S7. E16: Chef GW Chew: Something Better
“We make everything from a vegan rib, so we got a rib that'll blow your mind. Looks like a rib, tastes like a rib, but guess what? It ain't a rib… it can go on the grill, you can smoke it, you can literally barbecue it and it comes out like mama's ribs that you ate when you grew up.”
– Chef Chew
GW Chew, aka Chef Chew, is a vegan food inventor and restaurateur on a mission to change lives and bring holistic solutions to urban communities. He has developed a plant protein called Better Chew, which helps meat-eaters transition into a vegan lifestyle.
He grew up in rural Southern Maryland to a family of devoted carnivores, and experienced the tragedy of losing close relatives due to diet-related diseases (diabetes, cancer). When he was 18, he decided to go vegan in pursuit of a healthier lifestyle, but found that many plant-based foods at the time were less than palatable.
After nearly 20 years of experimenting with literally thousands of ingredients and cooking techniques, and three vegan restaurants, Chef Chew found the secret to the most authentic plant-based versions of his favorite ethnic and comfort foods, and Better Chew entered the plant-based food scene.
And he’s done all of this with the goal of democratizing access to healthy, plant-based foods by making them affordable and accessible to all people.
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In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Chef Chew: [00:00:15] We make everything from a vegan rib, so we got a rib that'll blow your mind. Looks like a rib, tastes like a rib, but guess what? It ain't a rib. So we make ribs that literally mimic it and can go on the grill, you can smoke it and you can literally barbecue it. It comes out like mama's ribs when you grew up.
Elizabeth: [00:00:41] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Chef GW Chew. Chef Chew is the founder and CEO of Something Better Foods. He has spent the last 20 years as a plant based restaurateur and a vegan food inventor, he's created this line of incredibly delicious alternatives to comfort foods like fried chicken ribs and fried fish. He's done all of this with the goal of democratizing healthy plant based foods by making them affordable and accessible to all people. How are you?
Chef Chew: [00:01:52] Good to meet you, I'm doing wonderful.
Elizabeth: [00:01:54] I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you so much.
Chef Chew: [00:01:58] Yeah, absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:02:02] I want to talk about everything, but I want to start with your name because it's awesome.
Chef Chew: [00:02:03] Yeah, I love it. So, my last name is actually Chew, which is pretty interesting. What's cool about my last name is I was adopted at birth by a family that had the last name Chou. So that's kind of what makes it really cool. It was a black African-American family, and so my last name is actually CHEW. I like to say I'm going to give you something to chew on and I always say I was born with the mission, born with the purpose, born to change lives one chew at a time. My first name is GW. That's my real name. My mother always told me, ”You know, your name is GW. It's going to be easy to learn. Your name was only two letters, so you're never going to forget it.” So it's pretty cool.
Elizabeth: [00:02:42] Talk a little bit about how you grew up around food, because it was absolutely opposite to your life now.
Chef Chew: [00:02:50] Oh yes. Our family lived in a small rural town in southern Maryland. Literally, when we think about food, I was born in 1982. My father was still sharecropping. Ok, so that's a very hard thing to understand. Like that sharecropping still existed at that time.
Elizabeth: [00:03:08] Could you explain how?
