Fresh, healthy meals, delivered.
“Our mission has always been the same since day one,” says Ameer Hassan, co-owner and CEO of UNREFINED meal prep delivery service. “We want to deliver healthy, clean, and good tasting food to as many Clevelanders as possible, and RATIONAL has been able to help us get to that point.”
As its name implies, UNREFINED only uses all-natural ingredients in its recipes: whole grains, fresh meats, seafood, and produce, free of preservatives and seed oils, without added sugars, and made entirely from scratch.
Gluten and dairy-free and dietitian approved, UNREFINED meals are great for people with special dietary requirements as well as anyone wanting a cleaner, healthier, simpler lifestyle. There’s no walk-in or sit-down restaurant; clients order online for a la carte, by the pound, or subscription for meal pickup or delivery. There are also a handful of grab-and-go coolers with meals at local health and fitness facilities.
“We can help people that have celiac disease – people that have autoimmune diseases that need to eat this way. We can help people with diabetes. But on the flip side, someone could just order it because they're a busy individual, not because they need gluten and dairy-free, but because we provide something that tastes equally as good,” says Olivia Stone, vice president of customer relations and co-owner of UNREFINED.
Big gains for a booming business.
Riley Tatonetti, co-founder and COO, and Hassan, established UNREFINED in 2021. Hassan, an entrepreneur, saw Tatonetti’s healthy meal creations on Instagram and reached out: “Hey, your food looks great, want to cook for me sometime?” She cooked for him twice, and he said, “This is really good… we should start a business.” Several months went by and Olivia Stone joined Hassan and Tatonetti, first as a culinary consultant and then as part owner.
Three years and three expansions later, Tatonetti, Hassan, and Stone, along with the UNREFINED team of managers, kitchen staff, and drivers, prepare and deliver about 1,700-2,000 meals every week from their 4,000 square foot kitchen in downtown Cleveland. At the heart of the kitchen is a RATIONAL iCombi Pro and a RATIONAL iVario Pro used to make about 70-80% of menu items.
Choices might include sticky ginger soy chicken thighs, sweet and smoky steak and potatoes, harissa honey salmon, chicken chorizo, Korean BBQ beef, roasted zucchini and peppers, cilantro lime rice, or chocolate fudge protein brownie bites. All recipes emphasize high protein, high quality anti-inflammatory ingredients – always clean, pure, and fresh.
Streamlined processes and greater efficiency.
The UNREFINED team became interested in RATIONAL in 2022 when a vendor lauded the brand; intrigued, they connected with a RATIONAL rep to discover more.
“It was a pretty seamless process,” Hassan recalls. “They showed us a couple of demos. We went to a facility, saw everything live, and we were sold on the spot. Our rep has been amazing since day one, setting us up, coming in from time to time, making sure everything's working correctly, and helping us with some of our menu items.”
“UNREFINED has relied a lot on software and technology, and RATIONAL bridges that gap for us perfectly, helping us streamline processes and become more efficient,” he points out. “It’s helped cut costs in certain aspects of the business, and we allocate that money to other parts of the company.”
They bought an iCombi Pro in 2022, and the following year purchased an iVario Pro: both replace multiple pieces of kitchen equipment.
“It produces an amazing product. We’re able to do a lot more at one time, and it helps us cut down our cook time tremendously,” Hassan says.
They prepare almost all their proteins and vegetables in the iCombi Pro: chicken, salmon, beef, green beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and fajita veggies, using the ‘roast’ preset with a combination of moisture and heat to get an ideal, crisp texture.
They use the iVario Pro to prepare everything from rice and pasta to ground beef, soup, and eggs. And sometimes they use both for a single dish, like when jasmine rice is cooked in the iCombi Pro then added to sautéed hibachi vegetables in the iVario Pro to make fried rice.
“There are so many features that you have endless opportunities to create so many recipes. It allows us to expand our menu further than some companies who don't have this type of product,” Tatonetti says. She uses the ConnectedCooking app to store and share recipes with her team with each new menu launch. She can also see other RATIONAL users’ settings from around the world as she and Stone test their own new recipes.
“We home-make everything from scratch, and RATIONAL products help us do that in large batches.”
Olivia Stone, Co-Owner and VP of Customer Relations, UNREFINED.
Fresh, flavorful, and consistent food.
“When you look at the quality that we provide compared to other places that don’t use a product like this, our quality soars,” Stone says. “We make everything from scratch, and RATIONAL helps us do that in large batches. When you talk about efficiency and how much it's helped our labor costs, when you look into how we thrive as a business, it has really improved our systems.”
She recalls finishing salmon cakes on the old stovetop, browning them individually for an hour and a half. Now, 10 full racks of salmon in the RATIONAL achieve the same results in three minutes – an incredible 97% reduction in cooking time.
Stone underscores the importance of consistency in the meal prep business, where many clients order similar items week after week. “It’s hypersensitive, because if they like something on week one and then on week two and they get something different, the trust is going to be broken. I feel so much more confident knowing that every week, our product is going to be consistent. It's going to taste consistent; it's going to be cooked consistent, and the quality is never going to fail,” she says.
“We're going to give them extremely fresh, flavorful, and consistent food every single week. That’s what using RATIONAL has provided for us.”
“We want to help people build sustainable habits that they can take with them and really transform their lives. RATIONAL has enabled us to do that.”
Riley Tatonetti, Co-Founder and COO, UNREFINED.
Reaching as many Clevelanders as possible.
“We want to help people build sustainable habits that they can take with them and really transform their lives, to be the best versions of themselves,” Tatonetti says. “RATIONAL has enabled us to do that because it’s allowed us to expand and really be able to cater to more people in the Cleveland area – and provide a product that’s super consistent and makes people want to come back for more.”
“We feel a lot more confident knowing that our staff is here with such amazing equipment,” Hassan adds. “We've been able to take ourselves as owners out of the kitchen, to focus on other growth opportunities for the company.”
- Industry:
Catering - Core business:
Meal prep delivery - Location:
Cleveland, Ohio, USA - The challenge:
Scale a business that produces labor-intensive home-made meals from scratch - The solution:
iCombi Pro
iVario Pro
Benefits:
- Elevated quality, consistency, and productivity
- Reduced cooking time, freeing up staff for other projects
- Digital recipe management through ConnectedCooking
- iCookingSuite – monitoring and support to deliver the results you want, exactly as specified
- iProductionManager – allows you to prepare different foods at the same time
- iCareSystem – automatic cleaning and descaling
- iDensityControl – intelligent climate management for exceptional productivity and exceptional results