Golly, been a week already since my “first” entry. I write this in VS code of all places because it’s easier than having separate apps for writing and coding and I don’t want to write JavaScript in MS word.
But how I write is a boring topic and I want to keep this interesting and useful.
I’m listening to Hooked by Michael Hoss on Audible right now “How the food industry exploits our addictions”.
I’m struggling with a sugar addiction right now. I already cut out sodas and caffeine, most processed meats, most empty carbs like breads and pasta, but the sugar addiction is a tough one to break. So I got this book thinking it might help me more than the Sugar book by Allen Carr (his Easy Way to Stop Smoking book performed a miracle for me back in 2018 so I figured I’d give him a chance with sugar) and this new book is working better for me. It gives all sorts of insights and details about just how our food industry is not in any way working in our best interest. More about facts than brainwashing.
So the last few days as this book has been on my mind, I’ve been doing significantly better with my sugar addiction. I hope it sticks after I finish it.
Anyway, it mentions a lot about convenience and variety as being cornerstones of modern food marketing and it really sunk in that those ideas are never applied to anything actually healthy. Only junk food. Because no one in the vegetable industry is truly profit driven. If they really want profit, they jump over to processed crap and the vegetable industry never gets a fair shake.
I’ve been thinking and planning for a couple years now to open a restaurant, the healthiest restaurant in America. Not my primary goal right now, but something I’d really like to do if I can find the time and money.
You are welcome to steal these ideas. I very much encourage it. Let me know if you do and I will try to help.
So let’s outline my plans now, since I’ve never actually sat down and written them out even though they are quite detailed in my head.
So my restaurant would be advertized as the healthiest restaurant in Pittsburgh for the first year or two, then we’d jump to making the claim of being the healthiest restaurant in America.
Turn fast food totally on its head. It would be set up similar to a Subway with the window in front of the cooler and you stand there and choose, except instead of sandwich toppings we have sliced vegetables. Then in a side cooler, customers could grab their own dipping sauce portion cups. So you’d choose a container, like a cup, bowl, or large bowl, each at a different price. Then you fill your container with whatever vegetables you choose, grab as many dips as you want for like a dollar each or whatever, and GTFO. Since we don’t need to do any toasting like Subway and most customers will choose fewer items than what a normal person puts on a sandwich, we should be able to match or even beat Subway in terms of speed and convenience.
As well as the cup/bowl choices, customers can choose a simple ziploc bag of veggies. We can sell this as a fast way to get the fresh vegetables for your dinner prep all cut up and ready to go.
The key here is both variety and speed/convenience (also freshness, but that’s obvious. If it’s not fresh, it fails.). The smaller version of a store like this can be crammed into an even smaller space than a subway, and won’t really need a lot of tables since it’s designed as either an on the go snack or dinner prep. There’s tons of veggies going way beyond just carrots and celery, like the obvious ones like broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, but also things we don’t normally think of as raw dipping vegetables like asparagus, radishes, poblano, cabbage, bok choy. We can pick ten or twelve of the most popular vegetables and then five or six alternates that are constantly rotating and experimenting. Same with the dips. We pick like 16 good ones. A couple ranches, a couple hummus, a couple nut butter based dips, some honey mustard, yogurt and herb. Then we have 5 or 10 that we keep changing and switching up and experimenting with. About 50% of them should be vegan.
But we need more than just a snack, so for the normal sized locations we will also sell three or four different hot bean soup options. We will definitely have a classic American vegan chili, one that we will really work on and taste test with folks who normally look down on healthy vegan food. The classic chili can be a bridge for us to bring in folks that don’t normally eat like this. We will have things like cheese, sour cream, yogurt, jalapenos, onions, fried onions, tortilla chips, fried peppers, lime juice, hot sauce etc so we can really go all out with a wide variety of toppings for our chili to really make it special and extravagant but still really fast. (We will NOT be a true vegan restaurant. Almost Vegan is one possible name.)
Then a couple other bean options like a chickpea curry or a thick lentil soup. The chili will probably be an every day staple but the others will rotate around and experiment.
So with this setup you have no on the fly cooking. Everything is just grabbed and put together. We might be able to simplify it further by using the same containers and pricing for both the veggies and the soups.
So we’d have three types of customers: people coming for a quick healthy snack, people getting veggies for use at home with other meals, and people looking for a full vegan(ish) meal.
I also have marketing planned out.
We start by advertizing as “Healthiest restaurant in Pittsburgh” and we invite other restaurants to challenge us on that. If we can afford to grow and franchise, we can expand to claim healthiest restaurant in America.