Chef Chew: [00:03:09] Many African-American families post-slavery became sharecroppers, where they actually would pretty much, in essence, lease the land and would pretty much split the profits, whatever that percentage would be with the white landowner. So that system was abused a lot of the time. Many people pretty much stayed in a perpetual state of poverty because they pretty much never had land ownership. So, pretty much for generations families would do this again without any ownership, but would do all the work and not build wealth for their communities. As a result of that, when you think about it from that perspective, most of them ate scraps. They ate scraps from the land they worked on, they pretty much ate whatever they could to survive. My father is still in the house that he grew up in, one of my cousins still lived there with his mother. His sister still lives there, and it was a one bedroom house that literally had an outhouse. It was very rural and had a small community. People ate off the land, but the food was still a great experience. Sadly, we ate a lot of animals; fried chicken ribs, pork chops, ham, ribs, you name it, we ate it. I was also very close to the bay, so seafood was a really big thing in our community. Crabs were really popular, especially the blue crab. I lived in the Chesapeake Bay, so eating blue crab was normal. We ate seafood and a lot of meat. But then we ate squirrels, my father used to sit in the window and shoot squirrels. Growing up, that was normal. This would be normal on a saturday morning, just seeing him in the window, with the window poke down. Then three hours later, you would see it hanging up in the garage. He skinned it and everything. He would tell me and tease me like At Least you don't have to eat possum like we did'. But possums, rats, all those types of things were normal in my fathers childhood because it was just part of surviving for him. So growing up, food obviously was a big part of our culture beyond just meat eating. We had our soul food, iconic dishes, mac and cheese, potato salad and sweet potato pie. All these dishes were just mainstays in our family. When we had our holidays, you think about Thanksgiving cookouts in the summertime. My father would have a big cookout every year. This is where the family would showcase their best dishes. A lot of the great memories that I have as a kid, as a child, was really centered around food. So food for me was more than just eating food. It was really a part of my culture, which extended into becoming a part of my identity. Then when I became older, transitioning to a plant based lifestyle, a vegan lifestyle, was crazy. I would say, one last piece of that story though, my mother's side of the family consisted of seven Adventists. So seven Adventist communities. It's a world of religion, but many of them are actually vegetarians.
Elizabeth: [00:06:19] I never knew that.
Chef Chew: [00:06:20] I got exposed as a kid to vegetarian meats. So a lot of it was old school, such as Morning Star before it was popular, but they had stuff in cans like Loma Linda, stuffing Beef Franks in cans and all kinds of crazy stuff that is not popular these days. As I got older, I ended up making that personal decision to become a Seventh Adventist. Which led me to become 100 percent vegan in my experience, 90 percent plant based. So, yeah, it was a journey for me, but food was a very big part of my experience growing up.
Elizabeth: [00:06:47] What really kind of pushed you over the edge into veganism?
Chef Chew: [00:06:52] There were a few things. One of the primary things was one of the aspects that did become a seventh Adventist. So, it was a very big spiritual decision. It was kind of natural within becoming a seven day Adventist that you adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. But, many people were not vegans. So, veganism and going completely like no dairy, most of them were vegetarian, so it's still a lot of dairy. This is like 2001, so this is before vegan or plant based foods were popular, but I also saw a lot of premature deaths in my family. So again, growing up how we ate, many of my uncles and aunts were obese and had diabetes, heart disease, cancer and sometimes they would have other issues. They would have hemorrhoids, gout and some of these other things that were not as life threatening, but it was the precursors. Most of it was lifestyle related.
Elizabeth: [00:07:47] Were you connecting it to food at the time?
Chef Chew: [00:07:50] It all started clicking when I turned 18, It was like, I'm losing a lot of family members. I'm talking about within five years, at least five or six aunts and uncles died within this time frame and all of them weren't even 60 yet. They literally died before the age of 60. It all began to click. I started seeing this connection between how we ate and the connection of how it impacted our health. The plant based lifestyle would obviously be a solution to reverse or prevent these deaths. Black Americans have twice the rates of diabetes and if you go down the list of statistics, it's pretty crazy to look at. So, I started to get more into it. I began to start seeing this connection between social justice and access. These communities actually didn't have access to these types of healthier options. So, all of that kind of grew over the years. But, I think the initial component of that was really just a desire to save peoples lives, if I can get people that that grew up eating a piece of fried chicken, if I can get them to try my plant based chicken that I make currently, if I can get them something that tastes delicious and look like what they used to eat, I could actually help them to transition. So, it's more of a starting out. Let me figure out how to make a piece of chicken that looks like chicken and tastes like chicken, but it's not chicken. If I can figure this out, I can get you to eat healthier. That was kind of the excitement that led more to product development. I went look intensivley deep into recipe development and really deep into the food, kind of being a chef and learning how to cook.
