Chef-dietitian blends fresh, healthy food with flavor
When Jessica Foust started working in hotel kitchens in her hometown of Reno, Nev., she thought she wanted to be a pastry chef. Yet she didn’t love the caffeine and sugar-fueled lifestyle.
After a few years, she shifted gears and headed to the Culinary Institute of America in New York. Surrounded by chefs cooking amazing food, she saw a disconnect when it came to health and nutrition. Wanting to bridge that gap, Foust studied nutrition at Johnson & Wales, eventually also becoming a registered dietitian.
As a chef and registered dietitian, Jessica Foust also became the first female chef for McDonald’s. It might seem like an unlikely career path, yet every move she’s made has been driven by how to get people to eat better.
In May 2017, Foust moved from McDonald’s to become the culinary director for the Chicago-based start-up Farmer’s Fridge. The new concept offers 90 movable “fridges” in the Chicago area, including at O’Hare International Airport, and recently expanded with a dozen facilities now in the Milwaukee area offering breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks with a whole foods and plant-based focus. (You can find locations via the Farmer’s Fridge app.)
Foust, 34, is expecting her first child; she lives in Oak Park with her husband.
Her path
As I started to work in pastry kitchens, I realized it was long hours, lots of sugar and caffeine, and it wasn’t for me. … I moved over to the hot side, working in banquets. I made sushi, and after a few years decided this was what I wanted.
I moved to New York to attend the Culinary Institute of America. While at CIA I started to see the same lifestyle patterns that I saw in the pastry kitchen. I worked with chefs who were making amazing food, but they didn’t know how to feed themselves (nutritiously).
At the same time, I worked with a lot of dietitians who could tell you what to eat, but couldn’t put it together in a way that was palatable. That led me to explore why.
Delicious nutrition
After I graduated from the CIA, I decided to explore programs that included nutrition. Johnson and Wales had just started this program bridging these two disciplines.
The power of food
My career goal has always been to positively influence the way people eat. What I was seeing in hospitals and restaurants was the impact that a chef can have when you’re only feeding a couple hundred people a night.
That led me to look at bigger chain restaurants. At McDonald’s, the menus and ingredients I was working with were reaching 27 million people per day.
What is a Farmer’s Fridge?
Most people relate to them as vending machines, but they are automated restaurants we have created. They are mobile, so we can put them in almost any location.
Fresh focus
We really try to focus on plant-based whole foods, minimally processed foods, as much as possible. We’re moving beyond salads. … We just launched a cauliflower fried rice, a quinoa bowl.
Trends and taste
I went to a produce event in New York in the fall, and it was pretty fun to see what is trending in fruits and veggies. It was all about color. The Pantone color of the year was represented throughout the show, so I’m seeing a lot of purple on menus this year, from brussels sprouts to cauliflower.
Current craving
I’m very pregnant, and my mood and appetite change by the minute. Right now, I have an obsession with melon that is not in season.
Menu making
I like to start in the field with our farmers to see what they’re growing. If it’s not being grown, and farmers don’t know to grow it, then it won’t be available to you.
The first menu item we introduced (for Farmer’s Fridge) was a peach caprese salad. It was late summer and there were beautiful peaches coming from Michigan. I wanted to get them into a salad that really captured the season.
Data-driven decisions
We’re fortunate to have a great team that developed technology that allows us to see on an individual fridge level what is being purchased, what customers are craving and when they’re craving it. All of it influences our menus and what we put into our fridges. It is helpful as a chef, and it is helpful that it is in real time.
In her spare time
I have a garden of my own at home and I’m experimenting with ingredients that may not be available to scale today. I’ve got blueberries, apples, pears.
Last year I started experimenting with different things to put in teas. I started growing my own chamomile and different herbs for infusions, lots of lavender and unique vegetables. I’m always looking for random things in the seed catalog. I planted some bulbs of saffron in the fall. It said it would grow here, so we will see.
Fork. Spoon. Life. explores the everyday relationship that local notables (within the food community and without) have with food. To suggest future personalities to profile, email nstohs@ journalsentinel.com.