I've been cooking professionally for thirty years. In that time I've built restaurants, exited concepts, scaled kitchens, and fed hundreds of thousands of people. And in thirty years, here is the one thing I've learned that nobody tells you at the beginning:
The food business rewards the people who control the supply chain. Everyone else is at someone else's mercy.
The chicken I've cooked for three decades — the strips that became the most ordered item at BRGR BRGR for six straight years, the birds that launched Saucy Bird — I never owned the source. I bought what was available. I cooked what arrived. I trusted that the product was what the label said.
That's over.
"No chicken brand in Canada has a verified 1:1 omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. The claim requires owning the entire supply chain from soil to shelf. That is exactly what we are building."
What the farm actually is
Made by Hands Farm is not a side project. It's not a marketing story. It's the infrastructure that makes every claim Saucy Bird makes permanently defensible.
Conventional chicken sits at a 30:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. The industry's best pasture-raised product sits at 3:1. Our target is 1:1 — verified by a third-party lab on every single batch, written to the blockchain, and printed on every box we ship.
That claim requires zero corn. Zero soy. Farm-grown flaxseed. Black soldier fly larvae enriched with omega-3. Heritage breeds selected for retention. A rotational grazing system that rebuilds the soil while it raises the birds.
Nobody in Canada has done this. The reason nobody has done it is because it requires owning the entire system. You can't buy your way to a 1:1 ratio from a commodity supplier. You have to build it from the ground up.
So that's what we're building.
Three nodes. Alberta first — scale, cattle, carbon credits. Keremeos next — experience, the Birdhouse Society, the Joey Bricco Farm School. Pacific Northwest third — US market entry, LICK raw milk, carbon credit liquidity. Every acre we touch must be measurably healthier when we leave than when we arrived.
The foundation piece
Emily's uncle Joey Bricco had Down syndrome. He lived into his sixties — which was considered remarkable at the time. He was joyful, present, and deeply loved. He didn't need fixing. He needed space to exist fully.
1% of every dollar Made by Hands Farm generates goes to the Joey Bricco Foundation before anything else gets paid. Not as a charitable gesture. As a structural commitment. The Foundation funds farm education grants, neurodiversity programming, a permanent farm school on the property, and a land access program for BIPOC and Indigenous farmers. It's non-negotiable. It's built into the accounting from day one.
Emily becomes Chief of Purpose in February 2028. The farm is partly hers. The Foundation is entirely her vision made real.
Why I'm telling you now
Because we have zero land. Zero birds. Zero farm revenue.
And I think that's exactly the right time to tell you.
The farm thesis is complete. The website is live at madebyhands.ca. The Instagram launched tonight at @madebyhandsfarm. The strategic plan is written. The science is documented. The three-node roadmap is mapped.
What comes next is the Alberta land parcel. The first cattle rotation. The first BSF larvae system. The first batch of birds raised on our own feed, our own pasture, verified by our own lab results.
Saucy Bird proved the formula works. The farm is where the formula becomes permanent.
You're reading this at the beginning. That matters.