Elizabeth: [00:09:23] Were you a chef already?
Chef Chew: [00:09:24] No. When I was 18-19, I went to business school. I was crazy, so I was at a B school at Harvard University leading HBCU then I quit college to work at an organic farm.
Elizabeth: [00:09:37] That's such a good story.
Chef Chew: [00:09:39] Yeah. I ended my first freshman year of college three point six. I was in the honors business school. I came home to my mom and told her “I'm quitting college and I'm going to go work on an organic farm”. She responded, “What the heck?” Like the school gave me a free scholarship and because I did so well in my first year, they gave me a free ride, and I'm about to go record this organic farm and literally go pick vegetables. But, I had this strong conviction and strong urge. I wanted to make my own way. I kind of got into food early, and that's how my journey began. Immediately thereafter, a year later, I'm actually making my first product. I'm making granola, I'm making crunchy bunches of granola. We don't box well but we got a granola that will knock you out. So, I started making healthy granola and I was going door to door, selling healthy vegan cookbooks. I had granola and so forth. That's what kind of began my first steps into the food industry.
Elizabeth: [00:10:41] Was there a spiritual component this whole time too?
Chef Chew: [00:10:44] I had to unpack the spiritual component again, seventh heaven is Christian. We do believe in the Bible, and we looked at Genesis, the Genesis story in scripture that talked about, from the very beginning, that there was a diet of fruits and grains and vegetables. I mean, it was pretty much a plant based diet from the onset. Our interpretation of scripture is that meat only came in out of necessity. Once, after the flood story and then pretty much meat was more for that. But, if you look in the Bible for a story about a man named Daniel, he actually did one of the first plant based experiments and went plant based for 10 days. He said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “Listen, look at my face and look at the other peoples faces” because they were taken captive too. The king then gave them all the luxuries of the good food, that was the meat and the wine. Daniel told the king “Hey, I don't want to eat this food. I want to eat a plant based diet”. And after those 10 days in the Book of Daniel Chapter one, it says he came out healthier and he also was stronger. His face looked a lot better. He's the first scientific experiment on somebody's eating a plant based diet compared to eating a meat centered diet. It's kind of like it's in the scientific journal if you have to look it up. So the whole concept of going plant based is a biblical concept. People argue that because they did sacrifices and stuff like that. But when you look at the scripture and holistic, our interpretation is that a plant based lifestyle is the best from environmentally speaking, physically speaking, health speaking, when you look at all the health outcomes. When you look at what they've done like in our church, there's a place called blue zones. I forget the other ones, but Loma Linda California to speak about specifically, it's a very high population of seven Adventists. We actually created what they call planetariums, which are pretty much kind of lifestyle treatment centers that didn't really use medicine, but more like hydrotherapy treatments and lifestyle treatments. The Seventh Day Adventists kind of congregated there, and they created a hospital, created the College of Medicine, et cetera. They did studies on the populations in those areas, and their life expectancy was 10 to 15 years longer than the average American. The crazy part about that was that many of those individuals were of diverse ethnicity. So there wasn't this one ethnic group, it was very diverse. And so what it showed was that, you know, a plant based lifestyle going vegetarian. Most of our members in that community, they don't drink alcohol and they don't smoke. So the faith perspective was the inspiration behind the development with the mission of being able to really be able to provide a solution that can help people holistically. That was really the main mission of turning vegan.
Elizabeth: [00:13:41] I want to know. So, you're making granola at home right to begin with?
Chef Chew: [00:13:47] At home, and that's where I started. Absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:13:49] How do you go from that to inventing and creating plant based proteins that have never existed before?
