Barnett’s newest enterprise is a tarot deck for males. | Photograph courtesy of Kristen Barnett
5 years in the past, Kristen Barnett was on the forefront of one of many greatest tendencies in restaurant expertise.
After serving to the New York-based fast-casual Dig Inn launch a ghost kitchen program, she joined ghost kitchen startup Zuul as its director of technique and later grew to become COO. In 2021, when Zuul bought to Kitchen United, she left to create Hungry Home, a special spin on the format that partnered with cooks on unique menus. She spun that into Culinary Creators Worldwide, a advertising and marketing company for meals influencers.
After which, final 12 months, Barnett left all of it behind, partially as a result of she’d realized that scaling tech corporations was troublesome to sq. along with her private philosophy on eating places.
“Meals itself is such a pure endeavor of nourishing folks,” she mentioned. “While you infuse it with expertise and enterprise capital dynamics round development and scale, oftentimes the standard and the unique intention can simply turn out to be degraded.”
Barnett’s reverence for meals was sparked by an expertise she had in 2015, when she was working as an affiliate with Boston Consulting Group. She’d been battling Lyme illness for a few years, and after antibiotics did not deal with the sickness, she took a medical depart from her job to attempt to get higher.
In quest of options, she got here throughout a uncooked vegan most cancers clinic based mostly in West Palm Seaside, Florida, that additionally claimed to assist folks with Lyme illness. She cashed out her life financial savings and enrolled in a 20-day program.
For 3 weeks, Barnett ate a completely uncooked vegan weight-reduction plan. That meant no gluten, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, or sugar, together with fruit, in addition to tri-weekly wheat grass enemas. (“That’s when you’re determined to heal,” she mentioned.)
The toughest a part of this system for her was giving up heat meals. “Folks like to prepare dinner meals over fires for a cause,” she mentioned. “After which swiftly it’s simply salads daily.”
However the remedy labored wonders. Over these 20 days, Barnett’s situation improved by 70%, a restoration that she mentioned would usually have taken as much as two years. Her eyes had been opened to the quasi-miraculous powers of high-quality meals. And whereas most individuals may take that as an indication to vary their weight-reduction plan, Barnett determined to make it her new profession.
When she obtained again to New York, she give up her white-collar job and utilized to work at Dig Inn. The chain’s health-focused, farm-to-table mission resonated along with her, she mentioned. However it was a threat professionally: She went from working for one of many world’s premier consulting companies to answering buyer help emails for a small restaurant chain.
That didn’t final lengthy, although. Inside a couple of 12 months, Barnett was promoted to Dig Inn’s head of provide chain and menu growth, then director of strategic operations, after which basic supervisor of Room Service, its in-house ghost kitchen program.
She give up Dig Inn in 2019, feeling burned out after 4 years and prepared for one thing new. That ended up being Zuul, a ghost kitchen startup that needed to assist impartial operators compete within the fast-developing meals supply market. That’s the place she first started to really feel a few of the tensions concerned with scaling a tech firm that served small eating places.
It was round this identical time that Barnett had an expertise that might finally ship her down a completely completely different path. Throughout a short break earlier than beginning at Zuul, she had a Lyme illness relapse, and went to Costa Rica for an additional uncooked vegan retreat. The proprietor of that program urged she look into ayahuasca. The psychedelic concoction originated within the Amazon rainforest, the place it’s utilized by indigenous folks for ceremonial and medicinal functions.
For Barnett, ayahuasca would show to be much more transformative than her journey into meals as drugs. “I got here out of it with a very new outlook on my persistent sickness,” she mentioned. “I dropped the identification of being sick. I used to be like, ‘I’m truly not that sick.’ After which I by no means relapsed once more.”
The expertise obtained her pondering extra concerning the energy of the thoughts and the way it can influence one’s well-being simply as a lot as treatment or weight-reduction plan. So when she lastly left the world of meals tech for good, with the sale of Hungry Home final 12 months, she started to level her subsequent entrepreneurial efforts in that course.
“I simply felt like I used to be disconnected from my authentic intention of why I’d gotten into the meals trade,” she mentioned. “I used to be doing a variety of tech and advertising and marketing stuff, which was tremendous enjoyable, however not soul-connected.”
She took a step again and checked out the place the dialog round well being was going. When she first obtained began in eating places a couple of decade in the past, she was a part of the rising farm-to-table motion, a development that dovetailed along with her curiosity within the therapeutic properties of meals. Now, she mentioned, “I believe we’re at the start of the psychedelic and consciousness motion.”
She determined she needed to assist folks enhance their religious lives, however in a manner that was accessible and enjoyable. Final summer time, she launched Highest Good Ventures, an organization centered on “the intersection of historical knowledge and trendy enterprise,” based on its web site.
Highest Good’s first contribution to the burgeoning religious economic system is, fittingly, a bit of on the market: A deck of tarot playing cards designed particularly for males, referred to as merely, Tarot for Bros.
Why tarot playing cards, and why males? In powerful instances, “a variety of ladies I do know flip to psychics and their ladies,” Barnett mentioned, “however the males that I do know and love don’t have those self same assets out there.”
She believes tarot playing cards are a good way to spark that reflection and dialog. They only wanted a rebrand to get guys .
The Tarot for Bros deck is identical as a conventional 78-card tarot deck, however with visuals which can be much less witchy and extra masculine. Illustrated by artist Parker S. Jackson, the playing cards are impressed by classic army and expedition imagery, area manuals, and woodblock prints. The waitlist is now open, and decks will likely be shipped out within the subsequent couple of months.
So, as Barnett leaves the meals realm for the religious one, does she see a spot for eating places on this new frontier?
Perhaps in a roundabout way. However she does consider the 2 worlds have lots in frequent. Good eating places, like good religious practices, have a powerful sense of set and setting, she mentioned. Music, lighting, and hospitality all contribute to a optimistic — and maybe transcendent — expertise, whether or not it’s a meal or a tarot studying.
“Individuals who work in eating places perceive the facility of set and setting whenever you wish to create a desired expertise,” she mentioned. “And that’s additionally actually essential in all of those consciousness communities that want to increase past the perimeter or the hippie world.”
Her background in eating places ought to turn out to be useful, then, as she embarks on this new chapter.
“It is actually fascinating instances, and I simply sort of belief my nostril on these things,” Barnett mentioned. “I knew farm to desk was going to be essential. I knew meals supply was going to be essential. And whereas this feels completely out of left area, I actually belief that this can be a actually thrilling frontier that increasingly more persons are going to be getting interested by.”
