Ep 587: Rooted in real food with Jenny Wright and Chad Sterling

Two foodie health junkies from Boone, Iowa are redefining what farm to table really means and their story is one you’ll want to listen to while you cook, drive, or wind down.

In this episode, I sit down with Jenny Wright and Chad Sterling, founders of Radicato, a local meal service whose mission is deeply rooted in community, real food, and nutritional accessibility. What started as a fitness coaching relationship transformed into a partnership built on sourcing ingredients directly from nearby farms and creating meals that truly nourish.

Resources From The Show:

• Radicato @Nourishing Boone on Instagram
• 6th Street Underground Boone, Iowa on Instagram
• 6th Street Underground on Facebook

Our Partners

Podcast Transcript

Jannine Krause (00:01.614)
just let you run right into it, like whether it’s coming into the gym, whether it’s whatever.

Radicato (00:05.667)
Yeah, so both of our businesses, really the goal there is helping people kind of get from point A to point B. Like they know they want to eat a little bit healthier. They know that they need to move their bodies and we kind of provide those stepping stones so that the whole process is a little bit more thoughtless. And I don’t mean that it’s not still thoughtful. That is not something that they’re intentional about, but that it’s

made so much easier for them because the most difficult part that they have to do is literally step into the gym. Once they do that, it’s a program that has been planned out every step of the way there’s a purpose for, and then you’ve got coaches that are leading you through the process. When it comes to the food business, it’s the same way. You know you want to eat a little bit better, but maybe you don’t have the time or the ability to…

prep that food, to think about that food. You just know that it’s something that you maybe need to focus on a little bit. And we make it as simple as open a menu, choose what you want, and then it’s ready for you. And you can grab it from your refrigerator. It’s faster and more convenient and oftentimes cheaper than even fast food. And it’s locally sourced, chef-prepared meals that taste nothing like standard meal prep.

Jannine Krause (01:30.932)
You know you mentioned something that makes me laugh. Yeah, standard meal prep. Because a lot of people are like, don’t like healthy food doesn’t taste good. I don’t know how to make like I don’t know how to make vegetables taste good unless I drowned them in butter. And so what kind of fun things are you guys doing to help the food not be so healthy tasting?

Radicato (01:43.352)
Right.

Radicato (01:50.755)
Well, we’re not afraid of cooking with seasonings and we’re not afraid of cooking with healthier fats. We believe they both play a big role, not only nutritionally, but just in the enjoyment of the food that’s put in front of you. So we don’t go overboard with anything really, but we make sure that we use things that maybe are otherwise ostracized in some circles, things around fat or salt. Those play a really key role in taste and texture and the things that maybe keep people from thinking they can enjoy.

even steamed vegetables, you know, if you just add a little bit of the right ingredients, it suddenly turns into a delicious thing. Yeah. And where we get them matters too, right? Like we are, I think we struggle with being called meal prep because when we, when we think of meal prep, we think of like ground meat and rice and somebody’s frozen vegetable blend that they eat in a box on repeat every day. They have the same lunch or the same dinner for every single meal.

Neither of us have any interest in that. That works for people for like a week or two. And then you tend to hate life a little bit and you don’t really want to eat that anymore. You know, you can make vegetables taste a lot better if you’re getting them from your local farmer. And that’s where a lot of our stuff comes from. We’re, you know, trying to avoid things like thinking of vegetables as the only option is from a can or

that’s been freezer burned in the back of your grocery store for the last year and a half. The choices you make in how you source your food matters in terms of quality, in terms of taste, and a lot of other reasons. I mean, we’ve done some unintentional experimentation, if you will, where we’ll make the same dish when a vegetable is out of season and people will enjoy it. But then we’ll get that.

in-season vegetable from a local farmer and put it in the dish and not tell anybody sometimes and the feedback is amazingly more positive when we do that. They can tell a difference without knowing what we did and it’s really just about sourcing it from a fresh local place that you know we just went and got it yesterday and cooked with it today from a farm.

Jannine Krause (04:03.576)
huge. I don’t think many people think about that.

Radicato (04:04.641)
Yeah. No, and like bonus, again, in that whole realm of like I want to do something better for me but make it a little more thoughtless so that it doesn’t feel like I’m adding one more thing into my life that’s already busy and crazy. You know, the nutrient value of locally grown foods is just plain higher than what you’re going to get from a grocery store or a bulk, you know, wholesale store or a restaurant supply place.

So in a way, we’re helping them be healthier, again, without them even having to think about it. If they can eat the portion of vegetables we put in their containers for their food, for their dishes, they’re already getting a leg up than if they were just grabbing a can off the grocery store shelf.

Jannine Krause (04:49.386)
Makes sense, makes sense. Tell me a little bit about how you guys found your farmers that you work with and like how you’ve developed relationships with them and you can tell us what farmers if you want to. mean, it’s all whatever. I’m very curious how you made the relationships and how you were like looking at their quality. Did you go visit the farms? Did you talk with them? How did you meet them?