Chef Chew: [00:13:56] Oh man. Well it started there. Granola was kind of like the curiosity of food. I found my passion. When I started making granola, we had a little missionary team and we sold books and I was making food for our missionary team. So, I started making granola and had a little cookbook. When I'm making granola, I'm literally making up names. So, rather than saying I got regular granola, I say I got sensational strawberry and pleasing pineapple granola. I'm making up names, making up slogans, and this passion of food was really starting to be born. Eventually, I ended up being able to go into commercial kitchens, making granola on a larger scale. There was a lady in the community that we met. We asked if we could use her bakery? She taught us how to use things like commercial equipment and big ovens. I'm starting to experiment with vegetarian meats, I was literally starting to take oats and basic ingredients, nothing super scientific like I'm doing now but I was like taking oats, potatoes and tofu and these different ingredients and just trying to make a veggie meat. So, I took an oat burger and I turned it into a regular oat school burger, which looked like cookies. Typically, I turned it into a little chicken leg. When I did that, it was my aha moment that was almost like I fell on the floor. It was just the craziest thing I could ever think of. How in the world could I turn an oat burger into a piece of chicken? Because knowing that I'm looking at normally, it's like an oat patty or a burger. And so when I saw it as a chicken, my mom was like, “you can make vegan chicken”, and it just all started from there. At that point, this is two thousand three, two thousand four. I literally started taking every grain and every bean that I could get my hands on and started experimenting with different ratios, different combinations of different formulas. Over time, almost three or four years after doing tons of different formulas, tons of recipes, I created my own proprietary Textualization process.
Elizabeth: [00:15:54] What does that mean?
Chef Chew: [00:15:55] I learned how to take beans and create seven or eight steps and get to a layered texture that is created like meat which almost peels on itself. So, I learned some techniques that again, I've mastered, and now we're in the process of selling them in grocery stores. I learned this process over like a five or six year period, and I've been learning how to scale that process over the last 10 years by mastering that process. Even as of the last, like a year and a half, we just perfected our bread process, so it's been 15 year in the making of recipe development through three restaurants that I've had over the years that have customers giving me feedback. So it's been hard work perfecting this process as protein. Yesterday, we just got voted in one of the leading Plant-Based magazines, they voted us the best plant based vegan fried chicken in the space right now, so it's pretty amazing.
Elizabeth: [00:16:53] Awesome. So it's called Something Better Foods and you make all different types of meat?
Chef Chew: [00:16:58] Yeah, so normally in our industry, the typical process is a plant based meat manufacturing, it is done through a process called wet extrusion, which is a very high temperature manufacturing process that creates a vertical strain of protein. Most of the plant based meats you taste in the market are kind of compacted, it's a stringy kind of texture, and that comes from the similar process called extrusion. Our product creates layers of protein, so we're able to take that product and create a true fried chicken like experience. We actually create a shredded steak so you can literally make your own carne asada tacos. You can make your own Asian stir fry or Asian soup, like a fudge or ramen that goes inside of that perfectly. We make everything from a vegan rib, so we got a rib that'll blow your mind. Looks like a rib, tastes like a rib, but guess what? It ain't a rib, so we make ribs that literally mimic it that can go on the grill. You can smoke it and you can literally barbecue it. It comes out like mama's ribs when you grew up. So, we have various textures. We do everything from fried chicken to a chicken nugget. We can kind of cut it in different shapes and sizes and do different things with it. So we have a retinue and a variety of products that we've been able to create with this process, it's pretty amazing.
Elizabeth: [00:18:15] When you first started getting good and the food started getting good, were people in the community just astonished?
Chef Chew: [00:18:23] Well, it's funny because my family is my biggest critic. So my aunt, when I first started making my food products and stuff, they were like, It looks horrible, but it tastes good. It was like look, the greatest, right? So the way my food looked wasn't great, but the taste of it was like, Man, it tastes amazing, you know? I started getting my mom and other family members to test, my cousins and everybody. Eventually, I started my first vegan restaurant in my hometown and this meat and potato rural town. I started my first vegan restaurant and probably since 2008, has been the last one. I don't know if anybody else has done another one.