But if any restaurant tries to challenge us on the title, on the surface we may playfully act like we are in competition, but in reality we will go out of our way to advertize the challenger more than our own restaurant, regardless of how close they come to beating us in healthiness. We make it clear that we’re going to make you look good if you’re at least trying to be healthy, to encourage more challengers and attempt to create a community of restaurants pushing toward healthier and more ethical food choices. It’s all about the end goal of pushing the whole industry toward better choices.
The other marketing, and this sounds weird, but our focus will be on children and truck drivers.
The thought is “where can we do the most good for society, have the most positive impact.” If we can maximize the positive impact on our community, we should easily be able to turn a reasonable profit and expand.
So children are the ones that have the most influence here. If kids say “I wanna go to McDonald’s”, the parents are going to drag their feet, but if the kids want to eat at a place like this, the parents are going to quickly go along with it. Also by marketing to children, we may be able to take advantage of school programs and teachers that may really support what we’re trying to do and may give us free advertizing. And again, trying to do the most good before making a profit, marketing healthy eating choices to children sets them up for a lifetime of better choices.
Truck drivers I believe are a big untapped market. They have a huge stereotype of only eating garbage, but in many ways they aren’t doing it by choice. They eat what they have available. They are aware of how hard the career is on their bodies and they’re not happy about that but feel like there aren’t better options. We can put these in truck stops then advertize them a hundred or so miles down the road giving truckers and travelers time to really think about their choices.
The beverages are a tough choice. I really really really don’t want soda pop. Sugar beverages are poison. Cutting them out of my life was one of the best choices I ever made. But it’s hard to succeed as a restaurant without them.
Anyway, ideally I’d like to have like 10 different kinds of unsweetened iced teas, most of which would be decaf like chamomile, basil, ginger turmeric, or Lemon verbena, then a couple regular caffeinated teas like one black and one green and one with cold coffee. As usual, flavors will be constantly changing and experimenting. But it would need to be expensive fair trade ethical coffee. Not sure why, it just feels like the coffee needs to be high quality here. Also hot coffee. Can’t get by without that. Hot tea is a good option too, if we have a crazy crapload of choices of tea bags and we’re basically just selling hot water in a cup and a tea bag.
We would have unrefined sugar and if we can afford it, honey (but probably won’t be able to swing that) for people to add to their beverages, but that would be the only sugar in the restaurant. Certainly not pre-added to the beverages.
But the first iteration would probably just have seltzers and bottled waters and other packaged “healthy” beverages because I just don’t know how we would make all that tea in a cost-effective manner. That would take a bit more research.
Also, it would be nice to provide some kind of super quick access to information about the ingredients, like maybe experiment with QR codes on things so people can look up nutritional info on each vegetable… of course need to do it such that only people waiting in line want to do it so we don’t slow anything down. We don’t want to make any choices that might sacrifice speed and convenience.
I’m thinking places like this should be placed in high volume areas. We may need high volume to justify all the prep work we’re doing, but if we have multiple locations in a city, I wonder if having a central “ghost kitchen” type thing centrally located would be a good idea to do all the prep work and deliver out to the locations, or deliver larger catering orders. There’s a lot of ways this could go.
This would be pretty high risk venture obviously. I used to watch a lot of Gordon Ramsey and spent 10 years in the kitchen industry and have seen a lot of failures. It’s not an easy thing so I’d need to prepare for failure.
But I do really think this could work.
I had this big misinterpretation of Pittsburgh food.
In this city it’s all pizza and fries covered in cheese sauce. Coming from Seattle I was a bit disturbed by the food culture here.
But I decided to start making vegetable trays and taking them to parties. I mostly did it for myself because I knew I wouldn’t have any other healthy option at the party. I thought people would mock me and go for all the other pastas and pastries first.
But that’s not what happened. People really did eat my veggie tray–granted it’s a big one with like 10 different veggies on a bed of both spinach and purple cabbage. I throw it together pretty quick, but it still looks good. But people really did eat it and without complaining. Some even get real excited.
It didn’t make any sense to me. But then I realized: Yinzers aren’t married to unhealthy food. They just aren’t picky. They don’t complain about their food. In Pittsburgh we like it fast and ready, hence the fries on the sandwich.
So I take one of these veggie trays to a party a couple times a month, with some store bought hummus and some spicy peanut butter or ranch or something like that. Same basic thing every time, and yet people still get excited about it and eat it, like 80% of it when they’re eating about 80% of the pasta dish or pastries next to it that are actually smaller.
I swear there is a fucking market for this. Our society has fallen so far down the rabbit hole of horrible eating that deep down inside people are desperate for something like this.