Nick Taranto - The Evolved Eater: A Quest to Eat Better, Live Better, and Change the World

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For Nimmi, my partner in crime, who keeps my eyes on the stars and my feet on the ground

I ts hard to run a business, and its hard to write a book. Doing both at the same time is nearly impossiblewithout a team of fantastic people. I want to thank my mom and dad for their genes, guidance, and funny memories. Bree Barton for her research, writing, and desert and dessert tales. Carlye Adler for her edits, strategy, and personal training. Nicole Sinno for her research and product management. My agent, Anthony Mattero, for believing in me and making magic happen. Elizabeth Beier at St. Martins Press for her visions and revisions. My sisters, Alice and Daphne, for their design prowess and funny captions. And the entire #TeamPlated for an incredible journey since 2012. As Ken Blanchard said, None of us is as smart as all of us. Lets go!

I started working on this book in 2015. At the time, I remember thinking that the food industry was already moving at breakneck pace, changing and morphing seemingly every week, if not every day. Thats a big part of why I wanted to write a bookto capture and share my front-row perspective on an industry in the midst of disruption.

Wow. If I thought things were crazy in 2015, then they have become legitimately bonkers since then. Billions of dollars poured into the food technology space, and meal kits became a household term. Amazon bought Whole Foods. Our closest competitor went public and had one of the worst Initial Public Offerings in recent memory. And we were acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars by Albertsons, one of the largest grocery stores in the United States.

As youll read over the coming pages, my cofounder and I started Plated because we had a vision: We believed we could use data and technology to make healthy, affordable, and delicious food a reality for everyone.

Building a business from scratch is really, really, really hard. We faced rejection and bankruptcy and naysayers every day for years on end. But we fought through. And while the journey is nowhere close to over, we are winning.

Albertsons is the parent company of nineteen grocery banners, including Vons, Safeway, Shaws, Jewel Osco, Pavilions, and Acme. If you have spent any time in the United States, chances are youve shopped at a store run by Albertsons. Albertsons owns the biggest certified USDA organic brand in the country and welcomes 35 million weekly shoppers in over 2,300 stores. The scale, and the opportunity for Plated to accelerate our vision, is massive. As you read the pages that follow here, I hope you become as excited as we are!

I wrote this book for smart, passionate, hungry, busy readers. If youre like me, youre trying to squeeze this book in between a dozen other activities, and you want to learn something, but you also want the time you commit here to be fun, or at least entertaining. I have always thought that footnotes get in the way of fun. Instead, I decided to use endnotes. I have meticulously sourced, and if you want to get more background or go deeper on any subject, the endnotes are there for you. If youd rather get going and keep cruising, then let me get out of your way!

A t Plated, we are on a mission to feed ten billion people in a healthy, affordable, and delicious way. Thanks for picking up this book and taking the time to hear a bit more about what weve done, what we have planned, and why we believe it matters. Im going to cover a lot of ground here as quickly and efficiently as I can while still having fun, so buckle up, and lets get started!

Toward a Better Food Future

When we started Plated in early 2012, I was twenty-seven years old, recently married, and fresh out of the Marine Corps. I moved back to New York City, started working on Wall Street, and put on twenty pounds in under six months. I was pasty, overweight, and depressedand I knew there had to be a better way to eat (and live). Thats when a business school buddy and I teamed up to create a solution.

Our vision was to use technology and data to create a world where healthy, affordable, and delicious food is available for everyone. As business school guys who were excited about using technology to solve big problems, we saw an enormous market opportunity. In 2012, more than 30 percent of all electronics were bought online, but less than 2 percent of food in the United States came through e-commerce. As outsiders to the food industry, we saw the opportunity to build a large, profitable, mission-driven company that made good eating easier for tens of millions of people.

After studying the food industry and deep-diving on where we were falling short on food in our own lives, we realized this:

Eating fresh, real food is the best way to both connect to where your food is coming from and to ensure that you and your family are eating only high-quality, sustainable, healthy ingredients.

When we started Plated, heres what we were thinking: The future of food will be defined by a return to freshness and quality. Increasingly more people now realize that what we eat has an impact on our health and the health of the planet. In order to keep up with the demands of both consumers and the planet, we have to embrace new technologies and growing methods. While the pastoral notion of farming and food will always exist, a greater willingness to accept technology and innovation into that picture is also needed. And we wanted to push the vanguard.

Five years later, Plated has delivered tens of millions of meals and chef-designed recipes across the United States (we deliver to the entire Lower 48), we merged with one of the countrys largest grocers, we employ hundreds of people in multiple locationsand it feels like we are just getting started. We have also ignited a dialogue about where we are, where we want to go together, and what this means for the future of food in a quest to change how we eat in this countryand around the world.

Today at Plated, we deliver everything you need to cook a delicious dinner at home in about thirty minutes. We believe that deciding what to do for dinner shouldnt be a struggle and that convenience shouldnt come at the cost of deliciousness. We deliver the ingredients you need, when and where you want them, precisely measured for the recipes youve chosen. That means less prep time, less food waste, and more control over your scheduleand your life.

What we figured out, and why our business model works better than traditional food models, is that consumers crave choice, quality, convenience, and flavorand that theyre not willing to compromise. In the age of instant transportation, digital dating, and connected everything, the traditional food industry has not kept up or innovated fast enough to meet consumers where they need us. The consequences of this inability to evolve have had a negative impact on all of us.

Why does good, fresh food have to be more expensive? Why does healthy, nutritious food that is grown sustainably only need to be for the rich? High-quality, nutritious food should be the right of every person. And that is why eventually, hopefully not that long from now, we want Plated to be for everyone. We need to first prove that a good business model that delivers good food can also deliver good profits and returns to investors. There are still many haters out there who dont think its possible, but give us a few years to prove them wrong.