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Hosts: Travis Entenman & Lori Walsh
Guest: Tim Meagher - COO of Vanguard Hospitality
Episode Summary
Tim Meagher, cofounder of Vanguard Hospitality, discusses his journey from working in pizza to managing multiple restaurants in Sioux Falls. He emphasizes the importance of hospitality and creating a unique experience for guests. Tim highlights his efforts to source local products, including partnering with tribal partners, and the challenges of maintaining a sustainable food system. He stresses the need for resilient, interdependent relationships with producers to ensure long-term success. Tim also reflects on the impact of the pandemic on food systems and the importance of normalizing local products to create a sustainable future.
Highlights
- Tim traces his unlikely path from pizza joints and a heavy metal band called Spore to cofounding Vanguard Hospitality, explaining how a song called “Vanguard” inspired the name and a legacy-driven ethos that rejects the status quo.
- He unpacks the difference between service and hospitality, arguing that hospitality is about how a place makes you feel and how relationships are built in a room, not just how fast food arrives or how well a table is managed.
- Tim describes his journey into wine and cheese, learning microclimates, soils, and root systems, and how that same curiosity led him to question monocultures, input-heavy agriculture, and ultra‑processed foods.
- A turning point comes when he begins sourcing Berkshire hogs and later partners with Dakota Rural Action, acknowledging what he doesn’t know and working to normalize local foods so they are no longer a niche but a default choice on menus.
- Inside Vanguard’s kitchens, he and chef Josh quietly swap ingredients for more nutrient-dense, pasture-based options, trusting guests’ bodies to notice the difference rather than preaching ideals at the table.
- Tim talks candidly about walking away from dependence on broadline distributors, visiting ranches to see plant diversity and soil health, and telling suppliers he would rather lose his businesses than go back to systems where somebody always loses.
- The episode explores integrated regional hubs, small processors with kill floors, retail, and restaurants under one roof, and what it would take for South Dakota’s food system to be resilient enough to feed itself.
- Throughout, Tim returns to questions of incentives, relationship-building, and “playing offense” in a system that constantly tries to sell you convenience, showing how small, intentional steps—from one better salad to one local logo on a menu—can add up to structural change.
About the Show
Rivers & Rangelands explores conservation, water, and community in the Northern Great Plains. Hosted by Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh, the podcast asks big questions about how we care for our land and water — today and for generations to come.
🎶 Special thanks to Jami Lynn for providing the music for this episode. You can explore more of her music here: jamilynnsd.com
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👉👉 And to hear more from Lori, follow So Much Sunlight, a newsletter of essays, poetry, and audio ephemera on Substack!