Radicato (05:11.543)
Yeah, it’s been a long trial and error process. When we first started, we maybe knew of two or three farmers in the local area within, you know, short drive that we wanted to try out. And so we did, we immediately noticed the difference. And then as we’ve gone, we’ve one way or another, we’ve either had them referred to us, we’ve seen them on Facebook, we’ve noticed a sign when we were driving down the highway, you know, it’s just, it’s amazing the different ways we’ve come across them. What is our…

Our set of people that we’ve used off and on is like 40 or so now across the couple of counties around us. Yep. And a lot of times the schedule of our business is a little problematic for like say something as simple as going to a farmer’s market and making a connection. we do our, the way our schedule runs, we cook all of our foods on Fridays and then our customers pick everything up on Saturday morning.

Most farmers markets happen on Saturday mornings. So we’re a little preoccupied. And so we had to get a little more creative that way. And sometimes it was really actually as simple as like following a sign or having another small business owner say, hey, did you know that there’s this small farm that does micro greens in this county over here? And we were like, no, we’ve never heard of them. it sounds like they’re doing cool things.

and then we just reach out and it’s been a really positive experience across the board. We’ve been able to visit many of the facilities and everyone has something really unique about it that we really enjoy. We’ll probably give a shout out to a couple of our favorites. I would say I’m gonna all talk about Red Granite Farms. That’s a place north of Boone and not only do they really have a pretty

beautiful setting and a great operation. We’ve repeatedly said to Nicole, the farmer that runs the place, there’s something about the soil. There’s something that she does out there with the way that she cares for her soil that just makes everything we’ve ever gotten from there taste different and taste better. Like we’ve talked to her about what her practices are. We’ve seen the operations from a pretty intricate detail and

Radicato (07:33.432)
we’ve just come down to the conclusion that maybe nothing really is done a lot differently other than the soil. Something is happening in the soil. And then Chad, I bet, wants to talk about joy grow mushrooms. Yeah, of all the places, there’s this guy that used to live here in Boone that relocated so that he could find a property where he could build a like, metal Morton building. And inside of there, he’s got it all set up to grow.

mushrooms and so he can grow mushrooms year-round. walk inside of it. Have you been inside of them? Yeah, so you walk inside of it and it feels like you’re walking into a cave. Yeah. And he’s got different grow rooms that are really well temperature and humidity controlled where he grows dozens of varieties of mushrooms. Turns out he’s serving some of the top end restaurants in the Des Moines metro area with some of these mushrooms and

You know, he just loves the fact that we’re doing this in Boone, which is his hometown, so he loves to partner with us. And he’ll even reach out to us when he’s got a few extra mushrooms and say, hey, could you figure out a way to work mushrooms into your menu? But we’ve, you know, not only done things with him around oyster mushrooms, which is a pretty standard thing, but we’ve discovered different varieties of mushrooms that we can’t believe how much different they are, and yet they add a different dimension to dishes when we use them. So that’s pretty fantastic. And then we’ve got just recently,

Another one that we’ve discovered, is the Riturais farm, which has been pretty cool place for produce and seasonal vegetables too.

Jannine Krause (09:05.486)
Okay, now I’m intrigued, because I geek out on the farms. I geek out on, you know, I also want people to hear this because you, Boone is how many people are in Boone? It’s not big. 12,000 people, and I think a lot of people will sit and go, like, I don’t know where to get healthy food. I’m like, Boone is not that big. And there are 40 plus, you know, farms you’re working with. And we’ve got a guy that’s got a big building with all these mushrooms. Now, let’s talk mushrooms.

Radicato (09:15.395)
12,000 people, yeah.

Radicato (09:26.883)
Thank

Radicato (09:30.66)
Not just a guy, like talk about the most interesting person, one of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet is the guy who hangs out in the dark with mushrooms all day long. We’d like to ask him, I’d have no idea, but if so, I would just want to know what music he plays. He’s also a really good cook in his own right too. He’ll send like…

Jannine Krause (09:34.926)
You

Jannine Krause (09:44.72)
my gosh, does he play music to them? I’ve heard that they grow better if you’ve got music.

Radicato (09:57.814)
Instagram videos of what he’s doing with different varieties of mushrooms on his grill or in his in his home kitchen And it all just looks fabulous. So yeah, he’s a foodie,

Jannine Krause (10:07.502)
my gosh, so, okay, different varieties of mushrooms you guys didn’t know about, adding different dimensions to foods, because I think a lot of people will be like, mushrooms are kinda, you know, unless you really love them, it’s like a, what am I, why? And let’s talk about benefits of mushrooms, like what you guys like about them in terms of health benefits. So I’ll let you guys take over on that one. Tell me what kind of dimensions, what kind of recipes, what kind of flavors, and why you guys like mushrooms so much.

Radicato (10:18.083)
Good night.

