Before founding Rusty Hinges Ranch, Suzanne Kimbel was a successful tech CEO creating connections through the provision of broadband networks.
But, despite her success, Suzanne felt compelled to pivot her career toward fostering a different type of connection—one that supports and empowers healthier living, stronger communities, and a deeper connection with food and nature.
From this mission, Rusty Hinges Ranch was founded to help reconnect local communities with their food and with one another.
We sat down with Suzanne for an in-depth conversation about how Rusty Hinges Ranch is making an impact on the lives of those who call Sonoma County home.
Suzanne Kimbel: First off, thanks for taking the time to have this conversation. I think it’s important that we have discussions around what drives healthy communities.
I’m Suzanne Kimbel, the Founder of Rusty Hinges Ranch. We make it really easy for busy people to eat healthy meals and reconnect with their community through locally sourced foods.
On a broader scale, our mission is to make it possible for local food systems to be rapidly set up all over the US and serve communities in a way that allows people to eat healthy food that aligns with their values.
This is such an important question, and my answer is always evolving the longer I’m involved in this work.
When we talk about how food is related to community, it comes down to one word—connection. Most of the things that are hard in modern life are rooted in some form of disconnection—whether it’s work-related, your personal life, whatever it might be.
We’re not machines—we’re living beings. And what we put inside our body is directly correlated to how good we feel, how healthy we are, and, in turn, how well we integrate with other living systems around us.
This doesn’t just apply to those immediately around you—it applies to our communities, our society, and nature.
We’re surrounded by nature, but we do this weird thing where we exploit nature and try to take over its tools in order to try to grow food for ourselves.
We pour chemicals into it and try to get more from it. Then we eat this food that’s been provided in this unnatural way, and we wonder why our bodies don’t perform as well as we’d like them to, why we don’t have enough energy, or why we don’t feel a sense of satisfaction from the food we’re consuming.
I’m really in love with the idea that we can reconnect to each other and ourselves by reconnecting to our food. A beautiful byproduct of that is our health improves as we do so, and the actual environment around us improves as we’re more mindful of how we do it. I see the food system as being a lever for how we as humans can achieve longevity and do it in a healthful way.
I hope Rusty Hinges serves as the poster child for how to quickly, efficiently, and joyfully reconnect a community with its food. I want to do this beyond Sonoma County. It’s needed across the country.
At the end of the day, what I think is the most powerful thing is for us to have that mental reconnection that we are part of nature, our bodies are part of nature, and our food is part of nature.
I love talking about the origin of Rusty Hinges Ranch because, in some ways, it was a “fist-on-the-table,” overnight thing, and in other ways, it was a long time coming.
One thing that some people might not know about me is that I’m actually a tech CEO. I moved to California from the Midwest. I came at life from a typical Midwestern perspective–pick yourself up by your bootstraps, use grit, work as hard as you possibly can, keep your nose to the grindstone–and you’re going to make life great.
When I moved to California and started running businesses in the tech sphere, I really had this weird duality going on.
On the one hand, I felt cool creating tech products, rolling out broadband to the world, and helping us have access to the internet on our smartphones.
But on the other hand, I had this huge dysphoria. I was more successful than I’d ever been, providing more jobs than ever, and I was building things that connected people, but I was feeling less connected to the people I was around than I ever had.
I saw this trend where things like social media were enabled by these broadband networks I was building, and part of me felt like I was doing an amazing service for people, and another part of me felt like I was enabling this beast that’s going to take us over.
Over time, I started becoming more disillusioned with the tech world, and I decided I wanted to take a year off.
I had recently purchased almost 120 acres of land in Petaluma in Sonoma County, California. Then, the pandemic hit, which forced me to stay on my land and figure out what I was going to do with it.
We started to see all these crazy things on the news about the disconnects between the supply chains of food and grocery stores and restaurants.
You would see tens of thousands of gallons of milk getting poured down the drain on the news because the supply chains weren’t quick enough to react.
I was looking around and thinking that it was crazy how broken our food system is.
I was surrounded by dairy farmers in Sonoma County that have milk. Yet, people are showing up at the grocery store two miles away, unable to get milk.
It was an opportunity for us to say, “We’ve got land, we’re outside, it’s safe to be outside. Farmers, bring your stuff here, and community, come pick it up.”
We just started out as a COVID response to get local food into the hands of local people.
That catalytic moment has stayed true to our mission: how do we make our community stronger by connecting the source of our food with our people?
One of the things we learned by serving people through the pandemic is what people love most is the connection we provide.
We do offer home delivery of our products, but 80% of our customers prefer to drive two miles out of town to come visit us on the farm because they’re after that moment to breathe, see neighbors, and have a glass of wine or lemonade.
You get to feel good about supporting the people, workers, and farms in your community.
I think, right now, what we provide is that opportunity for people to take a few minutes out of their week and reconnect.
We cater to people who are concerned about where their food comes from. They want to understand the source of their food and know specifics about how it was grown and produced. It’s important for them to understand what’s going into their bodies and what’s feeding their families.
When you put the local element into it, knowing food is from your community and knowing the people who put effort and love into it, you begin to close the loop around feeling better and start to adopt the habits you really want.
At Rusty Hinges Ranch, we have this thing called the Real Meal Bundle, a nutrient-rich meal for four.
Life is busy, and lots of different things compete for your time. What we want to do is make it very easy for you to connect with your food and your community in a way that works for your lifestyle.
We make it easy for people to do one real meal per week.
In 30 minutes, you can have a beautiful meal for you and your family, all while you’re directly supporting a scalable and workable model that financially supports not just one farm but ten.
Our customers are everyday people in my community. That direct relationship of speaking with people every week, knowing who their kids are, and knowing the recipes they like are all micro-conversations that are so valuable in feeling connected to your community. Being that place where people can come together and have those moments.
For example, we do this fun event called Second Saturdays, where we open our farm to the public every second Saturday of the month. It’s essentially a big community party. Our goal is to be a place where people can connect with animals and land, explore the farm, and feel rooted.
Head to our website to learn about our Real Meal Bundles. You can choose the frequency of meals you want to receive. We’re really friendly to different types of dietary preferences. If there’s anything that’s not going to work for your household, just let us know, and we’ll substitute.
If you’re interested in living in a sustainable community that fuses the best of city living with the country lifestyle and all the amazing things that Sonoma County has to offer, we invite you to visit SOMO Village. To learn more, download our residential project brief or get in touch with us today.