Show Notes
On this special episode of the Nuance podcast, join Case at The Collaborative’s 7th Annual Labor Day Prayer Breakfast for a conversation with John Rivers, founder of 4 Rivers Smokehouse and 4Roots Farm. They explore John’s extraordinary journey from healthcare executive to one of the South’s most beloved BBQ restaurateurs and a leading voice in sustainable food systems.
John shares how his faith, family, and calling guided him to leave a lucrative healthcare career to start 4 Rivers Smokehouse. He explains how aligning passion, purpose, and business creates lasting impact — from building community-focused restaurants to tackling hunger and sustainability challenges in Florida.
Episode Resources:
4Roots Farm: https://4rootsfarm.org/
4 Rivers Smokehouse: https://www.4rsmokehouse.com/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website 👉 https://wecolabor.com
Get to know Case 👉 https://collaborativeorlando.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Tony Jenkins
It’s an honor to stand before you this morning. I think about when I was asked to introduce John Rivers as this morning’s speaker. I immediately thought, I guess I get now when you sometimes hear people say “that person needs no introduction.” I think about John when I hear that. So actually, my job is very simple this morning, but I would like to give you a little bit of background on John. He is the author of the Southern Cowboy Cookbook, and he gained national recognition, including the title of the South’s Best Barbecue Restaurant by Southern Living magazine and the number one barbecue chain by MSN he was recognized as Restaurateur of the Year by the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association. I have a question for you guys. Has anyone in this room ever cooked at the prestigious James Beard house in New York City? No? John has. Some of you may not know that John actually didn’t start his business career in restaurants. He left a 20 year career in healthcare by retiring as President of a $1.5 billion company to pursue a lifelong dream of owning a restaurant. In 2009, he created this first concept, 4 Rivers Smokehouse, was that on Fairbanks? John, on Fairbanks, how many stood in line to get into that restaurant, which quickly became one of the fastest growing restaurants in the southeast. But John, I do want to thank you for continuing the world’s best fried chicken tenders from The Coop. Remember The Coop at the 4 Rivers smokehouse. You can still get those chicken tenders there. Many of us are extremely excited about John’s upcoming project, the 4Roots farm, which will serve as a community campus to inspire revolutionary change in Florida’s food system through education on sustainable farming, advancements in agricultural technology and research in culinary medicine via the launch of a culinary Health Institute. John’s accomplishments are many, but I immediately became impressed with him as an individual when I was invited to one of his large manager meetings several years ago where attendees were from across the state and Georgia, hundreds of people were in the room, and when John got up to open the meeting, it started with prayer. Wait a minute. Did I just see a CEO give glory to God to start his business meeting? I knew then that this was my type of a leader and business person that is leading by his actions and not by words only. I think about John when I hear the Bible verse, 1 John 3:18, “let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” I’ll turn it over to Case and John now.
Case Thorp
Welcome, welcome.
John Rivers
Thank you guys.
Case Thorp
I love what he had to say about The Coop.
John Rivers
I miss that one.
Case Thorp
Yeah, we do too. That was actually not my first question. Do we get The Coop back?
John Rivers
You know, if I had my druthers, I would say, yes. But no, I think the team right now is focused on the smokehouse and building it, growing it, though I would say this, if anybody wanted to run a Coop, I would help them do that and open it, just so I can go, matter of fact, for nine years, while it was open, I started every Saturday there. And you know what I loved about it? You know the food and everything was wonderful. It was the feeling. It was the community that was there. And you look in the dining room, and we built that dining room to feel like my grandma’s house, and you’d look around and you would see grandkids all the way to grandparents, and that’s what I loved, the very most matter of fact, you might not remember it, but there are pictures of chickens on the walls, and what happened was, you know, you think about grandma’s house, what does she have on her wall? We’re so off topic, by the way, you’d have pictures of your grandkids, right? So at first, we had family pictures all around and about a week before opening, I told Monica, my wife, I said, people don’t care about our family. So we took all the pictures down. We replaced them with chickens, but we named every chicken after a family member that it resembled.
Case Thorp
Sounds like my house. My wife loves her chickens, and I don’t. So if Jesus was in your restaurant, would he eat pork?
John Rivers
No, he was Jewish. Yeah, he was Jewish.
Case Thorp
Now, Tony mentioned your start in another career, and then, oh my goodness, 180 completely going in another direction. So talk to us through that first career, and then the shift to barbecue.
