I believe in the interconnectedness of existence, and in the organic growth and evolution of individuals and humanity as a whole. Based on research and experience, I believe that nature and the wilderness that nurtured our evolution as a species can help us heal from within, and that Nature as our greatest teacher has answers to questions we once knew without asking.

Being engaged in and with the natural world stokes primal sources of inspiration for me, while also deepening my understanding of myself, and my appreciation, respect, compassion, empathy, admiration, and love for others. This belief system is a product of my experiences; personal, cultural, and global exploration; as well as an expression of my coming to more intimately know, embrace and share, aspects of my multi-cultural heritage.   

I am a mongrel, a mix-blooded mutt, like most in America.  My family tree, like everyone else’s, displays the lineage of an individual, replete with the foliage of known family history. Especially in America, that canopy of what we see is often nourished by a many-branched root system reaching into the deep soils of many cultures that came into being on continents oceans away.

I have the good fortune of knowing a good deal of my family history passed down from generation to generation. Some of that history was inscribed within old Bibles passed from one generation to the next. My known family root system reaches into the rich cultural shores of the Irish, Scottish, English, Danish, and Native American, plus goodness knows what I don’t know. 

I grew up in the deep south in close proximity to one source of my cultural heritage, a heritage nourished by my Father with him as the source of that lineage for me. He taught me the hidden history of the remnants of the Creek Nation, those full and mixed-blooded Native Americans who’d hidden deep in the mountains, forests and swamps to avoid the forced relocation and march from their native home to Oklahoma that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. He taught me what he’d been taught as a child by his Grandparents who kept him for long periods of time when his father served in World War II. My Dad passed down to me this unwritten history and knowledge in conversation during walks and hunting trips into the woods, in car rides and fireside talks. He also taught me of other parts of our family history that he knew, from the Irish, Scottish, English and even the Danish, which he identified heavily with, as well. 

I grew up in a childhood home my Father had dubbed Valhalla. Literally, a long piece of wood hung off our back porch that overlooked the Flint River with the fire-blackened word “Valhalla” burned into the old gray cedar plank. A Vietnam Vet himself, he loved the ethos of the Viking warriors. The home was cedar-planked and blended into the woods that surrounded it. But the inside of my childhood home and bedroom walls were adorned with Native American paintings inscribed with Native American principals and wisdom. 

Over the course of my life it has become evident to me that I am the human version of my childhood home, that I am what those Creek ancestors who preceded me wanted and sought to do, something that on the outside blends in with the environment to not draw attention. The inside, the core of me, like my childhood home, is adorned with the Native American oral history, knowledge and art passed down from generation to generation. This single root of my cultural heritage, that which is the original root sunken into this native soil, is not the thickest, largest, or most numerous type of root feeding into my cultural heritage, but it is the root that most forms and feeds the essence of who and what I am. 

My Creek ancestry is what I identify as my “cultural taproot”, that most essential part of who I am, that which is the seeded origin of me and feeds into my inner essence, that with which I spiritually identify most.  

I also identify this cultural taproot as being the source from which I founded Strive Superfoods, that taproot and my wife, Claudine as co-founder, with her food knowledge and existing business as the soil from which Strive Superfoods has been seeded and grows.  My experiences of traveling the world, mixing with and experiencing many cultures as I challenged myself and came to know more about me and this world in wilderness settings across the globe, contribute heavily to the root system that feeds into and nourishes Strive Superfoods as it develops and continues to grow. 

The products of Strive Superfoods are based on extensive research and development. The ethos of Strive Superfoods is very much informed by the core of what I have experienced and come to know as the essence of who and what I am as its Founder.

I founded Strive Superfoods with this simple mission in mind: to search for, find and deliver answers to some of those questions we once knew, how to live healthier physically and mentally while living in better harmony with each other and the natural world. 

Our deliverables to date are: 

(1) To help you live healthier, stronger, and longer by providing the best organic superfood blends our planet has to offer. These superfood blends have been formulated to support optimum body system performance. We believe the key to achieving this is through nutrition completion. Our research into modern nutrition and diets, as well as study of archeological, genetic, epigentic, microbiological, and anthropological research has revealed that non-communicable diseases such as: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic respiratory disease, etc, did not exist in our hunter-gatherer ancient ancestors. These diseases began showing up about 12,000 years ago, after the development of civilization when the variety of minerals and micronutrients in our “civilized diets” reduced down to a limited number of grains coupled with domestic livestock as our primary food sources. For these research-grounded reasons, and others, Strive Superfoods products are evolution diet-focused. We use a variety and quantity of plant-based minerals and micronutrients that our body systems evolved on and research shows our body systems perform best on.

(2) Because we believe nature heals when one engages with nature, as our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors daily did, our goals as a company also include supporting and inspiring others to engage in, and with, the natural world to promote physical and mental health through life-enriching experiences. 

Strive Superfoods seeks to positively affect the lives of our customers, team-members, and business partners as we collectively contribute to efforts to support the health of our customers and preserve the health of our planet.

It is important to us to help make a difference. That’s why our business is sustainability-focused. We contribute 3% of business profits to support causes central to our core beliefs. We split our contributions between the preservation of cultural heritage for indigenous peoples, and the preservation of habitats of endangered species. 

