Christine Barone was tasked with growing True Food Kitchen as its new CEO and scaled the brand from 6 to 10 restaurants, gaining Oprah Winfrey’s buy-in and more.
Entering through the doors of True Food Kitchen is enough to make you feel good about yourself. Simply standing, waiting to be seated feels like “this was a good choice for me to come eat here.”
I wasn’t entirely sure if True Food Kitchen was a restaurant or a concept. Turns out it’s both. The concept to bring happy food to the masses in a way that it’s both approachable and familiar for an entirely digestible experience– no pun intended.
It’s not easy to make it cool to eat healthy –just ask the sustainable industry that only in recent years has truly seen a remarkable peak– but somehow Christine Barone has been able to manage.
View this post on Instagram
Barone is the former Senior Vice President of Food at Starbucks who joined True Food Kitchen as it’s CEO. She is credited with helping expand the brand to a whopping 30 locations since joining, gaining the attention of Oprah’s team first (a word-of-mouth recommendation) and the buy-in of Oprah herself as a now True Food Kitchen investor and board member.
Let Barone tell you and she shares that the first time Oprah came to the restaurant, they had a 45-minute wait. She left and came back because her team told her she had to go back. Oprah loved True Food Kitchen so much that she sent her team to invite Barone for lunch at her house. The rest is history.
View this post on Instagram
Maybe it’s the team that genuinely means the compliments they give or the fact that at least one person in the restaurant looks like you or maybe it’s the staff’s affirmations on their t-shirts with words like “Honest. True. Shine On. Farmy. Grass-Fed. Nourish,” that add on to the vibrational welcoming “wow” that this place is obviously not like any other.
I have never seen any company wear their mission statement –literally– on their sleeve, but I like it. It exudes trust and purpose. Thus is the True Food Kitchen narrative: a restaurant that not only promises sustainable, tasty, and nutritious food without sacrificing flavor, but it permeates oceans of light, positivity, and goodness.
As people today, we are much more aware of what’s in our food and we’ve learned to read a label of ingredients or two. That inclination of distrust is one of the reasons why True Food Kitchen adopted the open-kitchen format because they aim to be as transparent as possible.
Yes, in fact, your Brussels sprouts were freshly cut from the stalk that you saw in the kitchen a few moments ago.
View this post on Instagram
What alludes to the viable success of True Food Kitchen’s tremendous expansion and recognition are its resilient and brilliant leaders like Barone, who with Dr. Andrew Weil, a renowned physician and doctor of integrative medicine, are not just pushing product sort-of-speak, but living and breathing the True Food Kitchen mantra.
Speaking with Barone it was vividly apparent that the decision to join True Food Kitchen was a natural fit. She is a person that speaks from a place of alignment as evident in the details found throughout a True Food Kitchen location: the uniformed affirmations of the True staff to open-kitchen concepts.
Amidst the challenges she has faced, she continues to lead from a place within herself in which she has been able to create the tangible space that best translates the positivity, inclusivity, and transparency that has shifted True Food Kitchen from concept to lifestyle brand, and what will be the future of conscious living that will push our society into the future of dining.