Radicato (10:35.863)
I think a big knock on mushrooms, I’m being honest with the people that really don’t know what to do with them or they’ve only ever had them out of a can, is texture. think texture is a huge deal for mushrooms for people and they believe that all mushrooms have the same texture. And a lot of it comes to how you cut them, how you prepare them, and also how you cook them. It’s not just throw some mushrooms out of water.

into a dish. So for example, the oyster mushroom, I don’t know how many people are familiar with them, but we just used them a few weeks ago in a chicken filly bowl. So we had the, we sliced the chicken breast a certain way and we tried to emulate that with the mushroom too. So in a way they kind of were hidden in the dish in terms of visually hidden in the dish. And so many people

didn’t even mention the mushrooms, which is a good thing because it added a dimension that made it more flavorful and more delicious and more nutritious than some of the minerals that it adds to your diet, but they were sort of invisible in a way. So that was one. And then I think we’ve done it in soups with chestnut mushrooms, which was pretty fantastic too.

Jannine Krause (11:48.96)
chestnut mushrooms. They look like chestnuts or they taste like them. I’ve never had them.

Radicato (11:53.08)
They’re chestnut in color. They’re little tiny mushrooms, but chestnut in color and they add kind of a roasty flavor to a dish, which is pretty fantastic. They’re super interesting and tasty. like they don’t have as much of the textural. If people are off put by thinking mushrooms are slimy, right? Like chestnut, the chestnut mushrooms really don’t have that. It’s more of a, more on the end of maybe like a portobello, like that meaty.

Jannine Krause (11:54.902)
Okay.

Radicato (12:21.55)
It was our favorite story though, has got to be the, where we took the oyster mushrooms and we, I don’t know what we do, cut them in little tiny strips and we baked them in olive oil and spices. And this was a thing that Erin from Joy-Gro told us to do. And we cooked them to the point where they were crispy. And then we, we had one of our customers try them and these people are anti-mushrooms.

Like they will ask us to leave mushrooms out of their dish. Yeah. So we asked them to try them. We didn’t tell them what it was and it did not resemble a mushroom at all. And they were like, well, this is really good. Is it what chicken skin? thought it was chicken skin or bacon and they were mushrooms. And they loved them. So again, it’s how you prepare them a lot of the times.

Jannine Krause (13:07.374)
Because, you know, here’s the… Okay, I’ve got so many things I could say. Because I used to teach kids cooking classes back when I lived in Colorado. And one of the biggest things moms would say is like, can’t get my kids to eat the vegetables. Well, number one, getting them involved in cooking, of course that helps. But, like you said, incorporating it in, you know, much like not knowing if it’s chicken or if it’s bacon, and we don’t even talk about the fact that mushrooms are in there. Or we…

we talk about mushrooms and we put them in a way that the kids are like, oh wow, that’s a mushroom? Dang, know, same with adults. Because like you said, canned mushrooms, I mean in the Midwest, let’s be real, in Wisconsin, I’m pretty sure most of us associate canned mushrooms with what’s on top of a pizza. Like that’s exactly what we think about here. And so, you know, thinking about mushrooms like a chicken, I mean, what? Okay, what other things? Now I’m in trade, what other things have you guys had like?

Radicato (13:40.942)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Radicato (13:51.564)
Right, absolutely.

Jannine Krause (14:03.758)
blew your mind about different ways you could prep certain foods that maybe people wouldn’t normally eat. Or they’d be like, please don’t put those in my-

Radicato (14:11.096)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this isn’t a, this is not a mind blowing one for, for those of us who’ve probably eaten a lot of these in our lifetime, but sweet potatoes were something that were surprisingly foreign to a lot of our clients and a lot of our customers. They were like, I don’t like sweet potatoes. The only time I’ve ever had them is at Thanksgiving covered in marshmallows. And that version is okay. But you know, they’ll

they’ll tell us like, I’ve tried sweet potato fries at a restaurant and those, didn’t like them. And we have had, mean, like we can no longer count on two hands how many people have said, I really disliked sweet potatoes until we tried yours. And they were just in there, so I had to try them. And you know, I kind of like them now.

And that’s simply a matter of like maybe giving them into giving them them in a way that they’ve never had before like we do a lot of like Spice and savory mix on those so maybe it’s something as simple as like roasting with cinnamon and a little bit of cayenne

Jannine Krause (15:27.819)
It’s funny, because yeah, that holiday dish was awesome.

and put that one.

Yeah.

Jannine Krause (15:41.825)
no! Internet! Come back!

Jannine Krause (15:50.744)
Shoot.

Jannine Krause (19:36.721)
boy. Did you guys move locations again?

Radicato (19:40.213)
We gotta have a speaker somewhere.

Radicato (19:46.313)
We can’t hear you, so we’re just trying to get this figured out. We switched laptops, thinking that might have been the issue. Hence the different. Do you have volume on here somewhere? Yeah, up top here.

Jannine Krause (20:00.43)
Can you hear me now?

Radicato (20:02.215)
we got you. We just had the volume turned down.