As the children of veterans, Claudine and I support those who have served their country in times of war. Fueled by our passions for whitewater kayaking, with our children Finn and Keira, we seek to serve  as  Strive ambassadors to support the local chapters, members, and efforts of Team River Runner, a non-profit whose River to Recovery mission is: To provide all veterans and their families an opportunity to find health, healing, community purpose, and new challenges through adventure and adaptive paddle sports.  Our tagline at Strive Superfoods is Chase Your Dreams. That is the shortened version of our core driver: From city streets to mountain streams, chase, catch and live your dreams. One dream we chase is for Strive Superfoods to be an active participant in supporting these men and women as they make and pursue dreams that they ultimately turn into realities lived. 

As a couple, Claudine and I co-founded Strive Superfoods. How Claudine, a native of Montreal, and me a south-Georgia boy from flat rural farm country, came together is a question we sometimes get asked. I tell people it’s because of a mosquito in Zanzibar, or Ethiopia. It could’ve been either place that I got malaria and ultimately ended up in the Whitefish, Montana ER with a 105.7 degree temperature in the middle of January. True story. A couple of years after that mosquito bite, while on expedition to attempt to be the first American, first Canadian and first female to ski from the summit of an 8,000 meter peak, we eloped. With Mount Everest and the grand peaks of the Himalaya as the backdrop, Claudine and I were married in Nepal at a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. We didn’t understand a word of that ceremony, but will never forget it. Now, that may all seem improbable, but that is our reality, our story, and a contributing factor to how and why we are what we are, hence, how and why Strive Superfoods is what it is.

Because of that mosquito and me contracting malaria, plans changed and I crossed paths with Claudine in Conway, New Hampshire. Truly, it was our love of the wilderness and all things wild that brought us together.  We were in Conway to get our Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician  (WEMT)  certifications.  Claudine and I each meant to be guides for wilderness exploration and adventure expeditions. 

Our goals, experiences, and interests ranged from leading mountain climbing expeditions to distant and remote alpine peaks, to going on whitewater kayaking and rafting expeditions into regions where tribal cultures still exist today as they have for tens of thousands of years. This love of exploring nature, of exploring a variety of cultures and foods central to those cultures, of exploring and learning of ourselves and helping others to do the same in wild and natural environments has guided us to an understanding that Nature heals. 

Based on this intimate knowledge of nature’s nurturing and healing abilities, our 25+ combined years of experience in the food industry, coupled with our desire to support others, we co-founded Strive Superfoods to deliver the organic healing properties of nature to people.  Inspired by tribal and ancient traditional uses of select superfood ingredients supported with scientific research on the effects those superfoods provide to benefit various body systems, we have formulated products meant to mix into, and become a part of modern life’s daily rituals. As a company, we also seek to inspire people to get out into nature to support physical health and mental well-being. 

At Strive we help people get into nature by reducing perceived barriers for people to do new things and activities to connect them with nature. We do this by offering excursions into nature to introduce people to kayaking and paddle sports as well as encourage people to hike, ski, mountain bike, run on trails, camp, and in general to increase their connection to nature, hence increase their awareness of the wild within themselves, that spiritually primal awareness of existence as a kinship that binds all living things. 

As mentioned above, my cultural taproot, my Native American heritage comes to me through my Father, and to him through his Mother.  My Father, and then I as a child, joined the Ma-Chis Lower Creek Tribe of Alabama. The tribe’s members are comprised of remnants of the Creek Confederacy, the descendants of those who escaped the Trail of Tears. Our Native American ancestors hid deep in the woods, foothills and swamps in the Southeast, denied their Native Heritage to remain in their Native Land rather than undergo the forced migration to Oklahoma Territory that killed tens of thousands and permanently separated those tribal members from their Native Home.

By nurturing this cultural taproot I am guided by the concept of the interconnectedness of existence, a cosmic vision I have come to know through travel, research and experience that is common to indigenous cultures and their conception of creation, hence evolution, as a living process resulting in a living universe in which a kinship exists between all things, from past to present and thus to the future. This awareness of the interconnectedness of the ever-evolving natural world informs and inspires my use of Biomimicry as the basis for all system and formula designs the Strive entities build, operate, utilize and promote as sustainable solutions to support the physical and mental health of humans, as well as contribute to supporting the health of our planet.

It is this awareness of and love for Nature, the Natural Cycle, a study and understanding of evolution and biomimicry, the profound connection to the Natural World that indigenous peoples have, and the interconnectedness of existence that is the basis of all that Strive Superfoods is founded upon. 

As the Founder of Strive Superfoods, I invite you to join with us to make a difference in your life and in the lives of others, to rejoin a tribe, to help us grow our Strive Tribe. I say “rejoin” a tribe because we are all descendants of and from tribal members. That’s a fact of evolution. As a result of cultural evolution, we have become separated from this common past that connects us intimately with our natural world. Most of us, unfortunately, can not identify what our tribal ancestry is. I don’t know all of mine, only remnants as I’ve described above. And we all have remnants, maybe not as well known, but in our deep evolutionary history we are all descendants of and from tribes. At Strive, we seek to weave those remnants, those tribal threads of our common ancient ancestry, together into a Dream Catcher to form a new tribe, an Inclusive Tribe, a tribe you can join that seeks to be a part of the solutions to make a difference in this world, a difference in your health and life, a tribe that supports its members as we each seek to become our best versions of ourselves, so from city streets to mountain streams we can each chase, catch and live our dreams.