How Clean Kitchen Club aims to be the ‘plant-based McDonald’s’

I sample the truffle burger and the katsu curry and chips – followed by red velvet cake and a brownie. All vegan. All delicious. All in the line of duty. “Vegan food is just normal food – but vegan,” as Mikey puts it. I’m sitting upstairs in Clean Kitchen on Camden High Road, across the street from Pret, having lunch with Clean Kitchen Club co-founders, Mikey Pearce and Verity Bowditch, who look as if they could be contenders on Love Island if they weren’t doing this.

Mikey hit a fork in the road at the beginning of the pandemic. He had been a YouTube influencer but he had run out of steam where pushing brands and playing pranks were concerned. And his weight had risen to an alarming 18 stone. Even at around 6ft 3in, that was maybe a bit too high and mighty for comfort. “I was a big fan of bacon sandwiches and beef burgers,” he admits. He went back to his mother’s house in Rottingdean down in Sussex to regroup. In a way he owes it all to her, because she was the one who got him into plant-based foods – which, combined with 6am 10k runs, slimmed him down, toned him up and gave him the idea for Clean Kitchen Club: vegan for meat-eaters.

“I wanted to do something real and meaningful,” he says. They started on the beach at Brighton, flipping burgers in the summer of 2020, between lockdowns, and their popularity grew apace on social media. Soon Mikey was doing deliveries all over London, which is where he joined forces with Verity. “This could be a business,” he told her at a party. “It’s becoming self-sufficient and we need to expand.”

Verity was raised as a veggie and had her first taste of vegan cooking aged seven. She didn’t much like it. “Dodgy tempeh,” she recalls. She went straight from event technology into the reality TV show, Made in Chelsea. But Verity was not just a friendly face on the screen or a Pilates virtuoso: she had done a BSc at King’s College, London, in biomedical sciences, specialising in epigenetics and nutrition. She knows the chemistry and she’s good on statistics too. “We have 83 per cent fewer emissions than the standard burger,” she tells me as I’m tucking into the truffleburger. “And only 0.8g of saturated fat per 100g.” The competition weigh in at 7g or a hefty 14 per 100.

Their menu is the first to provide a carbon footprint for each item. Verity has ensured their packaging, provided by Happy Planet, is totally recyclable. Any plastic is already recycled and biodegradable. They have their own allotment too, where they grow their lettuce and turn food waste into compost.

Clean Kitchen Club opened in four different sites over the last year, including Camden in August 2021. In September they are opening their biggest restaurant yet in the new Battersea Power Station alongside the likes of Ray-Ban, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger.

One of the keys to Mikey’s and Verity’s success is their fluency in social media and digital marketing. They are old hands at networking and cracking deals with fashion houses and film companies. When I met them they had just returned from a film studio I am not allowed to name, where they will soon be supplying A-listers with vegan lunches. They equally have a vision of seeing football fans at London stadiums scoffing their burgers at half-time.

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You have to make good food, but these days you also have to be seen to be making good food. Which in practice means making, for example, “no-duck wrap” and then taking a photograph of it and posting it on Instagram. “We film everything,” says Verity. Their core audience is between 15 and 35 and therefore attuned to the latest meat-free adventures on TikTok.

“We’re the first taste of vegan food for a lot of people,” says Mikey. “Clean Kitchen is for everyone rather than the hardcore vegans. The flexitarians. It’s all about the taste.” A recent measure of how widely accepted vegan cooking is becoming was Mikey’s cabbie, who asked what line he was in. “Vegan? It’s getting pretty big,” says the taxi driver. Mikey invited him into Clean Kitchen and handed him a burger. “People are being converted,” he says.

Mikey has been diagnosed with ADHD, but it reckons it’s his “superpower”. “It meant I became obsessed with the business. I’m working on it when most people would be sleeping. I have about 1,000 ideas a day. Verity tells me when they’re no good!”

Clean Kitchen Club is only 16 months old, but increasingly visible on the high street and online. And they did it on a shoestring. “It’s a pandemic business,” says Mikey. “It shows you can turn around a bad situation. Now I have a purpose every day.”

Mikey and Verity don’t beat about the bush when it comes to ambition. “We’re a cross between Leon and Pret,” says Verity. “There’s a gap in the market,” says Mikey. “We want to be the plant-based McDonald’s.”

I checked with a hardcore carnivore friend in Camden – she is willing to give it a try. I reckon I’ll come back here and try out the Mexican next time.

@andymartinink