Perhaps most importantly, there’s the narrative that big food companies cannot save themselves, the idea that they must bring on outside help if they are to survive. By acquiring natural and organic food startups—helmed by mostly young, mostly college-educated, mostly white co-founders—multinational food conglomerates can buy their way to success and offset the flagging sales of aging marqee brands. The food industry is too old, too set in its ways, to change. But maybe it can be a benevolent master to the next generation of food companies, who are trying to offer America something new and truly different—or so the story goes.

That newness is what’s emphasized again and again, as food media tells Epic’s story. The takeaway is that Taylor and Forrest invented something no one else had ever thought of, and that General Mills never would have tried in a million years. “At the time, no protein bar of this kind existed,” wrote Inc.’s Tom Foster in a breathless profile published last month. “Forrest and Collins had hit on a powerful formula for new food brands. It was a novel product concept that fused two hot categories, protein bars and meat snacks like jerky. There was their mission for a larger purpose—sustainable sourcing—and, of course, the couple’s own compelling story. It all added up to exactly the kind of authenticity that legacy companies only wish they could create on their own.”

But there’s a problem with the insistence, central to Epic’s own marketing and repeated endlessly in the press, that Forrest and Collins invented something that didn’t exist before: It isn’t true.

In 2006, almost a decade before General Mills acquired Epic, social entrepreneurs Mark Tilsen and Karlene Hunter started making the Tanka Bar, the first commercial meat and fruit bison bar, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The goal was to create a product sourced from and produced by Native people who would help reduce the reservation’s unemployment rate, which hovers around 65 percent. The second goal was cultural. The co-founders hoped demand could be the economic driver that would restore the buffalo’s place in the lives of the Oglala Lakota people.