A Good Egg

In 2007, serial entrepreneur Matt O’Hayer was at a crossroads. He had spent the past five years living on a charter catamaran, ferrying clients from Maine to Grenada with his diving instructor wife, Catherine. Now the familiar itch to try something new had resurfaced. O’Hayer traveled to northern Indonesia for a diving trip with an old friend, Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey (who is featured in Inc.’s Founders Project on page 34), mulling his next move.

At the time of the scuba trip, Mackey was working to improve the animal welfare standards of Whole Foods’ meat and poultry suppliers. He’d recently invested in a hen-laying operation in Austin, and described to O’Hayer a future in which chickens wandered freely outdoors, grazing on grass, rather than