Joey Thurman: I'm here with Ron and Kara, Plants and Plates. Plant-based eating, can it be good? Well, these two are cooking with love and together, and they live the lifestyle together. It's very sweet. Tell me about Plants and Plates and why you started.

Kara Cunningham: We provide a plant-based meal delivery service. Here in our home at the moment we, we prep all the meals on a Sunday. They're ready for pickup or delivery on a Monday, and they are fresh for a week at a time. It is a weekly service and shortly we will be transitioning into a ghost kitchen so that we can service more people.

Joey Thurman: Ghost kitchen. That sounds a little weird. What's a ghost kitchen?

Ron Worrell: It's a great alternative for small businesses starting off, especially because getting a commercial kitchen is not easy. You'd have to get a big commercial kitchen at a restaurant or get a food truck or something along those lines. Ghost kitchens have become more popular as a means for folks to find a location to go and have all the professional tools and equipment you need, cold storage to warm storage space to a space just for cleaning and a space just for cooking to make sure everything is on the up and up.

Joey Thurman: Now, what brought on the idea of living a plant-based lifestyle?

Kara Cunningham: Plant-based started with him actually. When we met he was kind of diving into that.

Ron Worrell: I watched a documentary that really kind of hit home for me. It's called Game Changers on Netflix. During the pandemic, I was binge watching a lot of things and it was the very early beginning part of it, I guess. It just kind of really hit home with me as someone that likes staying active and fit to see that athletes at the highest level can live a plant-based lifestyle and perform at an even higher level. It just felt like why not? Let me try this and see how it feels, because I was already kind of pivoting from eating a lot of meat to more of a seafood diet.

Ron Worrell: For me, seafood is also kind of feels like home being from the Caribbean and being from also the Mediterranean part of the world where seafood was always in my diet growing up as a kid. But when I moved to the US, that changed a bit. As I've kind of evolved a little bit, I made that transition to seafood more and then saying, "Let's try this plant-based all in all." It's been great.

Kara Cunningham: I will say that the more of the process vegan plant-based meats, they do not sit well with me. I mean we had a lot of time on her hands.

Ron Worrell: We did.

Kara Cunningham: I love cooking and we love cooking together. We were just testing out new recipes, doing research in a sense, like reading books, learning about fiber and how that works in the body, as well as how you cook it. It was just experimentation and word of mouth traveled and pretty soon we ended up with more clients than we thought, and to the point of where we're at our capacity in our own kitchen, that we've kind of laid back on marketing until this ghost kitchen opens up.

Joey Thurman: What do you find with being a startup? Is there any struggles, anything that you have to push through? Obviously a large demand is a good thing, but how do you get through that?

Ron Worrell: Finding the efficiencies to be able to do it all is really critical. Identifying the right ingredients, the right meals, who cooks what, when. All those have to work in unison in order for it to all be ready in time. The first few weeks it was stressful. It was like, "Oh my God, it's midnight and then we got to get this done. Label's got to be printed and put it on the packaging," and all these things that we learned, but through trial and error and communication and figuring it out together.

Ron Worrell: But after the third and the fourth week, we're like, "This is actually a lot more manageable. We're getting better at it." But it was all just by trial and error. It's been a good learning process, but I would say time and finding the efficiencies are the critical components to making it work.

Joey Thurman: What's the first impression of the food that people try? Are they leery about it? I don't want to try plants?

Kara Cunningham: Everybody has commented on the flavor. I think they go into it expecting that it's going to be this dull green [crosstalk 00:04:05] thing with this white block of tofu that doesn't taste like anything. Everybody is always shocked by the flavor, which is a huge compliment to us because we're eating it too.

Ron Worrell: I agree. I think that's been definitely the biggest feedback because even when I first tried to take on this plant-based lifestyle before Kara, it was hard because I didn't know as well what I could make, what my options were. I was making very boring, basic things.

Ron Worrell: Then as we've learned, there's so many exciting recipes that you can make. It just makes it enjoyable to have variety and what you're eating, but also consuming things that are good for you. It's a perfect combination of things. A lot of what we make are influenced by things that we've either explored or things from even, we make a jack jerk chicken, which kind of has a bit of a Caribbean influence from where my dad is from. We make a Mediterranean salad, which is with a homemade hummus, which is kind of where my mom's side is from in Israel. There's just a lot of, I guess, things that are based on a little bit of our origins into it as well.