Jannine Krause (20:05.454)
Good deal. Good deal.

Radicato (20:07.519)
Sorry if the video quality changed. I don’t know how to change the settings on this.

Jannine Krause (20:10.798)
It’s okay.

Jannine Krause (20:15.222)
You’re fine. I think really for you guys, if you come closer, like a little closer to screen, it doesn’t wash your faces out as much. And I think Chad, you turn a little, but I mean, I don’t want anybody with like neck pain and. Torticola. There that’s that’s good. Well, because ultimately I’ll give you a copy of the clip, too, that you guys can put into your promo, you know, because it’s always good to have one of these like clips to throw in to, you know, promo. But OK.

Radicato (20:24.949)
don’t care about that.

Jannine Krause (20:44.48)
So we’re leaving off on sweet potatoes and you were gonna say something about sweet potatoes. I don’t know if you remember what that was, but that’s okay, because it was a it was a good like, yeah, yeah. So I love where you guys are going with like the food and the what’s going on in the dirt at Red Granite Farms. Are they were doing regenerative? Do you know if it’s regenerative farming? Like she’s putting mushroom, like not mushrooms, but like ferments into the soil.

Radicato (20:52.949)
I think we got most of it.

Radicato (21:14.518)
I think that she is, but I don’t have it. Like I’d have no verification of that. Yeah. Yeah. That was, we did a big tour like a year over a year ago where we literally went through every single piece of her operation. And I do think that’s part of what we talked about, but that was lost in the last year and a half or so. Yeah. She’s doing it for sure in the, like some of the fields where, know, they

Jannine Krause (21:20.76)
That’s okay, we won’t die.

Radicato (21:40.853)
cut down the plants after they’re done with them and they till them back in. They do some of that and then they have ducks and chickens and a few other animals that they use to help fertilize. So there’s some of that, yeah.

Jannine Krause (21:52.878)
Cool, cool. Well, I realize I left recording on, so we can put that in there. Why not? We’ll edit it all. I mean, we edit it all anyway. But you know, I’m just, I was just super curious. So, okay, now we’ll dive back in officially. I’m gonna think about where I wanna go next, because I love the food part. Okay, here we go. So, I didn’t even ask you guys this, but I see you both are foodies.

Radicato (21:59.677)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (22:20.972)
and you both light up a lot when you talk about food. Did you guys meet? How did you meet to work together? Because I’m super fascinated and I never ask in any of our conversations we’ve had.

Radicato (22:32.469)
Chad actually started as a student of mine. both used to work and well train first and then work at a facility in Boone that has since closed and while we were there Chad came in as a client and he was my first long-term nutrition client so when I first started doing nutrition coaching

Chad was with me for a full year and had already done a lot of things to improve his health and had already lost just an enormous amount of weight and had put in all kinds of work toward that process but wanted to just kind of tweak things a little bit and shift his focus a little bit and kind of work on some longevity style nutrition focus.

And so we met on a weekly basis. We chatted often and realized, well, we both really like food and, we both really like the habit change that’s involved in this process. And Chad was a coach by profession at that time in a different realm completely. And so we just really clicked in that regard.

And then he started doing some nutrition coaching. He took all the same certifications that I had taken. in that process, we were like, man, we’re working with people who are doing great things, but they are continually stuck by bridging this little gap between where they are and where they want to be. And a lot of that’s lifestyle stuff or the time that they have to devote to that.

And so we were like, how could we further help them? And that’s kind of where Raticato was born. But I always talk over him, so I’m going to let him talk. No, mean, I you pretty much covered it. Yeah. I mean, the other part of that sort of journey was, once I discovered that I had a passion for nutrition in working with Jenny, and then as we started talking about what are the things we could do with that, even from a

Radicato (24:54.865)
maybe a side gig or something to sort of compliment, scratch an itch that we both had to help people with nutrition. I think circumstances just lined up in a way that helped us get to the point where we could start the business then because we weren’t burdened by the other facility that we were working on. We had time to dedicate to really think through how we wanted to express our mission and to move forward with it. I, at the same time, had been in a corporate job for 20…

five years and even though I was doing a lot of coaching professionally in that job, I really wanted to step back and do something for myself and Jenny was the perfect person to do it with. had interests that were aligned and the same sort of mission and outlook on things. So it just kind of worked out. And we both do really geek out about food. So like one thing we’ve done since even before we officially started Raticado is we will have almost weekly

market research where we go and find like really interesting dishes that we want to try at other places, other restaurants or you know, whatever the place may be or we go to a farm stand or somewhere and we get something that we’ve never had before in terms of a vegetable or piece of produce or a type of meat and we just, play with our food a lot. And so it’s really fun to kind of go through that process together and help figure out.

What are the things we really like? We pick things apart as we eat them, not in a judgmental way, but like a, is it about this thing that we love so much or what is it we don’t like? And how could we replicate something like this or make it more user friendly? Cause we have pretty adventurous pallets and we have a, we serve a pretty wide range of people. have people who would be willing to jump on that adventure with us. And we have people who think black pepper has a kick to it. So we have to kind of find some middle ground.