Elizabeth: [00:19:02] Did people come?
Chef Chew: [00:19:03] Yeah, they came. I won't say they came in groups, but they came. I had a faithful customer base. It was very different. It was way before its time and I got a lot of great feedback, but it became the very fundamental kind of stage of me commercializing what I was doing.
Elizabeth: [00:19:20] You also opened a testing kitchen too?
Chef Chew: [00:19:22] Yeah, it was the first and I did two restaurants beyond that and it just kept improving. That first restaurant was the very beginning experience. Getting meat eaters to go vegan and to go plant based. I mean, the funniest thing was like when I had Thanksgiving with my family, my father's side of the family and all the jokes that I would get. I mean, the curiosity of wanting to try what I was doing. It was all of that, all of that combined and really great experience. So I had a lot of fun with my family back then.
Elizabeth: [00:19:50] Then the next one was that in Maryland also?
Chef Chew: [00:19:53] No, actually, that was an Arkansas. I was literally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is right beside the headquarters of Tyson Springdale, Arkansas, as Tyson's food. I'm literally in the headquarters of the chicken capital of the country and there's also a Walmart right there.I mean, this whole meat centered town, so they just thought I was just it was just a great thing. I was in a college town. So, I was in Fayetteville, so a little bit more progressive. But nonetheless, it was still a meat and potato town, you know? But it was amazing. They did pretty well. This is 2011, 2012 and I had it for a few years out there. Then lastly, I went to Oakland, California, which seems more natural, right Oakland?
Elizabeth: [00:20:37] A little more open.
Chef Chew: [00:20:39] Yeah, yeah. More open. So this is in 2016 all the way until last year I had that restaurant and that did phenomenal. I mean, plant based went crazy. Everybody is talking about veganism and all of that. So, it was just the timing couldn't have been better for that restaurant.
Elizabeth: [00:20:50] That's awesome. So the one in Oakland, did you close down?
Chef Chew: [00:20:54] Yeah, I closed down only because I was starting out in a manufacturing company and I have known restaurants for years, I just kind of got to a place where I wanted to focus on getting our manufacturing established. It's been an amazing journey and now we're looking to open up another restaurant again. So hey, kind of full circle back again.
Elizabeth: [00:21:10] I know when you had Veg Hub, the restaurant in Oakland. A lot of your work I'm assuming still is on fighting for food deserts. So for people who don't really understand, will you first talk about what food deserts are?
Chef Chew: [00:21:25] Food deserts ironically, are not a desert in a sense. Food does exist in the food desert. This is typically the food choices and the food that exists.This food is horrible for your health. You look at these places. If you ever take a ride on any kind of inner city and even sometimes very rural communities, typically you'll see a bunch of liquor stores, you see a whole bunch of cash and carry stores, people just having payday loans and then we go more into the food. You’ve got Chicken Shack here, Fish Fry shack here. You've got these little small convenience stores, which have a bunch of snacks. So the food choices are there. This fast food, junk foods, this horrible quality foods and then the environment again, as it's built in poverty, a lot of times the people are afraid to be people being burglarized. So, most of the places are kind of caged up, you think about getting your food in places that are like caged up and it's not going to be typically in grocery stores. So, you talk about a place that has food options, but very poor food options. The question that you ask yourself is why? How did that happen? How do you have a place that doesn't have access to healthy food options
Elizabeth: [00:22:50] Or even a grocery store, right?