John Rivers
You know, it wasn’t overnight, I do believe that when each and every one of us are born, God gives everybody specific gifts. Okay, you can call it your calling. You call it your passion, whatever it is. But if you ask little kids what they want to do, you know, they’ll tell you, I want to be a fireman. I want to be a preacher. I want to be a teacher. I want to be an astronaut, so and so forth. I want to be a football player. What’s beautiful about that is that nobody’s told them that they’re not smart enough, or they’re not fast enough, or they can’t do it. Nobody’s told them what they can’t do. And as we grow up, we tend to hear that more often, and we move away from what that passion was. When I was a little boy, I loved to cook, for no reason. It wasn’t in our family. I just absolutely loved it, and I always wanted to have a restaurant. So it’s always been there. It’s all the passion that has been there. But just like a lot of our passions, our careers tend to encase it and get in the way sometimes, and they separate us. And you know, there’s a difference between making a paycheck and living out a passion. When you can get your passions to line up with your paycheck, okay, all of a sudden your career becomes your passion. You love it. You love what you do every single day. And I did learn something important in the smokehouse. Now, granted, I had to walk away from a career to step into a passion, but when you can line up your passion and your work with a third piece, which is purpose, when all of a sudden, it’s not for money, okay? And it’s not for title. You know, those things tend to move away quickly, but when you’re doing it for a greater purpose, it’s lasting, especially if you’re investing in the very community that you’re serving. You know, you create, to me, business people work for people, and people buy from people. It’s all relational. And if you’re in business and you don’t serve the community, not just with your product, but with true care and taking care of them and lifting them up, then that relationship is short lived. You know, we’ve been very blessed. The average restaurant today in the United States is only, like, two and a half years old, and that’s it, you know? And this will be 17 years for us, 17, and I’m convinced it’s…okay, the food is great, you know, the team is just awesome, but it’s the mission, it’s the purpose. I pray and I hope that when people come in, they realize that they’re not just buying a brisket sandwich, that they’re actually giving back to the community in one way or another. And that purpose, then is, well, you know, it started with helping kids with cancer. That’s how the whole thing generated out of our garage of raising money for a beautiful little girl. And that mission has stayed in the middle of our business. You know, I was talking to some business magazine about how you bring mission into the business, and I kind of realized how fortunate we were. We were actually blessed to be able to build a business around a mission. And the challenge has been, quite frankly, typically, as you grow, how do you maintain the integrity of that intent and make sure the focus continues on the mission? And that has come at some decisions that might not be the best for the business, but have been best for the team, for the guests, or for God, and we’ve always stood by that.
Case Thorp
Can you give me an example? When has there been competition with your mission?
John Rivers
Use of funds. A lot of times, you know, we’ve got different organizations that are now in, be it banks or be it whoever, and when they peel it back, and they take a look, and they take a look at PNL, and where we spend our capital, there’s a good portion of it that doesn’t go back into the business that goes back out. Our farm is by far our, you know, our biggest opportunity that we’ve had to truly make an impact in our political community. And what happened is we, Monica and I came back from a mission trip to Africa, and honest to goodness story, we got our invoice, our visa, and we looked at it, and we spent between the four of us in our family a lot of money in travel and accommodations and clothing and all these other things that weren’t necessarily mission-based. I mean, it got us to the mission base, but all that capital, you know, I started asking her. I said, well, what if we took all of our giving, okay, and we concentrated it, and we go deep instead of going wide, and we prayed about it, and we ran around, we looked about, and the thing that we discovered, you know, you see the results of a core issue, which is a broken food system. And those results that we see is, I don’t know if you realize it. I went to OCPS, Barbara Jenkins was the superintendent back then, and I said, Barbara, we’re looking where to point our foundation. Do you need help in the schools? Of course she says, yes. You know, all public school systems need it. We walked around, went to the computers, to the classroom, to the capital, and we went into the cafeteria, and that’s where I saw it. What I saw was on the plate. There wasn’t a lot of green there. Okay, you know, they only get $1.78 for two and a half meals a day. That’s their total budget per student. So you can imagine there’s not a lot of healthy produce that’s going on there, and the stuff that was there, you’re probably not going to eat it. But then, and I made a comment to her, and she looked at me, and she said, John, and this is the sad part, because this was, this was back in 1918 she says, one in six of these students. And I say sad because now it’s one in five, 20% of these students, this is the only food that they will eat all day. And I stopped, and I said, What do you mean by that? She says, this is it. They don’t have food when they go home. I said, What about dinner? A lot of them don’t eat dinner, which we’ve documented later. And I said, wait a minute. What about the weekends? And she says they had to