Yeah, it’s pretty fun. It’s pretty fun to go on some of those little adventures where you’re trying to expose yourself to new flavors. think it’s maybe we’ve twice ever resorted to asking the server what’s in the dish. We’re always sitting there trying to figure it out. Like, what is this? What is that? I know there’s a flavor in there. I recognize, I’ve never tasted these two things together. It’s pretty fun.

Jannine Krause (26:53.755)
my gosh.

Jannine Krause (27:17.112)
gosh how cool you know I see this as something that you know folks can kind of take take some inspiration from because you know let’s face it probably the average American has like maybe maybe four or five recipes they put on repeat every stinking week and

they may be excited about going out and doing the foodie thing and getting to a restaurant and finding something new and then they try to replicate it at home and maybe it doesn’t go so well. And so thinking about like, how can we bring this back, that joy back to food? And also looking at how you guys pick things apart. So give me a story. Oops, my stinking phone. It’s a day.

Give me a story, like tell me one of the play, like what was your favorite food market research experiment?

Radicato (28:08.821)
That’s hard. There are a few, a lot of them actually. Well, I mean, we had one fairly recently that we haven’t yet done a full recreation of that really caught us both off guard. So we went to a Nepalese restaurant in Des Moines and we were fully there expecting to get some of the best Indian style food we could imagine. Both of us had been to the restaurant before and

yet somehow never had seen on their menu that they had a Nepalese version of chow mein. And let me just say chow mein would not be the thing either of us would order. Like it wouldn’t be the thing that stood out on a restaurant menu. And then I think Chad was the one who saw it and was like, we have to try this. Like it has to be something that we try. And so we did and

It was like so unexpected that it was really fantastic and so different than anything we would have ever thought it would be that we almost forgot about the dish that I had ordered, which was delicious in its own right. But it was very much masked by this surprising version of two different cultures.

kind of coming together and creating something that was just pretty magical. Yeah, it was surprising to the point of being almost shocking how different and good it was. Yeah, so we’re still in the background process on our end of trying to recreate an experiment. That definitely is a complex enough flavor that we have to play for a while before that one hits our menu.

Jannine Krause (30:01.39)
You know thinking I mean creativity imagining I mean I think most of us have kind of lost imagination Creativity all those things around food and so now I’m like well heck I need to go out and try different restaurants and try things not to you’ve inspired me to think about it and how I can record you know replace Not replace. What am I trying to say like recreate it in my in my own repertoire? But okay, let’s talk a little twist because obviously a lot of folks are me thinking about chow mein right and they’re gonna be like that’s not really healthy You know you guys always are gonna twist it so that you’ve probably got more veggies

and there you’ve probably got different things that you’re thinking about. Now because you’re still on working process of that one, I recently saw something about a tamale bowl on Instagram.

Radicato (30:40.341)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (30:42.09)
So, you know, a lot of people will be thinking about tamales as like the tamale and really it’s more corn than anything when you get a tamale, but yours looked like it had a bunch of other things. Talk us through how you guys think about a dish like that and how you’re like, I’m gonna add more veggies, I’m gonna add this, I’m gonna add that. How does that work for you guys? What’s the process?

Radicato (31:03.541)
Well, honestly, something like that dish usually starts with a food memory for us. And that’s one of those, you you just happened to see my birthday week menu, right? So yesterday was my birthday and I chose the full week’s menu, which normally it’s much more collaborative than that. But we do this for each of our birthdays where we just pick some of our favorite things and put them out there. you know, growing up,

I was lucky enough to have parents who grew a lot of their own food. They canned a lot of their own stuff. They were just a couple of hippies raising children. My mom could pretty much put anything in front of her and she would figure out how to make it. My dad was the one who was like, let’s really explore with flavors. One of the things that he and I used to do is

There was a place, there was a little tamale stand in the town that he worked in. And we would go there and get tamales every once and again, we would travel to other towns that weren’t too far away. And eating out was a rarity in my childhood, like a big time rarity. But when we would go to places, we would look for things like that were shared favorite flavors like my dad and I both loving tamales. And so.

When we put that on the menu, we decided that we wanted to maintain that kind of like amazing, warm, comforting, delicious flavor of the tamale itself. But as with anything, it’s about balance and moderation, right? So sometimes we’ll have things like this amazingly delicious cheesy polenta as the tamale base of our bowl. But we know we have to balance that out with some.