Chef Chew: [00:22:52] Not even a grocery store. When you really start pulling on this as it becomes a really social justice issue. You start looking at structural racism. So, literally structurally, post-World War Two, many places in urban communities were red lined. So, as a result of redlining, what that simply did was pretty much the communities were red lined, literally red lined on the map. They said, Hey, these minorities, which are mostly at that time Black Americans, would live in this part of the community and the suburbs, which were being built at that time, typically with white Americans that got great loans. Those communities became the thriving places where grocery stores centered themselves, so grocery stores centered themselves around suburban America. But in some of these places we call hoods, these types of places. It wasn't advantageous for grocery stores to go in those communities because it was high risk. There was a lot of crime. Insurance companies would give them higher rates. There wasn't any incentive for businesses to actually be created in those communities, which in turn, you're not going to get the grocery stores, you're not going to get people wanting to start great businesses in those communities. Technically speaking, a food desert is a place where within a one mile to five mile radius, there's no food option. It's pretty much healthy food options. Then you have programs like government subsidy programs like some of those places. A lot of those things with people caught by government cheese and all of that type of stuff. So very poor quality food, even if he did eat meat, poor quality meat. So that was the food that was being given for free to nourish these communities, these communities' high stress alcohol is readily available and drugs readily available. So you talk about crack cocaine, It's put into these communities. In fact, in the 80s, that happened. So here you have a community that is stressed out, drugged up and a community which doesn't have good food options. You can only imagine the results. Then you have a prison pipeline system that pretty much takes all of that energy where there's no nothing, no jobs, no opportunity. You have a whole pipeline of young men and young women literally not finishing school. School systems don't have any incentive. So there's typically no educational opportunities. That's the storyline for many urban places across the country, as a result of that, here we are with the diseases that we see in some of these communities. So it's a really, really big issue and it's not easy to change when you look at it.
Elizabeth: [00:25:31] I think a lot of people who had never even heard the term Food Desert finally started to wake up during COVID, when the death rates were so much higher in black and brown communities because of food, right? because of their diet. So at least it started getting talked about. But you don't really hear many people talking about solutions.
Chef Chew: [00:25:51] I mean, one of the things I'm really big on about solutions is that number one, there are access points already in these communities. Whether it's a church that you can sell through and get these types of products into the stores, you can mend some of these major food texts, that's getting products in the KFC and stuff like that. That's kind of organizing some of these menus or providing healthier options. That's a big option as well. Bigger companies can support that and do that, but I think it's really a grassroots work. One of the things I really would say is that ownership creates ownership in these communities, typically people from those communities want to do better for themselves, but they don't have access or opportunity. So it's really, I think, an economic change because as people there that want to solve their problems. It's not like people are like, Oh, I just want to be here forever, but they don't have access and investment and so forth. So, one of the things that we speak really big on is creating our company, for example, something about the foods, we are a manufacturing company. The liquor stores that are there, the convenience stores that are there, they don't own any of them. It doesn't look like me that's owning those stores. So all of that whole block is not even owned by the people that actually live in that community. So one of the things I'm wanting to promote is that, how do you solve it? We need to create ownership for people that live within these communities. Co-ops are obviously great examples of ways that communities can come together and kind of take control of their food. There are examples of people doing that within these communities. But I believe one of the greatest things is restaurateurs going into these communities. That's a really easy touchpoint because you're getting grandmama who ate this way all of her life to transition to eating a plant based lifestyle. You have to have a touch point that's doable for them to change. So restaurants have been phenomenal. There are tons of vegan restaurants in black communities across the country.
Elizabeth: [00:27:49] It's happening more and more right?
Chef Chew: [00:27:51] Absolutely, so that's a very easy point to touch on. Having a vegan restaurant that becomes a place. People can get good and healthy food that's a great place of exposure for many places across the country. But I want to dig a little bit further in distribution and manufacturing. I think that's where you're going to make the biggest change is us having ownership, even in rural America, us having farms that we own and we kind of control some of the supply chains. So it's a really big picture when you start talking about systems change and really start talking about really kind of solving this. It's a 100 year plan, but I believe that you really have to start dealing with who owns and controls the means of production for these communities and empowering people from those communities to be able to control some of that. Which allows them to feed their community and be able to provide for their community a lot better than what's being done currently.
