When Ameer Hassan and Riley Tatonetti started UNREFINED meal prep in Cleveland back in 2021, they were aware that they were trying something new. For one thing, meal prep services were still a rarity in northeast Ohio. For another, they were cooking for a very particular audience: people with special dietary needs.
Tatonetti, the most experienced cook among the three, had first become interested in nutrition and food science as a teenager recovering from an eating disorder. “I realized that food is fuel,” she says. “And I really fell in love with finding recipes that were nourishing for my body. And then I really became passionate about wanting to help other people learn to cook for themselves and eat healthy.”
This became the ethos behind UNREFINED. Everything would be prepared from fresh ingredients, nothing frozen. They wouldn’t use preservatives, seed oils, or extra sugar or sodium.
When Olivia Stone joined the company a few months after it was founded, she had a few more suggestions. Stone had been diagnosed with multiple autoimmune disorders when she was in her early 20s and had to drastically change her diet, eliminating gluten and dairy. “Because I saw how much it helped me and changed my life,” she says, “I wanted to give people an option that was healthy and tasted good and could also help heal them.” They realized there were lots of other people who would benefit from a gluten- and dairy-free diet, including people with diabetes, lactose intolerance, or celiac disease.
When UNREFINED started, the team had a five-rack convection oven and two kitchen ranges. All the equipment was old. It took a long time to cook food, and, despite the team’s best efforts, the results were inconsistent. This posed a problem for their clients, many of whom had chosen to use a meal service because they wanted everything to taste the same from week to week and were very sensitive to change. If the meals were inconsistent, their trust in the company would be broken, and they would go elsewhere.
Then, about a year into the business, a food vendor introduced the three co-owners to a sales rep from RATIONAL. It took just one demo to convince them to invest in an iCombi Pro oven and iVario Pro tilt skillet, and they never looked back. The machines were easy to use and cooked more food in half the time, even though they were preparing meals from scratch.
For Tatonetti, the best feature is “favorites.” This allows users to program the iCombi or iVario to save their ideal specifications for a particular meal: oven temperature, meat temperature (monitored by electronic probes), moisture level, color. Then, with the touch of a button, the machines will recreate it every single time, even with specialty ingredients. “It makes it really easy to decrease the amount of human error that you have in normal kitchens,” Tatonetti says.
The UNREFINED team saw results almost immediately. They began to use the iCombi and iVario to cook nearly everything and increased their capacity to 2000 meals a week. And within six months, they’d begun to see a return on their investment in the new equipment. Best of all, they could consistently produce healthy, restaurant-quality meals for their clients.
“We want to help people build sustainable habits that they can take with them and really change their life and transform their life to be the best versions of themselves,” Tatonetti says. “RATIONAL allowed us to do that because it's allowed us to expand and really be able to provide a product that's super consistent and makes people want to come back for more.”
To learn more and schedule a demo, visit the RATIONAL website.
This post is sponsored by RATIONAL