“The decisions you're making today are going to support where you want to get to in the future,” Rembrandt Foods CEO Andrew Herr said during Minnesota State Mankato’s Annual Schmitz Lecture, part of the college’s entrepreneurship series.
During the presentation, Herr shared advice that helped him lead Rembrandt Foods to being one of the top egg producers in the U.S. with two million layers, according to WATT Global Media’s 2025 Top Egg Company Survey.
1) Sun birding
According to Herr, sun birding is the concept of taking ideas from one industry and applying them to another.
Throughout life, in grocery stores, restaurants, manufacturing plants and other places, Herr analyzes the environment and is always looking for how a concept in one environment could be applied to another to make it more efficient.
Questions he asks himself often include: “why was that great customer service?” and “what was inefficient about their process?”
After touring an orange juice manufacturer and seeing how a de-pulping system works, Herr said he knew that a piece of equipment similar to that would be the solution for extracting egg white from yolk in the breaking plant.
Herr had a similar experience after touring a dairy plant. After reading multiple dairy patents and learning how dairy producers use microfiltration systems to separate lactose from milk proteins, he said, I knew that I could repurpose that concept and bring it to the egg industry.
As an entrepreneur, it is important to be able to piece something together and produce a product that is better than what we had previously, Herr explained.
2) The Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (OODA) loop
The secret sauce of Rembrandt Foods right now is the OODA loop, and we are that way because we have driven profit and loss responsibility, or financial performance management, deep into the organization, he said.
“That way, everybody is incented along the same lines. Everybody is rowing in the same direction,” he stated. “A lot of people communicate, but not everybody decides. We are working on getting people to observe, orient, decide and act. That way, little problems never become big problems.”
Concerning highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks, management of the disease has come from the ground level groups on Rembrandt farms that have experienced it, understand how it happened and have a vested interest in fixing it, he added.
“We have tied that vesting interest with compensations. If you have a vested interest in solving it, you will be given opportunity and security.” Herr stated. “That is the lifeblood of which our business operates. That's the differentiator.”
While Herr knows he cannot reduce the probability of contracting the disease on Rembrandt Foods farms to zero, he continues to use math to govern the business and reduce the likelihood of an outbreak. Rembrandt Foods had farms impacted with HPAI infections during the North American outbreaks in 2014-2015 and 2022-2025.
The final thing concerning the OODA loop is that we are never satisfied with saying that we are just an egg company, Herr explained.
“We constantly challenge ourselves. Yes, we sell eggs, but we constantly challenge ourselves and study other businesses to make sure we understand other models,” he said. “That has been a core component of us.”
