Joey Thurman: Getting thoughtful, healthy food used to be so hard to find. Now amazing places are popping up in your neighborhood. I'm here in Chicago's West Loop to check out Uncooked. Let's go.

            What's going on? I'm Joey Thurman.

Jeremy Jones: Jeremy. Pleasure to meet you.

Joey Thurman: Nice to meet you. Nice spot you have here. It's very nice.

            Hi, we're here at Uncooked. Now, Jeremy, tell me a little bit about Uncooked and why you started it.

Jeremy Jones: Well, it's pretty straightforward. It's just, as you think about food, it's just uncooked, unprocessed. It's close to the source as possible. We try to take the beauty that nature gives us and try to add as little as we can to make it as delicious as possible. We started about two years ago. We've been open here since last July, going strong. Finally made it out of the pandemic. We're excited-

Joey Thurman: Nice. Congratulations.

Jeremy Jones: Thank you. We're excited for summer and we're excited to see where this goes.

Joey Thurman: So this is all raw. So the beauty that nature gives you, your body's able to absorb more. How do you get protein from plants?

Jeremy Jones: The same place that mother nature, most larger animals get their protein from.

Joey Thurman: Nice answer.

Jeremy Jones: So what we do is we try to have, go straight to the source as I mentioned. A lot of people have this misconception, especially in the west around protein. So we really try to make food that even I could consume. And when I say even I could consume, I'm 260 pounds. Obviously I'm not a skinny vegan. I'm mostly raw. I eat much less protein than most bros do.

Joey Thurman: I know what he's talking about.

Jeremy Jones: But yeah, our food has enough of everything that you need for your body to thrive.

Joey Thurman: We have a lot of options here. Take me through bottom to top.

Jeremy Jones: Our best sellers are the cacio and the arugula salad on a bottom shelf. The hummus bowl and my personal favorite out of everything here is the pesto noodle. It's delicious. The sesame noodle is kind of what we're known for. As you can tell, a lot of kelp noodle dishes are prominent. Our cakes are sugar-free, dairy-free. Just a little bit of milk, a little bit of nuts, and a little bit of monk fruit.

Joey Thurman: I'll take one of everything.

Jeremy Jones: And then the top shelf is just glass. Easily recyclable. We also upcycle them. So if you bring them back, we wash them. We sanitize them when we reuse them.

Joey Thurman: Now I notice your packaging is unique and you also said it's compostable.

Jeremy Jones: It took us a lot of time and a lot of work to find the right packaging that has both functionality and is sustainable. And there's also a lot of greenwashing that goes on in the world where just because something's compostable, biodegradable doesn't necessarily mean it's good for the environment. Having conversations, both with the manufacturer and the composting service, to make sure that we have the right kind of packaging and the services to be able to support the closed loop system.

Joey Thurman: I really want to talk about your passion for plants and plant protein and where that really starts.

Jeremy Jones: So 10 years ago, I started on this journey as a professional powerlifter with very typical masculine Western approach to diet where it was protein, rice, carbs, and then a little bit of grains. So there's a lot of people know I started to get too big, feel wrong, started getting inflamed. And I started doing some research into a vegan diet, really started digging into the science and really seeing if it works. And then the more that I started to get close to source, meaning plants, the better I felt. Dug deeper into this idea of taking what nature provides and not screwing it up versus taking this Western approach of cooking things, adapt, and trying to reconstruct it.

Joey Thurman: Let's go into Uncooked. And how did that start? And why did you want to live a more sustainable life and open up, well, multiple Uncookeds now, which by the way, congratulations. What really brought that about?

Jeremy Jones: For me, it was just really changing what is possible for a company to show that a company can both do good, provide for the world, create an unadultered, unprocessed product that people can consume and still feel good about what they're doing. So everything on our menu is just damn good food. It doesn't happen. It happens-

Joey Thurman: Is that your slogan, just damn good food?

Jeremy Jones: Just damn good food. Just damn good food. If you like food, you're going to like our food.

Joey Thurman: It's just damn good.

Jeremy Jones: Everything that we have is smoothie, smoothie bowls, and coffee. We have three different kinds of non-dairy dairy milks. We have macadamia, oat, and almonds. All of our coffee, same thing as all of our food. There's no sugar added on anything. There's no syrups. The rose latte is phenomenal because it's just rose water. So you're getting the hint of rose without getting all the calories from typical high sugar fructose corn syrup.

Joey Thurman: Right. Now, if I want to add extra protein, this is what we're going with?

Jeremy Jones: It's all organic. Local Chicago-based company at zero waste. What they'll do is actually is drop off these containers. We purchased the first glass container and we get a discount for upcycling them sort of carbon neutral. They don't ship outside of Chicago.

Joey Thurman: You put this extra in your smoothies because I'm still kind of wanting to get big. I want to add that muscle. And it's not bad for the environment.

Jeremy Jones: Exactly.

Joey Thurman: I like it.