained.
"Then the LandScan tool is able to analyze it … to produce opportunities and heat maps, where we can basically look for efficiencies." Ultimately, she said, "When we're thinking about sustainable agriculture, what we're really [asking is] 'how do we feed people with less inputs?' and that is a really, really tricky problem."
AI tech can now reduce the amount of fertilizer needed per tree, for example, by identifying with a heat map where there's good soil and where there's bad soil — and only fertilizing the areas that need it.
"If I'm able to use AI to figure out ways to improve the efficiency, I can actually reduce that amount of fertilizer, and that is good for the planet [and] good for people's pocketbooks," Birkholz told us.
🐝 Bee in good health
While Kind's regenerative almond farming program is still in the "learning" phase, the company has found other ways to bring its sustainability actions straight to its almond-based snack bars.
Enter: the bees.
Bees are critical for pollinating almond trees, but factors like increasing pesticide use and changing seasonal patterns due to a warming planet are putting bees in danger.
To combat this, Kind's Thins bars are sourced from bee-friendly almond farmland, and the company's goal is to source 100% of its almonds, for all its snacks, from bee-friendly farmland by 2025 (Philpott said the company is 70% of the way there).
"We're really excited to be able to tie our sustainability practices to our products more specifically," Philpott said, "and we were able to do that through third-party verified audits just to make sure that we know 100% of the almonds in those bars are being sourced from bee-friendly farmland."
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