Elizabeth: [00:28:44] Right, well, you’re certainly working on it. I mean, that's what Veg Hub's purpose was as well.
Chef Chew: [00:28:50] That was it. That was really the model. The reason why we went into manufacturing was that our goal is to scale a restaurant model. So to have multiple restaurants. So when you control your manufacturing, your cost of production is so much cheaper. So, I can provide that product rather than me buying that burger from a plant based company. I make the burger, I make the product so now I can sell it to my restaurant so much cheaper, which I can be able to give that price savings to that individual, to that customer. When you have manufacturing, you don't have to sell through the grocery store, so you can sell right to the people. There's a distribution aspect where food is marked up so much by the time it gets to the consumer. So if you can manufacture and sell directly to people, that actually helps the price to be cheaper because again, people are on very low budgets in these communities. So, it's a really holistic picture when you think about a long term solution for these places and so forth.
Elizabeth: [00:29:48] With something better, are you also just available straight up to the people?
Chef Chew: [00:29:53] Yeah. So, right now we just launched our direct to consumer, so EatBetter.com. That's one of the ways that people can get our product. But what we are actively and working on is an actual brick and mortar model for these for the community. So we're actually looking at a place within Oakland right now bringing our better Chew vegan community kitchen. We're looking at actually launching that in the next three to four months, and that's going to be for the purpose of providing this very solution. So now, rather than me selling through to the distributor that then sells to the grocery store that then sells to you as a customer, you can come straight to the restaurant and I'm selling to you the same price that I sell to the distributor. Some people might say I might cannibalize my sales in the grocery store, but I think people are still going to go to the store and still buy those products. What it is doing is helping that person in that community that simply won't have access to a product like that because a lot of times those stores aren't in those communities. We want to create that model, where we're literally bringing the product right to the community and selling it at like literally 30, 40 percent less than what they would find in a typical grocery store. So that's kind of where we're working on a phenomenal model that we hope to be an inspiration to the industry of how we can help solve some of these problems. I mean, the problem is too big for one person to do, but at least can inspire people to change.
Elizabeth: [00:31:17] I mean, what an incredible direction you've gone in, from restaurant manufacturing. Ok, now we can manufacture and have restaurants. Yeah, and get into the communities, but also get in the stores, it's pretty genius.
Chef Chew: [00:31:31] Yeah, it's a labor of love and it's something that again that's why I've been doing it for almost 20 years now, because it's not something that you just kind of can just replicate. It's something that you really have to have a intuition with people. It's very people centered. If that makes sense.
Elizabeth: [00:31:46] Yeah. Is it creating community? Having had Veg Hub and people getting excited about eating that way?
Chef Chew: [00:31:54] Oh, absolutely. Before, I mean, COVID obviously was another ripping off the bandaid like, we're sick and this is what happens. We die a lot faster. So people are obviously very aware that we need to eat better because this is the reality. We have the highest rates of disease, highest rate of COVID 19 mortality. So, I just think that the world is very aware of why. I think these people are just looking for great solutions that can help provide that for them.
Elizabeth: [00:32:22] Well, and you have some. So I love that you've just been in it since birth basically, like that name was given to you for a reason.
Chef Chew: [00:32:30] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:32:32] Well, Chef Chew, thank you.
Chef Chew: [00:32:34] I appreciate seeing the work that you guys are doing, and I'm so happy that we can share our story and what we're doing.
Elizabeth: [00:32:46] To learn more about Chef Chew, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything, we are on Facebook and Instagram at @Species Unite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Species Unite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Poky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
You can listen to our podcast via our website or you can subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Play. If you enjoy listening to the Species Unite podcast, we’d love to hear from you! You can rate and review via Apple Podcast here. If you support our mission to change the narrative toward a world of co-existence, we would love for you to make a donation or become an official Species Unite member!
As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.