find food. They don’t have it. And the fact that that was happening in our own backyard, okay? And it’s unbeknownst to all. I mean, I live in a bubble, and I don’t, I don’t mind admitting that, but when you look outside of the bubble, just in the people that are around us, they’re, I mean, we’re all called to go different places, but I’ve always contended, okay, God puts us in a specific place at a specific time for a reason. Okay? And sometimes some of the hardest things to do is actually to minister the person in the cubicle next to us. Talk about Jesus at home. You know, it’s easier to go talk to a stranger in different country, because you’re never going to see him again. Well, talk to the person next to you, and that’s in that same premise. What about the people in our community you know, who need it, and they’re there, and that that spoke to my heart, and as we started feeding programs, something happened, and it was a dear friend of mine, Dave Krepcho, who probably many of you know from Second Harvest. He is retiring from being CEO, and I served with him for many years. And I said, Dave, what did you learn in your tenure as CEO? And he got very solemn, to my surprise, and he said, John, he said, I learned you can’t food bank your way out of hunger. And I said, What does that mean, Dave? He said, We are handing out more food today than we ever have in our history, yet missed meals and hunger continues to rise every year. It’s an essential part of the community health, but it’s not going to solve it, and so my nature, I’m a fixer, I said, well, I’ll keep handing out food, but we’ve got to go deeper. We have to figure out what systemically is causing this. And that’s the problem. When you start, excuse the pun, peeling back the onion, and you start to realize just how broken the food system we have is, and what it’s causing to all of our health and our costs as a country. It’s staggering, staggering. The average produce that we eat in the United States today, okay, has traveled 1,782 miles to get to our plates. You imagine that, here we are in Florida, 92% of our lettuce comes from California, the very furthest part away. And do you all know the Duda family? You know a wonderful family, wonderful farmers. Guess what they grow here in Florida, lettuce and celery. And guess where it goes…up the coast. Okay, we’re moving food exponentially, because it’s so easy, but every second that it’s out of the ground, it loses nutrients. On top of that, as a country, I’m going to go on a tangent. Okay, I want to get on a soapbox here. But on top of that, 52% of our fruits and vegetables are now imported. For the first time in our country’s history, we have become a greater importer than we have been an exporter. Now what that causes, in the United States today, people don’t see this. Over 150 farms close every week. We lose 150 of our farms every single week for the first time since the Civil War, which was our lowest point of farms in the United States, which was 2 million. We built it up to 7 million, 6.98 million at one point, we are down now to 1.89 million farms, okay? And those are families. Those are families in our community. But more importantly, these are the people that provide the very essence of food that we need for our survival. I always say it’s not a matter of food security, and I try to help people realize, this is a matter of national security, and we should have learned some lessons in 2020 and we should have learned some lessons even a few years ago, when everything shut down. We have to be able to sustain ourselves as a community and as a country, and if we become so dependent on other countries to supply food, like that, we’re in trouble. Not only that, you take a look at the food that we’re actually eating. 1996 was the first year we started to put chemicals into our foods. And these are altered foods, okay? From 1996 to now, over 528 billion pounds of chemicals have been added into our soil and into our foods that now go into our bodies, okay, since 1997. Chronic diseases, okay? And keep this in mind, I’m going to tell you what causes a chronic disease. Have increased 377% And quite frankly, is it of any surprise if you put stuff that’s not good for us into the very food that we’re eating? Well, guess what? It’s going to have a ramification on our health. Our health bill now is over 49 billion, trillion dollars a year. We lead the world in health care costs, okay? But we also lead the world in obesity. We lead the world in cancer rates. We lead the world in heart disease and in diabetes, all chronic diseases, if you take a chronic disease, okay? And let’s just say I put it in a circle. It’s 100% okay, only 10% of that causation is hereditary. 90% is environmental, meaning, specifically the number one cause is the food that we’re eating. Okay, we’re doing this to ourselves, and we’re in this cycle over and over. And if you look at the economy, the subsidies that go into agriculture, okay, there are 300,000 varietals of fruits and vegetables around the world. Fruits and vegetable varieties constitute 90% of our diets around the world. Okay, now the United States, we’re subsidizing the majority of agriculture that’s happening out there. That subsidization is going into three primary crops: corn, wheat and soy, okay, well, let’s say corn. And that’s the number one today, 40% of corn that’s grown in the United States goes to ethanol. Other 40% goes into food for animals, okay, that leaves 20%. 90% of the 20% is put into ultra processed foods. Our diet today is constituted of 70% in the United States of ultra processed foods. For those of us not in the food scene or health scene, that’s a bad thing. That is a bad thing for our health. And if that’s what we’re putting in our body, and that’s what we’re subsidizing, 98% of our dollars of subsidization go to those three crops. 98%. Only 2% go to fruits and vegetables. We’re funding the health problem that we have.