Kara Cunningham: I'm from Indiana [crosstalk 00:05:12]. There's not really [crosstalk 00:05:15].

Ron Worrell: Every once in a while.

Joey Thurman: [crosstalk 00:05:17].

Kara Cunningham: A version of it. We do a mashed lentil, I guess that would be the ...

Ron Worrell: We do a mashed lentil. That's a good one. Our food is inspired by a little bit of our origins, like I said, but I think we make it with love and I think that's the difference between the stuff that we feel we can make homegrown on a small local level compared to sometimes when we get things that are shipped frozen or what have you, the flavor and the taste is never going to be the same as what somebody's making that we also are consuming like our own. So absolutely.

Joey Thurman: Look at this food. I mean, it looks delicious. Do you waft it?

Kara Cunningham: Yeah. I fan it a little bit.

Joey Thurman: Hang on. Okay. Fan it out for me. What do we have here? Tell me about each individual plate.

Kara Cunningham: Truman with the homies over here. The giant portobello is also sourced from the farmer's market here locally. Then we have our green string beans. It is an uncooked green pet, mostly just for the visual aspect of it, but it's our mashed red lentils there.

Joey Thurman: Nice.

Kara Cunningham: Then we have our Mediterranean salad, which we brought on for the summer. It's a very, very big hit. It's fresh kale, roasted chickpeas, which are roasted with turmeric. Then we have fresh cherry tomatoes, red onion, Kalamata olives, cucumber, red pepper, which is a great source of your vitamin A and vitamin C, and then a homemade lemon hummus. I will let him tell you about his creation.

Ron Worrell: The infamous jerk jack quesadillas. We use ...

Joey Thurman: That's these?

Ron Worrell: Yeah. The quesadilla's coming from that Caribbean background, like jerk seasoning things are kind of are ammo. The coolest thing is that the replication of chicken, we use jack fruit, which is kind of turns into a shredded kind of texture when you break it down, which is really cool. We use that. We use, which is also a great source of fiber, we use black beans, organic black beans in there. Then there's a really unique paste that we make a combination of mushrooms with onions that we put into a blender, get it down into a paste, cook that, use that as a paste to kind of add a little bit more of a unique, a little bit of a sweet flavor almost to it, with a little bit of a jerk seasoning to it. It's a great combination flavor profile that really just jumps at you. Super tasty.

Joey Thurman: Here we go.

Kara Cunningham: Warmed up enough.

Joey Thurman: I know that's not cheese.

Ron Worrell: [inaudible 00:07:50].

Joey Thurman: Really? Look at that. It's actually delicious. I say actually like I was expecting it to be [crosstalk 00:08:00].

Kara Cunningham: I know, imagine ...

Ron Worrell: That's like our first clients.

Joey Thurman: You're actually attractive.

Ron Worrell: This is actually [crosstalk 00:08:05].

Joey Thurman: This is not bad.

Kara Cunningham: Then we have our RPM pasta, which is a roasted red pepper and mushroom sauce. We roast the mushrooms, the red pepper, then we put it into a food processor. We add our nutritional yeast, raw cashews into there and seasonings. That was a little spicy. We do add cayenne into that one. Then we have our blackened tempeh, which is a huge hit. That one is an array of spices and just topped with a little garnish there for you.

Joey Thurman: That is good. Not actually good. I like the kick to it.

Kara Cunningham: One of our breakfast options, some people also like to have it for dessert. It is our cold brew overnight oats. We do actually source the cold brew from the Wicker Park farmer's market is where we found [inaudible 00:08:59] very, a woman owned business. They recycle materials and beans from collect tebo. This is local too to Chicago. This has [inaudible 00:09:08] in it, the rolled outs, unsweetened coconuts, almond milk, and then a little bit of agave, cinnamon and almond extract. We really got it [crosstalk 00:09:22] here.

Joey Thurman: That's my favorite, but I'm a fat kid at heart.

Kara Cunningham: I know. So good.

Joey Thurman: Very good.

Kara Cunningham: [inaudible 00:09:33] for both of us. It took both of us.

Joey Thurman:
That's a triple high five.

Ron Worrell:
It's a triple. Team on place.

Joey Thurman:
All right. Amazing job.

Ron Worrell:
Thank you.

Joey Thurman:
Check out Plants and Plates, delicious stuff. It is actually delicious. This just Talking Plant Protein from Ukrainian Village in Chicago.