Member Spotlight: Wayne Adams, CEO of Adams Group

Member Spotlight: Wayne Adams, CEO of Adams Group, takes five to reflect on 5 simple questions. Enjoy!

OSC: Where do you call home (hometown or wherever you feel most at home)?
WA: Davis, CA, in the Sacramento region of the Central Valley is home to me. My family has lived within about a 20 mile radius of my current home for more than 150 years.

OSC: What’s one thing most people don’t know about you?
WA: I went to college to study music, I play the tuba. I’m a total numbers guy at work, but at home I love art of all kinds, and love creating art when I can.

OSC: What part of your work gives you the most energy right now?
WA: Our retail brand Marianne’s, offering 100% pure avocado oil and beef tallow, has been really fun to work with. We have a great team, which is needed to navigate the complex and difficult retail space. I love talking to people I run into who have bought our brand, I love to hear their stories. On the other side, anytime I can get on farm is a good day. We’re working hard to make the world a better place, and the impact we’re making with our farmer partners is so satisfying.

OSC: What’s a favorite childhood memory, funny or formative, that helped shape your path?
WA: Something that shaped my appreciation for our community and the work we do was driving around with my dad. He’d always be looking out into the fields as we drove around our area, looking at crop progress, health of the plants, weed pressure, and so on. Now I drive with my daughter and I teach her how to identify each crop, I quiz her, she knows wheat, tomatoes, corn, almond, pistachio, and walnut trees now. Feeling the connection to our food and the farm is something that’s important to me, and I love being able to look right out and see our food being grown.

OSC: What’s something you’re fired up about that needs a whole new way of thinking?
WA: Avocado oil purity. Right now the industry lets a single marker test and a “100% pure” label stand as proof, when a product can pass that test with up to 40% of another oil blended in. That’s backwards. We need to flip the whole model so purity is proven against the full Codex panel before the claim goes on the label, not assumed after. Prove it first, then say it. And more broadly, I want to see regenerative farming treated not as a feel good add on but as the actual business model, better for the soil, the farmers, and the long term health of the company.

About Adams Group
Adams Group is a fifth-generation, family-owned food company founded in 1914 and based in Northern California. A vertically-integrated trusted supplier of high-quality grains, seeds, and specialty oils to leading food and infant-nutrition brands, Adams Group now brings over a century of sourcing and purity expertise directly to consumers through its retail brand, Marianne’s, the clean pantry brand offering 100% pure avocado oil and beef tallow.