When the all-organic frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen went into the fast food business in 2015, it seemed like the industry was primed for a major shift.

That year, McDonald’s had given customers the option to have a salad instead of fries with their meals for the first time, even adding a baby kale and spinach blend to its menu. The “signs point to a sea change in consumer demands when it comes to fast food,” read one article in Civil Eats—and Amy’s’ founders, husband and wife team Andy and Rachel Berliner, were ready for it.

“We’ve just reached a tipping point in a whole new level of interest in eating better,” Andy Berliner told TIME. In July, they opened their first Amy’s Drive-Thru location in Rohnert Park, California, a small city north of San Francisco. From the start, they sought to do things differently. Workers made $12 an hour—at the time, well above the state minimum wage of $9 an hour, the standard pay for starting workers at most California fast food restaurants. The way Amy’s purchased ingredients for its all-vegetarian menu was different from the big fast food chains, as well: The restaurant’s suppliers were the same small and medium-scale organic farmers they worked with on the frozen food side of the business.

By 2021, Amy’s had opened two more drive-thru locations in Northern California, with plans to open 25 to 30 more in California, Oregon, and Colorado over the next five years. The idea was to show everyone from Wall Street to McDonald’s that organic, plant-based fast food could be profitable, and that people accustomed to eating mass-produced beef burgers would gladly eat an alternative made from fresh vegetables as long as it was convenient, tasty, and cost around the same price.

But then, last February, less than two years after announcing its expansion plans, Amy’s closed a store near Sacramento, then another near Los Angeles. Their entire drive-thru business seemed to be scaling back. To some, it seemed as though Amy’s’ grand ambitions for a more ethical fast food chain had been mislaid. This wasn’t exactly the case—but looking under the hood reveals some of the challenges that come with creating an industry more focused on the wellbeing of its employees and suppliers, instead of just perpetual growth.

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Perched next to a freeway exit right alongside an In-N-Out and a Chik-fil-A, Amy’s’ flagship drive-thru in Rohnert Park looks a lot like its fast food peers, but with a few differences, like a plant-covered “living roof,” a water tower to collect rainwater, and a dining room and patio filled with recycled wood furniture. At 4,000 square feet, it’s a big restaurant, but even at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon—typically one of the slowest hours of the week for any fast food joint—there were quite a few people dining in, and even more lined up in their cars outside to grab a bite from the drive-thru window.

“When we first opened, there were cars up the street,” Rachel Berliner told me as she and Amy’s president Paul Schiefer showed me around. The customers aren’t overflowing like they were on that first weekend, she explains, but there are plenty still coming in.

With her long white hair and grandmotherly demeanor, Berliner looks nothing like the typical fast food executive, for whom a family farm—let alone the farmers themselves—would be about as familiar as the surface of the moon. But over the last few decades, she’s grown used to standing out. When Rachel and her husband started Amy’s Kitchen in 1987, organic food wasn’t a consumer trend, much less a standard enshrined in federal law. But they believed access to it was important, and as certified organic food—meaning food grown without pesticides or genetically-modified seeds, among other criteria—boomed, the Northern California company spearheaded its entrance into grocery and convenience stores across the US with a line of vegetarian pizzas, burritos, and frozen entrees, now sold in nearly 50,000 stores in twelve countries.

After more than two decades in business, expanding into fast food wasn’t necessarily an obvious choice. But for the socially-minded pair, it made sense for the same reasons frozen food had years earlier: It was a way to bring the virtues of vegetarian organic food to the masses by giving it to them in a form that was familiar and accessible.

That sense of familiarity permeates throughout Amy’s’ flagship store. Inside the kitchen, flatscreen monitors list the current orders for staff, just like they would at any fast food restaurant. All the way in the back, there’s a walk-in freezer for storing patties and buns, made in the same factories where Amy’s makes its frozen foods. A long row of flat-top griddles churns out these “burger” patties, made from organic soy, bulgur wheat, oats, and a few kinds of vegetables, and “chik’n” patties, made mostly from soy. Salads are made to order. Whereas most fast food kitchens receive their lettuce prewashed and chopped, each of Amy’s’ now three drive-thru locations receives daily produce deliveries, complete with whole heads of lettuce, which staff tear and wash by hand each morning—a characteristically old-fashioned way of preparing food in an otherwise high-tech environment.

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In an industry that’s constantly looking for ways to speed up service, and pushing staff to their limits in the process, Amy’s’ often low-tech but labor-intensive methods stand out. So does its commitment to paying staff above the industry standard: While a statewide boost to the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour threw most fast food companies into a panic earlier this year, the move hardly affected Amy’s, which had been paying workers above minimum wage since its inception. (Better pay is also one reason why Amy’s says it retains employees at a higher rate than the industry at large.)

But what is most radical about Amy’s compared to its fast food peers is its model for sourcing raw materials. Instead of buying ingredients from the massive, intermediary corporations that dominate the food system in the way virtually any fast food company does today, it works directly with the farmers that have long supplied its frozen food business: For its burger alone, Amy’s says it sources ingredients from 30 farmers.

“We’re definitely deeply embedded in the small, mid-size farming network as a long-term partner,” Schiefer said on our kitchen tour. “A lot of these farms… want someone who’s stable and consistent and who will be there for each crop cycle.”

A supply network built on small-scale farmers is unique within the fast food industry today, but it’s not entirely without precedent. When it started in Southern California shortly after the Second World War, even McDonald’s sourced most of its beef from local ranchers. In the early 1950s, the company went as far as experimenting with raising cattle itself on a ranch in Grass Valley, California—a fact it proudly announced to customers.

