Jared Koch | Clean PlatesBrooklyn born, New York bred and Mid-Western educated, Clean Plates founder Jared Koch launched his ‘eat healthy without sacrificing taste’ campaign after years creating a family business. Pravassa founder, Linden Schaffer, who religiously uses the Clean Plates guide when eating out sat down with Jared at Clean Plates approved Mana restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side where they both dined on fish.
Pravassa: Jared, anyone who’s picked up a Clean Plates guide has learned that you deferred medical school and started working with your brother to create a family business. What made you step away from that line of work and head into nutrition?
Jared Koch: Well, I had everything that I had been told would make me happy, but I wasn’t happy. I felt like my whole life was about perusing money and I really wanted to do something more meaningful. I started taking yoga and meditation classes and even thought about going back to medical school, but didn’t know if I could study again. I had a lot of digestive issues and my yoga teacher encouraged me to take a look at my diet. I then decided to take a course in nutrition as a way to get into studying again and I became very passionate about it.
So from your nutrition studies you were able to grow a one-on-one business that led to the start of Clean Plates?
Yes, I started teaching yoga and working with clients as a nutritional consultant. The positive results I started seeing were not only with clients, but also with myself. I completely healed my digestive issues. The more I worked with nutrition, the more I realized it was foundational and is the answer to so many kinds of personal health challenges we face. The idea that became Clean Plates was the overall idea to get people to make a substantial change that was not only about education, but had a way to support this journey of change. It’s difficult for human beings to change. We’re resistant creatures. The thing that was working most successfully for my clients, was giving them practical recommendations; product suggestions, supplement information and restaurant recommendations. Clients would come back and tell me how much they loved my suggestions and that when eating out they would go to healthy restaurants multiple times a week. They would be putting different and better food in their body. It was a rational, non-extreme, doable approach to changing your lifestyle. When I started learning about nutrition, I knew nothing about the topic and as a culture we’re still very uneducated, but we’ve come a long way in the last 10 years and I wanted to contribute to that cultural change. My entrepreneurial brain kicked in and I decided to package this approach into the Clean Plates Manhattan restaurant guide.
That’s probably one of the biggest changes in the last 10-years, the availability of healthy food.
I personally didn’t want to sacrifice my fast paced New York lifestyle. I love good food and the amount and quality of the food has definitely increased. The demand has increased so now high quality chefs are interested in cooking this way. You can actually build a restaurant business around it.
What was a typical meal in the Koch household growing up?
Well, growing up I didn’t necessarily eat healthy, but there was a huge interest in food. It was more about the pleasure side of it. We are out a lot, mostly Italian food. Now I lead by example and my family’s eating habits have changed substantially. They’ve shown an interest in eating healthy and are constantly asking me questions about how to do it. Even my dog has a raw food diet provided by a holistic vet.
The taste testing process; tell us about how do you decide which restaurants to include in the Clean Plates guide.
When I first started, I went with a food critic to over 125 restaurants in a very short period of time. We started with eating out three meals a day, but we realized very quickly that was not going to work. We adjusted to two meals a day several days a week in about 3 ½ months. I definitely ended the process swearing never to eat out again – which lasted a week. Now that we’re doing multiple books in multiple locations, we use our large survey to understand the health and sustainability of the restaurants before we step foot in them. If they meet our standards, then we work with a food critic to visit and review them. We have different levels of approval so in the printed guide you’ll find the best restaurants that meet all of our criteria. If a restaurant comes close, you can find that listing on our website or iPhone app.
It’s expensive for small local farms to become ‘Certified Organic’ and for many of them it is just cost prohibited. How do you address this issue with the restaurants you feature?
Many of the restaurants we deal with source from farms that are not certified organic. We look for restaurants and the farms that they source from to use organic practices. Some of them are even better than the organic standards that the government sets. We don’t live in an ideal world, certainly there’s a lot of work to be done to improve the food system. Our guide finds the places that are doing the best job and that sort through the confusion enabling diners to make informed choices. There’s more of a comfort level for some people when they know that a restaurant orders ‘certified organic’, but at the moment it’s just not the reality of how things work.
Local – Organic – Seasonal. How do all these work together?
Seasonal tends to align with local. When a restaurant orders from a local farm, they are getting what’s in season. Ideally if you can eat the combination of all three that is great, but it’s not always possible so it becomes a personal choice which one you give preference to. Eating organic minimizes your exposure to chemicals, but the food could travel cross-country to get to you, losing its nutrients, impacting the environment and it might not be seasonal. Where if you eat something local, but not organic, your supporting your community, but the food might be sprayed with chemicals. It’s a personal choice. I lean toward organic.
In the past 4 years since I’ve enacted my wellness strategy through exercise, nutrition, stress reduction, I don’t get sick often if at all and when I do it doesn't last very long.
I haven’t been to the doctor in years. Some clients I work with don’t see a doctor either. I think once you start eating better, reducing your stress and practice more wellness activities; your body starts to heal at the root so you’re less likely to need a doctor. People have changed their diets and been able to get of medication as well as lower their blood pressure and cholesterol. Medicine has its place in terms of diagnostic testing and emergencies, but how you treat your body has a huge impact.
You just published the Clean Plates Cookbook. It has an education section at the beginning of the book, which instructs people on food choices and really explains what’s out there, is key and makes it more than a just a cookbook.
What we did well in the restaurant guides was take the whole topic of nutrition, which can be quite confusing and put it into an organized understandable fashion. It’s not dogmatic, but takes the topic and presents it in a clear way to help people to make informed decisions. I was getting a ton of great feedback about that front portion in the guides and how people were using it. Since the guides are city specific, I knew the information was only being seen by a limited number of people. Those people were reading the guide, but no one was thinking about it as being an education tool, it was more of a restaurant guide. So by taking this educational portion, expanding it and creating a cookbook, I am able to reach more people with my message. The cookbook became a lifestyle guide, an education and introduction into eating healthy without having to read a textbook or take courses.
Tell me about the actual cookbook portion of the book.
There are 120 recipes in the book and we worked with Napa chef and cookbook author Jill Silverman Hough who created almost all of the recipes using our ingredient guidelines. We wanted to make a fun, simple, tasty cookbook. There are about 15 recipes contributed from well-known chefs like Jamie Oliver, Michael Anthony from Gramercy Tavern, Iron Chef Mark Forgione and more. Throughout the process of the restaurant guide we built relationships with chefs that really believed in what we were doing and we asked them to contribute a recipe to the book.
These are all great books to have. Tell us how people can stay connected with you and Clean Plates.
We're currently building our online community via our website and sending out emails a few times a week with the intention to launch city-specific emails. The whole mission of the company is to make it easier and more enjoyable for people to eat better. The Clean Plates community is a resource to make it easier for you to live this lifestyle in your city and keep you in good health. - L.S.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 9:00AM 
Andrew McCarthyAndrew McCarthy
Andrew at the summit of Mt. KilimanjaroWhat's your 'go-to' restaurant item?