Reality like a whole a whole container of cheesy polenta would be like dream world Reality is you throw in some protein you throw in some vegetables that have a little acidity that are going to kind of balance out the creamy and Some fiber that’s going to help your body digest all of this stuff that you’re that you’re taking in and then cilantro on top to make it just taste amazing so those are kind of the ways that we try to think through it like

Radicato (33:23.433)
have something that feels a little bit more indulgent, but like balance it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re going without. You know, we just had a dish we did like a salmon dish with mashed potatoes. could put a bowl of mashed potatoes in front of either one of us and I think you would be perfectly happy to just stuff our faces if there was no, you know, nothing stopping us. But.

understanding that you can then take some really healthy things and add it to that really yummy decadent thing. You won’t feel deprived. In fact, you’ll feel better in the end because you didn’t eat a whole bowl of mashed potatoes alone. And take a mashed potato napkin. Right.

Jannine Krause (34:02.802)
my gosh, mashed potato coma. For sure. I’ve been in a few of those. I mean, you’re speaking my language, like mashed potatoes, polenta with cheese and, gosh, yes. So.

Radicato (34:08.219)
Thank you.

Radicato (34:16.949)
Especially as it like it’s getting cold for most of us like we just kind of crave more of those comfort foods And again, it’s just about how do you kind of balance that out? Especially for like, know me I’m always cold right like I’m always I I could walk around in a blanket and a hoodie and a stocking cap and still be cold And so it’s easy to gravitate toward those things that warm us up

We just have to do it a little smarter.

Jannine Krause (34:52.268)
You know, and I think this is great, I mean, inspiration again for a lot of folks to think, you know, like, I think we think when we have to, when we are moving to eating healthy, I think the first and foremost thing everybody thinks is like, you know, there goes my mashed potatoes, there goes this, there goes that. They like make a list of all the things they can’t eat instead of the things they can eat. And now just hearing you guys talk, I’m like.

All right, what other things? Chad, I gotta hear from you. What’s your favorite thing on the menu? What’s on your birthday week menu?

Radicato (35:24.341)
I don’t know if I remember that was April so long ago. That’s like 30 menus since then. I will tell you that I don’t know if I have a very specific meal, but I am very much on board and intrigued by the constant attempts by us to find things that are otherwise known as comfort foods and try to make them healthier or more nutritionally balanced in a way that maybe surprises people.

I don’t know if I have a good one off the top of my head, but we have things like pot roast and Philly cheesesteak bowls and things that people look at and they say, oh man, that seems like a really great comfort food, but boy, it doesn’t sound healthy. We don’t necessarily make it perfectly healthy, but we certainly make it delicious, more balanced, and more nutritionally complete, and then we properly portion it. And to me, that’s the puzzle part of this that I really get into.

I may not nerd out over a very specific dish, although Jenny, you probably could list a couple that I have nerded does. Curry. Yeah, curry is like a really big thing for me because again, it’s one of those things I was exposed to as a young person. So I was 10 or 11, I think, in that range when I had my first bowl of curry and sticky rice and I fell in love with it. And I’ve been on a search for something that measures up to that. like I love cooking curry and finding different.

flavor combinations that make it more accessible and approachable for people that think it’s just a spicy dish they get at their local Thai restaurant. And we’ve been trying to do that without doing like, you know, there’s a lot of hacks out there right now. And I use that term in a couple different ways, but there are a lot of like cooking hacks to make things healthier that include dumping in, you know, inordinate amounts of cottage cheese or

Jannine Krause (36:59.138)
or like over sweet.

Radicato (37:21.023)
protein chips and things of that nature. And we’re really trying to kind of still make things true to their original form and super tasty. like, you know, if we make a mashed potato, we’re still gonna use real butter in the mashed potato. And it’s not gonna be, you know, we’re not gonna be hiding strange things in there. we’re not gonna have, you know, make, yeah, like, yes, none of that. Collagen?

In mashed potatoes? nope.

Jannine Krause (37:52.846)
I mean, it’s like oatmeal with protein powder, right? And at the end of the day, know, yeah, in a pinch, I recommend this stuff, but it’s still processed, right? Like, what did they do to get to that format? And so I’ve, you know, I always look at them and go, wouldn’t real food be better?

Radicato (37:58.101)
Mm-hmm.

Radicato (38:05.823)
Yeah.

Radicato (38:14.185)
Yeah, like it’s a, for us it’s again that whole balance issue of like, eating, focusing on eating healthier is great, but like if the bulk, if your main focus for example is just get in gut busting amounts of protein and not give a thought to what you’re taking in with it. And so therefore not taking into any consideration how your body’s absorbing it. You’re not gonna feel good.

And if you’re not gonna feel good, you’re probably not gonna continue that same healthy focus.

Jannine Krause (38:51.106)
And if it doesn’t taste good, I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but if you’ve ever dumped protein powder into oatmeal, it’s not like the most epic thing ever.

Radicato (38:58.523)
It’s, nope, mm-mm, nope. Again, it’s that whole textural thing, right?

Jannine Krause (39:06.028)
It is, it is. So I like, you know, I like the idea that you guys are still remaining true to like the foodie aspect because so many folks with the health kicks, I’ve said this probably three times now on the podcast, but it’s something that I really want to get the point. Like we’re not gonna eat, continue to eat as healthy as we can for ourselves if it doesn’t taste good. And if it doesn’t give us that, like we are human. We cannot block the desire to have the food for something to comfort us. Like.