Case Thorp
Okay, love, the passion, the investment, and one of the things that I’m always excited about are leaders in the depths of these very complicated issues, but who also love Jesus and that you are leveraging the free market and the basis of business and to be able to address these bigger things. Take us back to the shift from your first career into 4 Rivers. Did you at that time have the vision for 4 Roots farm?
John Rivers
No, and that’s, that’s a blessing, you know. And I believe it’s like the, you know, the pair of all the talents and stuff, you know, God gives us something, and gives us all a talent, of some type. What we do with it, I think very much determines what happens next. If we bury it, those talents that are unique to each and every one of us. Just like it talks about, I think it’s in Ephesians, we all have specific talents, okay, if we use those to build the kingdom, He’s going to give us more talents. He’s going to pour to us more if we bury them and don’t do anything, it’s just like if you have an employee, you know, and they don’t do anything with what you’ve entrusted upon them, why would you give them more responsibility? So the answer was no. And you know, the funny thing, Case is, I prayed so much when we were making, when we left healthcare. And I say we because it was a joint decision with Monica, my wife, because we had a wonderful job. It was a wonderful career, but I felt this calling to do more. And I always say, you know, there’s things you get in your career you know you’re pursuing, the reason that you go off to work every day, you’re going after a title or, you know, a doctorate, or CEO or whatever, you’re doing something that you’re passionate about, that you love. You’re doing so because you’re making an income. And at the end of it, sometimes in life, you’re blessed, and you have all seasons that all three of those hit, but when you get to a point and you find out it’s only one, that you’ve achieved that title, those goals, you’re not doing something you’re passionate about, you’re not learning and it’s only for the money, no matter how much money you make, you’re never going to fill that hole that’s in your heart. And I do believe that we all may have a point in our life. We start off pursuing a passion, but it’s just part of our culture. We end up settling for a paycheck, and when we do, there has to be a gut check. And the hard part is, the longer we wait, the more successful we are. It’s so hard to pull out of it because you’re comfortable. You know, success breeds comfort, and that comfort makes it very, very hard to take risks.
Case Thorp
So you’re taking the risk in the business. Was it at a certain point in the restaurant industry that your passion over the food system bothered you? What pushed you to then to do 4 Roots farm?
John Rivers
It was that consolidation of our foundation funding our family, and it was walking that day with Barbara and in the schools, in the schools, yeah, and it to answer the question, you know, learning is an iterative process. Was it a 19th century theologian, Kirkegaard, he said, we live our lives moving forward, but we tend to understand our lives looking back. And I absolutely contend everything that happens in our life is for a reason, is important. Every encounter we have, every relationship we have, every person that we come across, and even every experience, even the negative ones, you have to have the challenges to grow. If you’re too comfortable, you can’t grow. And you know people say, well, you were in healthcare those many years, but did you feel it was a waste? No, it was a blessing that led me to the smokehouse. It taught me how to run a business and build it. And no, we weren’t thinking of a farm. God gave us the smokehouse. And the funny thing was, I thought that was the blessing. I thought that was the basis of ministry, and it has been, but that has a reach that’s in the local communities. He actually used the farm. He used the business to bring us to the farm, and now the work that we’re doing at the farm has a much broader reach to it. And I was doing my prayer journal the other day, and I was thanking Him for those steps, and it made me realize what’s the farm leading me to, you know? Why? Why stop dreaming? You know, we’ll see. The important thing is to say yes.
Case Thorp
Well, you said yes, when the pandemic happened in a very unique way. I don’t know that most people really know the story as I watched it unfold, where you very creatively found a way to bless the community but keep your staff employed and to get a win, win. Could you share about that?
