Behind the New Menu: How Our Chefs Built Maple Meal Prep From the Ground Up

Every new menu starts with a question. For us, it was a simple one: why does "healthy" food so often come loaded with ingredients you can't pronounce?

Seed oils. Bleached flour. A long list of stabilizers, dyes, and preservatives doing jobs that real food should be doing on its own. We looked at what was on the market, looked at what we were putting on our own tables at home, and decided our menu needed to close that gap.

So we started over.

Back to the Test Kitchen

Building this menu wasn't a matter of swapping a few ingredients on our existing recipes — it meant rethinking dishes from the pan up. Our chefs spent weeks in the test kitchen, running the same recipe five, six, sometimes ten different ways before it earned a spot on the menu.

Cooking oil alone took real trial and error. Most commercial kitchens lean on seed oils because they're cheap and neutral-tasting, but they weren't a fit for what we wanted this menu to be. Our chefs tested avocado oil, olive oil, and grass-fed butter across different cooking methods — searing, roasting, sautéing — to find the right oil for the right job, instead of using one oil for everything.

The same went for grains. Bleached, bromated flour is the industry default because it's shelf-stable and consistent. We went the other direction: unbleached, unbromated flours and whole grains, tested side by side until the texture and rise matched what our chefs wanted without cutting any corners.

What "Artificial-Anything-Free" Actually Means

It's easy to slap a label on a menu. It's harder to actually earn it. For us, that meant going line by line through every ingredient in every dish and asking: is this natural, and does it need to be here at all?

That meant:

• No seed oils — cooking exclusively with oils like olive and avocado oil
• No bleached or bromated grains — only unbleached flours and whole grains
• No artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives — every dish should taste like what it actually is

It also meant accepting some tradeoffs. Natural ingredients can be pricier, less consistent batch to batch, and harder to work with than their processed counterparts. Our chefs had to adjust techniques, not just swap ingredients, to make sure every dish still turned out perfectly every time.

Built by People Who Actually Cook It

What made this process work was that our chefs weren't just following a checklist — they were solving real cooking problems. When a sauce broke without the stabilizers most kitchens rely on, they figured out a technique to fix it. When a baked good needed structure without bleached flour, they adjusted hydration and mixing methods until it worked.

The result is a menu that doesn't feel like a compromise. It's food that happens to be free of seed oils, bleached grains, and artificial ingredients — not food that tastes like it's missing something.

Try the New Menu

This menu represents months of testing, tasting, and starting over until every dish met the standard we set for it. We think you'll taste the difference.

Explore the new menu and see what our chefs have been working on.