By the 1960s, McDonald’s had locations all over the country and relied on a network of up to 200 different beef producers to supply them. But with the advent of cryogenic freezing technology at the end of the decade, the deliverable range of beef increased dramatically. Instead of buying from a network of small producers, McDonald’s went to a handful of big ones, like OSI, JBS, and Tyson Foods, to provide the vast majority of its beef, both in the US and around the world. Since they dominated the industry, these companies could keep their prices down, usually to the detriment of the ranchers who raised the cattle.

While different fast food companies have adopted their own tactics over the years, the biggest have all turned to the same playbook, pressuring suppliers to grow exponentially alongside them to keep costs down, or risk getting replaced. It’s an arrangement that’s given fast food companies massive influence over the food system. But some environmentalists have argued that such concentrated power isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to sustainability. Writing for Wired, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg say a concerted effort by fast food companies to bring meat alternatives to the masses, for example, would lower the cost of fake meat and “propel research and development that could slash GHGs and improve [their] nutritional profile.”

“Unlike foodies’ delusional nostalgic agrarianism and unrealistic calls to ‘deindustrializ[e] and decentraliz[e] the American food system,’” the pair added, “pragmatism tells us that big problems demand big solutions.” (Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg will elaborate on that argument in an upcoming book, Feed the People!.)

As more people start to see their dietary choices as ethical ones, fast food companies, new and old, are already plotting ways to get just as big as the major chains, but with more “ethical” menu offerings. One newcomer is Kernel, a high-tech vegetarian chain launched in New York earlier this year by Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle. Though not a vegetarian himself, Ells says he was inspired to scale vegetarian fast food after reading about the climate impact of animal agriculture. Itsu, a British chain serving Asian-esque food, is considerably older, having launched in 1997 by Pret a Manger founder Julian Metcalfe, but still dynamic. Once known for selling sushi to London office workers, as it started expanding outside the UK two years ago, the company shifted more of its menu over to vegetable dishes made with rice and noodles. Unusual for a chain that still sells a lot of sushi and poke, Itsu even banned yellowfin tuna from its menu entirely in 2022—a move Metcalfe called both “ethical and economical.”

While vegetarian menus have some inherent environmental and ethical benefits, many of the problems that have made the food system so ethically flawed in the first place are tied to its opacity rather than its choice of protein, and thus run deeper than menu changes can fix. When McDonald’s vowed to stop sourcing beef raised inside the Amazon biome in 1989, activists all over the world cheered the decision. More than three decades later, McDonald’s’ promise has proven more easily made than kept. In 2022, an investigation by Réporter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that a McDonald’s supplier in Brazil had purchased cattle raised on land deforested just months before.

In a statement, McDonald’s said it disagreed with Réporter Brasil’s findings and that it was “focused on conserving forests and supporting the people and communities around the world who depend on them.” But as the original investigation found, “There are no comprehensive mechanisms in [McDonald’s] supply chain to track—from birth to slaughter—the origin of cattle arriving at slaughterhouses” and eventually going into their burgers. In other words, McDonald’s knows which suppliers it’s purchased its beef from, but not who raised the cows.

There is also no reason to believe a big move towards fake meat would make its ingredients’ origins any easier to account for: The grains and vegetables that go into popular meat alternatives, like Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, are just as untraceable as McDonald’s beef. Regardless of what it’s selling, the fast food industry’s interlocking system of suppliers is almost too large to manage or even monitor—much less reform.

Amy’s’ supply chains are, in some ways, more complicated than either McDonald’s or Burger King’s, but the complexity is a conscious choice. Since the company buys directly from farmers instead of on commodity markets, it knows exactly which farms supply the ingredients for everything it sells, both in the frozen aisle and at its drive-thrus. (Traceability is also one of the requirements of the federal organic certification which Amy’s adheres to.) Some of those relationships have persisted for more than a decade, Schiefer says, with suppliers that grew produce for Amy’s Kitchen’s frozen foods fifteen or twenty years ago now growing food for Amy’s Drive-Thrus. Amy’s even dispatches representatives to visit its partner farms at various stages of the crop cycle, from planting until harvest, to check on their supplies.

In another contrast to the big fast food chains, Schiefer adds that Amy’s doesn’t pressure suppliers to scale alongside it. By continuously buying organic produce, he says, the idea is to encourage more farmers to grow organic food and join it as suppliers instead of pressuring existing suppliers to get bigger.

“It’s harder, but it’s also more rewarding,” Schiefer says. “It means getting involved with agronomy researchers and seed breeders, working in partnership with growers. You can’t think of it as a commodity business. When you accept that complexity, you find your way there.”

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Of course, getting raw materials is only one part of the fast food business. Labor is another part, as is real estate.

This last part is one that Amy’s turned out to be less prepared for. After Rohnert Park took off, the company opened other locations that were equally sizable. Business was good, Schiefer says of the store near Sacramento, but not good enough to stay open.

“We had hoped that it would be just a big trending thing everywhere,” Rachel Berliner says after our tour. Instead, Amy’s learned that the appetite for organic, vegetarian fast food was stronger in some areas than others. In the short term, Schiefer says, future restaurants will be smaller, and the company will be more particular when choosing where to open new locations. Once they master their “core demographic,” he says, Amy’s will be ready to pursue a more ambitious expansion plan once again.

The company’s founders don’t seem to mind pressing pause. In fact, Rachel Berliner sees a parallel between the drive-thru business and the company’s early days. “We grew very slowly when we started Amy’s because there were no organic farms,” she says, recalling they had to turn customers away for lack of supply. With more successes, more farms started growing certified organic food, widening the base of suppliers without farmers having to scale relentlessly, as they would working for most processed food companies. Now that the drive-thru business is growing, Berliner says, they’re following their own model and adding new stores gradually, paying workers a decent wage and maintaining their rigorous standards as they get bigger.

The difference is now there are plenty of farms to supply them.