I’d be lying if I even said like, I rewired myself to not want comfort food. I don’t think that’s possible. I really don’t.

Radicato (39:43.657)
Well, and I don’t even know that it’s necessary. You know, if we’re talking about a lifetime of health, which is what most of us are aiming for, you’re not probably going to be able to sustain eating things that don’t taste good, you know, things that are zero calorie, but like a hundred percent science in order to be zero calorie. That’s not, it may serve you for a short period of time. If you have like some,

really hard-fought aesthetic goals, or if you are just absolutely in a pinch where you feel like you have to do something really extreme for a short period of time, those kind of things all play a role in that process, but they don’t necessarily play a role in the kind of thing you’re gonna do and maintain for the rest of your life. And back to Chad and I and our stories,

Both of us have had really big transformations in our lives. Neither of us were athletic in our youth. of us, both of us spent a large portion of our lives overweight and not moving our bodies and not feeding them well. And unlike many people that we know personally who’ve had big body transformations, we have been able to maintain the things that we did to get to where we’re at for over 10 years.

into middle age stresses, the stress of owning two businesses is a reality in our lives right now. So neither of us are exactly where we want to be in the moment. But we’re also not so far off that, you know, we’ve had these big fluctuations of like both of us losing around 100 pounds or more or just less. And then having, you know, gone up and down and up and down and up and down in that process. the big key there is.

figuring out how to make it the kind of thing that you’re willing to make a lifestyle habit more than just to get you to that next goal and not have it just be like all or nothing. No pass fail here. We’re just all trying to make it as long as we can.

Jannine Krause (41:56.686)
It’s such, you guys have such a straight, just a straight look at it and it’s such a good, insightful look because I think so many people are struggling with the ups and downs. And like you said, my gosh, in the world of GLP-1s and all these things, we are all now programmed for quick fix. And then it’s like, and then what? When you come off of these things. And that’s the biggest thing I’m worried about people coming off the GLP-1s. What are they gonna do when they haven’t figured out that right thing?

and you guys did it without any of it on board.

Radicato (42:29.791)
Yeah, we’ve, mean, if GLP ones are the thing that you need to get yourself moving in the right direction, like we have no issues with that whatsoever, but again, it’s the now what, it’s the where do we go from here, and 100 % of the time, whether it’s GLPs, whether it’s just somebody working on body recomp, whether it’s someone working on getting into healthier habits to benefit their mental health,

No matter what that thing is, it’s the habits that get you there. And if we can help with those and make those easier to implement into your life and make it the kind of thing you don’t have to think so much about, like we know from personal experience that that’s how it happened for us. When we automated some of those things, when we were able to enjoy the food we were eating, even if it was healthier, that’s what made us want to keep going.

Jannine Krause (43:27.0)
So, so huge, so huge. And that’s definitely the message that I want folks to hear today is that, you know, you can automate this stuff and what you guys have going on with Raticado. mean, I wish it was in every city. when you expanding to every city, when are we taking this even further?

Radicato (43:43.221)
Well, we got to multiply us first. Right, need an employee. That would help. A single employee would probably be useful.

Jannine Krause (43:56.43)
Well, you got kids, right? I mean, Jenny, you know.

Radicato (43:58.761)
Yup. Yeah. His son has a culinary degree. We keep trying, but he’s got other ideas. He’s getting lots of good kitchen experience right now, so maybe someday.

Jannine Krause (44:06.763)
Jannine Krause (44:11.298)
Well, you know, you can always help, right? And hey, you know, I love what you guys are doing. It makes it so much easier for folks. I wish that you guys weren’t six hours away from me because I would be like, send them my way. I would love this. Now with your meals, are you guys doing, and forgive me because I’m now forgetting, are you doing every breakfast, lunch, dinner for folks? Can they do everything or is it lunch, dinner? What are you typically covering?

Radicato (44:41.663)
Yeah, they’re designed so we have a very specific breakfast meal every single week. The rest of the meals, there’s a snack in there as well. The rest of the meals are designed so they could be consumed for either lunch or dinner, honestly. So yeah, they could cover their day if they really wanted to do that. And you can do something as simple as purchase one meal from us or we do meal bundles. There aren’t a lot of people who probably use it for every single breakfast, lunch and dinner that they do.

But there are several that use it every day for lunch. For example, we have a few working professionals here in downtown Boone that they come in and get enough food that they and maybe one other person in their office sometimes can have a lunch available all week long. So they don’t have to go get something like Jimmy John’s or take out food from a local Chinese restaurant or whatever it is they do. They just have a healthy option right there.