John Rivers
That was a tough time. We’re obviously in the restaurant business, and literally overnight. March 12, 2020, all the restaurants shut down, and that means we lost 90% of our income, of our revenue. We had 1000 employees. We were burning over $800,000 a week, and we have cash reserve, but we couldn’t sustain that. And it was…there were no apparent options. And on top of that, our farm was in the midst of a capital campaign and designing and building and doing things in that area. It all stopped. Everything stopped. And I remember, you know, you can’t put your head in the dirt and complain, you know, God didn’t put us in these positions, not to, you know, he put us here as a leader. And to do that, you have to lead the organization at the times of the most, greatest crisis, and you have to do it in a way that honors God. And we brought our team together, and we did have to cut, gosh, I think it was like 500 people, and it was singly, the worst day we’ve had, and starting 4 Rivers ever. But we made a promise, we’re gonna do everything we can to bring these people back. And then we had all these assets that were being unused. We had warehouses, we had trucks, we had all this stuff and people sitting around. And it dawned on the back of my head what Barbara said all those students, they rely on that food at the school, and the school wasn’t going to open, if you remember coming back from spring break, and I called her, and I said, Barbara. I said, How you gonna feed this kid? Where are they gonna get food from? She says, Oh, the state’s engaging. They’re gonna put food programs. I remember they’re handing out the meals and all the packs. And I said, Well, if you need any help, I got trucks. I got 500 people. I got warehouses, I got coolers, no matter what you need. Oh, no, John, we got it all covered. She called me back, and they had these distribution centers set up every school had them, she said, John, she said, we found a few holes. It was very telling, too for the state. This is one. It wasn’t indicative only to Orange County. They had 188 students living at the Coalition for the Homeless. They didn’t know about. Okay, then you had another 250 students on Mercy Drive. Well, there’s no parent there. Nobody’s going to drive them to the school to get the meals. And these were called holes. And she says, can you help me fill them? And thank goodness. We had great relationships in Tallahassee. In 24 hours we got approval. And I say, great relationship. It was God, you know, God blessed us. In 24 hours, we had approval to serve meals, get reimbursed by the state, okay, not just in Orange County, but for the entire state. In two weeks, we went from filling three holes, in Orange County to 46 sites in six counties throughout the entire state that we were feeding all these kids with. Now, as the kids came through the line, I was there one day, the first day, handing out the meals. Well, only the kids got food. Well, in the car, you had Grandma, you had brothers and sisters, and only one meal was going out for a family, a carload of four or five. I said, this isn’t right. So we said, let’s create family meals. Now, here’s what God showed us. We went back to all these farmers who we were working with. And you guys might remember it was in that March on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel. Do you remember a photograph of all these green peppers and onions on the beach had been dumped by one of the farmers? They couldn’t get rid of food. Okay? All this food was coming out of the ground and going to waste, and it was, it was a simple question I remember asking the Department of Ag, I said, Well, why can’t I just take that food and hand it to these family members? Well, I guess you could, you know, there’s nothing to prohibit. So I called all those farmers, and we started collecting all this produce that was going to waste, it was gonna get thrown away. And we started handing it to all the family members when they were coming up. And these beautiful grandmas were coming, and usually they were, they were singing to us as we gave them like a watermelon or cantaloupe or, you know, just beautiful fruits and vegetables. And that started, we had no design in this. We just simply said, yes. We listened to God, we leaned in and we wanted to help. And he opened up the door, and it created our feeding program, which is called Meet the Need. And that Meet the Need program has not stopped. We go side by side with Second Harvest and all the other feeding programs, and they hand out a lot of food, but we hand out fruits and vegetables, things that they can’t carry because they’re cold, they’re not shelf stable. And gosh, we’ve done we do about 2 million meals every year.
Case Thorp
And so you were able to keep some of your folks employed?
John Rivers
Yes, yes. Thank you. We ended up hiring as many back that we could, and not only here, but it was so successful in all those six counties around the state, we formed a network of restaurants, and we got them to hire their people back, and we taught them how to get reimbursed through the state, and if they couldn’t do it, they got reimbursed through us, through the state. And we, yeah, we brought a lot of people back in jobs.
Case Thorp
How can we pray for you and your endeavors?
John Rivers
Oh, goodness gracious, yeah, please, thank you. Pray for the team. You know, they work hard and you know, and every time you go into a restaurant, those people have a story and a life, and they’re putting it all on hold to come in and to work for us and please, thank them for the job that they’re doing, and then for us, please, I always pray for wisdom and discernment. There’s always opportunities. There’s always things that pull us, and just all these decisions that have to be made. And that’s, that’s one of the greatest gifts, I think, that God gives us, is, you know, that little glimpse of wisdom from time to time, and so most of the time when we need it most.
Case Thorp
Would you thank our guest?
