Keys to Success:
- Offer delicious, fun, and organic food
- Keep it fresh and free of single-use plastics
- Provide a wide selection without refined sugar, salt, or white flour, and avoid powdered instant soups
- Ensure kid-friendly recipes and steer clear of whey protein in smoothies
- Maintain a sense of humor and a standout front-of-house team
- Stay competitive on pricing and keep stores impeccably clean
- Have owners on-site, and remember: location, location, location.
The secret to a great product starts with the best ingredients, the right intentions, and an understanding that hard work shapes both quality and integrity. You don’t need elaborate recipes, a perfect flame, or even animal protein; what you really need is to see food as nutrition first—fuel for the body, not just entertainment. If you’re building a health-focused business, you must live that lifestyle yourself. Your own passion and energy will naturally flow into the food, especially if your team is happy and dedicated.
Our approach has evolved over time—our people aren’t jerks now, and neither are we. We pay close attention to the produce we use and constantly adjust our recipes. Being hands-on is crucial for maintaining standards, because even the strongest concept will fail with poor execution. And stellar operations don’t matter if you don’t have sales. In a health-based business, you have to “sell” health itself: customers should feel like your brand genuinely aims to help them.
Tenacity and a touch of workaholism are also vital. You’ll need to tackle countless tasks to move forward, adapting to trends and market shifts. Keep innovating: create entirely new offerings in the health-food space, or reinvent a traditional dish. Traveling abroad to discover new ingredients—or visiting the U.S. if you’re from Europe—can spark fresh ideas.
I believe in a fast-casual, grab-and-go model. While sit-down restaurants can work, they often get bogged down, complicating expansion. Running a single location well for decades is one thing; scaling multiple locations is another challenge altogether.
Choosing whether to offer animal protein depends on your goals, but it can broaden your customer base. People can eat healthily with carefully sourced and prepared meats—so consider a menu that’s around 70% vegetables, with an option for the cleanest animal protein. In today’s market, going gluten-free and avoiding refined sugars, salts, and low-quality oils is also wise. Use only pure oils for dressings—never store-bought—and avoid cooking “healthy” recipes in oil, as this undermines the nutrition you’re striving for. Similarly, never cook saturated fats in other saturated fats.
Regarding high-pressure pasteurization (HPP) for juices, unless you’re going wholesale, it’s probably not worth it—you’ll lose fresh taste and still face waste, without significantly lowering costs. Cutting corners, whether in produce quality or extraction methods, defeats the purpose of truly fresh juice. Small-batch production is key here, and the same applies to soup. You can make phenomenal soup in large vats, but beyond a certain point, quality suffers, and the details that make food delicious get diluted.
Businesses tempted by a “sliding-scale” approach—charging full price on day one and reducing it each day after—will likely find it unworkable. No one really wants old juice at any price, and keeping track of fluctuating “airline pricing” would be a logistical mess, not to mention it undermines the value of fresh, premium products. Similarly, trying to extend shelf life purely to increase profit eventually erodes quality. From the minute food is made, it begins to lose freshness, so consumers should question paying full price for anything past its peak.
Ultimately, succeeding in the health-food industry means balancing quality, integrity, and innovation—without cutting corners—and staying true to the ethos that food should nourish both the body and the spirit.