Jannine Krause (45:37.198)
And how crucial would this have been for you guys when you were going through the process of the weight loss? Like I would love to…

Radicato (45:42.553)
I would have made it easier. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it would have been a great supplement, I think, to the things that we were already doing. And we have a number of people who, just like us, the two of us really enjoy cooking. And people are amazed and maybe sometimes a little appalled.

that we spend as much time as we spend on a, because we do all of our cooking on a single day since we also own and operate the gym. So everything we do is done from like early, early in the morning on a Friday until very late into the night into sometimes Saturday morning because of our rental agreement and because of what we, you know, the space we have available, the time we have available.

And so there are a lot of people who can’t believe that then when they come in for like now we have a Sunday night pick up too. Sometimes they’ll come in and we’ll be cooking when they come in because we’re like making our food for the week or we’re practicing the next experiment. They’re like, my gosh, don’t you guys ever get tired of cooking? The answer is not really. Saturdays, we don’t, neither of us really want a lot to do with food on Saturdays, eating or cooking. But other than that, no, I mean, we have to.

We have to keep doing that. So yeah, I’m sure back in the day we would have used it, but as a supplement.

Jannine Krause (47:07.718)
gosh, yeah. I mean, the biggest complaint I hear is dinner for most people, because they’ll get to the point that they’ll have skipped lunch, and then they’ll get to the dinner time frame, and they’re like, I don’t even know what to do now. And the whole decision fatigue thing too. I mean, that’s where I’m at. I’m at it especially some days. But just listening to you guys talk about how, you guys light up so much when you talk about creating the recipes and the new meals. I’m like.

Radicato (47:11.765)
Hmm.

Radicato (47:30.197)
Thank

Jannine Krause (47:34.274)
Maybe I need some inspiration. That’s it. I’m coming down to Boone and hanging out with you guys on a Friday. I think I have to do that so that I can…

Radicato (47:39.199)
Perfect. Perfect. We would invite that for sure. For sure. And yeah, I mean, there aren’t a lot of people. It’s the reality, right? Like for a lot of people, eating is sort of just the thing you have to do and maybe isn’t the thing that you enjoy. And so you’re not going to maybe nerd out and geek out about food as much as the two of us are. But allow us to do that and then you can enjoy the spoils of that.

Right? I mean, our menu changes every week for a reason. It would be a lot easier. I’ll just put that out there right now. It would be so much easier for us if we didn’t change our menu every single week. But again, we want to get people trying new foods. We want to keep experimenting and having fun with it. And it helps us kind of stay seasonal with what we’re using to keep it rotating all the time.

Jannine Krause (48:33.134)
can imagine you guys are gonna have quite the repertoire after a while because you you look at the different like the big companies out there you know like the the I can’t even think of them now but I know and everyone probably has one in their mind yeah yeah it’s all like you get to choose and that’s what you get and you you know and I’m guessing that they probably have like lunch lady chefs now just in there whipping up the stuff that they you know the creativity is gone is what I’m trying to say

Radicato (48:45.141)
Like the meal prep delivery stuff. Yeah.

Radicato (48:59.157)
Mm-hmm.

Jannine Krause (49:02.478)
And the fact that we’ve got two people, we could see you guys. You’re like little wizards back there, you know, working on stuff. I’m like, oh, so good, so good. So we gotta tell guys, like folks, how they can find you and how far out from Boone, you know, like I would guess, like if they’re willing to drive in, it doesn’t really matter. Yeah, yeah, tell us, tell us your Instagram I think is Radicado and then it says Nourishing Boone. I’m let you guys say it before I start rattling.

Radicato (49:08.149)
Thank

Radicato (49:31.975)
I think Instagram is nourishing boon. Yeah. Facebook, you can find us by looking up Raticado Boon. We, yeah, right now it’s pickup only. pretty much if, as long as you’re willing to drive, we’ll have food available for you if you pre-order it. We typically target about with our, you know, Facebook ads and things like that. We target about a 20 to 25 mile radius. That seems to be the sweet spot in terms of people that are willing to drive. But we have people driving from farther than that. Like

I think 30 or 35 miles away is our big one. And we do get on a fairly regular basis inquiries about how soon we’ll be available in cities and towns closer to the Des Moines metro area. I have some former coworkers that I worked with down there that are waiting patiently for us to have a pickup spot down there for them. So yeah, that’s part of why we’re excited to kind of get our own kitchen space going.

and get that process underway. It’ll change things for us a little bit, but in a really good way and expand that reach and we’re excited for that.

Jannine Krause (50:42.51)
I’m so excited to hear how it plays out since I’ve heard the journey getting there and I’m definitely for sure we’ll get you guys back on and give folks an update and maybe we need to do, my phone, maybe we need to do a whole episode where we talk about inspiring people with recipes and different spices and of that nature. So we’ll definitely have you guys back on. Thank you guys for taking the time to hang out with me today. I really appreciate it.

Radicato (50:54.527)
Thank

Radicato (51:01.269)
Thank

Radicato (51:09.781)
Yeah, it’s been great. We always have fun talking to you, Janine. Thank you for asking us to do this.

Jannine Krause (51:15.854)
Hey, my pleasure. All right.