The Heir Who Turned Fertilizer Into an Eightfold Legacy

How Espoma Made an Inheritance Something to Earn

Jeremy Brunner knew he could eventually join his family’s fertilizer company. But his father intentionally kept him away from the business so leadership would remain a choice rather than an entitlement.

After college and law school, Brunner returned in 1997. He began on the plant floor and managed a small sales territory instead of entering the company as its presumed successor.

Two years later, his father’s cancer diagnosis pulled him into leadership much earlier than expected. The transition became a test of whether he could carry the company through uncertainty, not simply whether his name qualified him to inherit it.

Since then, Espoma has grown sales eightfold, expanded from roughly 20 products to more than 100, and reached over 20,000 retailers nationwide.

The company also invested heavily in automation without eliminating jobs, treating technology as a way to strengthen its workforce rather than replace it.

Today we examine how Espoma turned succession into something to prove, why stewardship begins before authority is granted, and what other family businesses can learn from an heir required to earn the company he inherited.

Case Study: How Espoma Made an Inheritance Something to Earn

Herbert G. Sanders founded the Espoma Company in Millville, New Jersey, in 1929 with a single organic fertilizer.

In 1946, he introduced Holly-tone, a slow-release fertilizer for acid-loving plants that remains the company’s bestselling product.

Each succeeding generation expanded the business without abandoning its original commitment to organic gardening.

Dean Sanders added products and automated production. Serge Brunner computerized the operation. His son Jeremy would eventually take Espoma from a regional manufacturer to a national leader.

But Jeremy was not raised as the company’s presumed successor.

His father intentionally kept him away from the business, concerned that too much childhood exposure could turn inheritance into obligation or entitlement.

Leadership remained available to Jeremy, but it was never treated as automatically his.

At Cornell University, Jeremy studied entrepreneurship while many classmates pursued careers in banking and finance. He became interested in building a business, even if fertilizer did not initially feel like the most exciting choice.

After earning his law degree, he joined Espoma in 1997.

He started on the plant floor to learn manufacturing and managed a small sales territory to understand the company from its customers’ perspective.

Two years later, his father was diagnosed with cancer and stepped away from daily responsibilities for approximately six months.

Jeremy was pulled into the office to help guide the company through the disruption. When his father returned, he chose not to reclaim all those responsibilities, beginning a transition neither generation had expected to start so soon.

Jeremy did not receive leadership through a ceremonial handoff. He proved he could carry the business when the family suddenly needed him to.

Under his direction, Espoma expanded from a regional supplier into the largest producer of organic fertilizer in the US retail lawn-and-garden industry.

Sales have grown eightfold since he joined. The product portfolio expanded from roughly 20 items to more than 100, while distribution reached over 20,000 retailers nationwide.

That growth required Espoma to modernize a manufacturing operation originally built around one fertilizer.

The company installed automated packaging lines, robotic palletizers and computerized production systems. Its first robot arrived in 2002, taking over one of the plant’s most physically demanding jobs.

Espoma says it has never eliminated a position because of automation.

Technology changed the work without making the workers disposable.

That distinction reflects how Espoma approaches capital investment. Automation is intended to expand capacity, improve consistency, and remove physical strain rather than reduce the number of people sharing in the company’s growth.

The same philosophy shaped its environmental investments.

In 2010, Espoma spent $2.5 million installing solar panels across nearly 43,000 square feet of warehouse rooftops. The system produces more than 700,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

In 2025, the company opened a Pennsylvania facility capable of processing 260 million pounds of fertilizer each year.

The plant dehydrates and granulates raw materials from nearby farms, helping secure Espoma’s supply while diverting manure from direct land application and reducing potential nutrient runoff.

The investment strengthened the supply chain by solving a problem for the communities supplying it.

Espoma’s succession story has now entered another generation. Jeremy’s daughter Jordan joined the company in 2026 after beginning her career at JPMorgan.

Her arrival marks the fifth generation, but not a guaranteed path to leadership. Like her father, she enters an operating company where the family name creates responsibility before it creates authority.

Nearly a century after Espoma began with one fertilizer, the company remains privately held, nationally distributed, and rooted in the same New Jersey community.

Its growth did not require separating modernization from stewardship. The company automated without treating employees as excess, expanded without abandoning its original principles, and transferred responsibility without assuming inheritance alone created readiness.

The deeper legacy lesson is that succession becomes credible when the next generation earns trust before receiving authority. An inherited business may open the door, but stewardship is proven by what the successor strengthens after walking through it.

From Inherited Authority to Earned Stewardship

1. Separate Ownership From Automatic Leadership

Bühler, the Swiss family-owned machinery maker now in its fifth generation, has kept ownership within the founding family while repeatedly entrusting operations to experienced professional leaders.

In 2026, the company appointed Samuel Schär as CEO after he had spent 20 years building and leading businesses across the organization. Meanwhile, Karin, Maya and Jeannine Bühler continue the family’s long-term ownership strategy.

The carefully planned transition preserves family stewardship without treating the family name as the only qualification for executive authority.

Ownership may be inherited, but operational leadership should still be earned through experience.

2. Preserve the Standard, Not the Spotlight

McIlhenny Company, the family-owned maker of Tabasco sauce, has spent more than 150 years allowing its product to become more famous than the family behind it.

The recipe has passed through generations while the company remains family-owned and operated on Avery Island, where Edmund McIlhenny first produced the sauce in 1868.

Stewardship does not require every generation to reinvent what already works. It requires knowing which standards must be protected while leadership changes around them.

3. Make Authority Earned and Verifiable

Since 1894, Underwriters Laboratories has built authority through testing, inspection and scientific standards rather than through inherited reputation or assertion alone. A product does not receive the UL mark because its manufacturer claims it is safe. It must be evaluated against established requirements.

Authority becomes durable when others can verify why it was granted. The same principle applies to succession: a title may identify who leads, but demonstrated performance is what gives that leadership credibility.

4. Inherit the Responsibility, Not Just the Title

Anthony Rau grew Rauhorn Electric more than fivefold since taking on greater responsibility from his father, yet he describes the company in terms of custodianship rather than conquest: "you are protecting a legacy while preparing it for the next generation".

Growth measured only in revenue rewards the wrong instinct; growth measured in trust compounded across generations rewards the one that actually endures. The families that multiply legacy are rarely the ones chasing the largest number, but the ones treating every number as borrowed from people not yet born.

From strategy to legacy

Espoma’s growth reveals a deeper succession discipline: inheritance may transfer ownership, but it cannot transfer earned trust.

Leadership becomes credible through the responsibilities a successor accepts before receiving the title, the people strengthened rather than displaced, and the institution left more capable than it was when they arrived.

The strongest successors do not simply preserve what they inherit. They prove themselves by building something the next generation will also have to earn.

- Legacy Beyond Profits