At Amanda's Feel Good Fresh Food you can get a burger, fries and soda for $7. You'll also be getting a meal with a mission. The meat is all-natural, the bun made with organic whole wheat flour, the Thousand Island-style sauce is vegan, and everything on the tray—down to the fork—is compostable. The fries are baked, and the sodas are sweetened with cane sugar or agave nectar, not high-fructose corn syrup. If you choose the light cola (or fresh brewed iced tea), you'll consume fewer than 500 calories in this meal.
And by the way, it's tasty.
Sound too good to be true? Not to founder Amanda West. Between her two years at business school, while she was working for natural meats purveyor Niman Ranch, she had an epiphany. "That was the summer that Super Size Me, the movie, came out. I realized, why doesn't anyone start a healthy fast food restaurant?" She spent the next four years hunkered down with classmate-advisers, a Stanford Hospital nutritionist and angel investors to be the one to do it.
On July 28, her restaurant opened on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. It's not on the Gourmet Ghetto end of Shattuck near Chez Panisse; it's downtown in front of a BART station, around the corner from the city college and at the foot of the Cal campus. In short, it's the perfect venue for a melting pot of customers who need food fast. They can choose that beef burger or a nutty vegetarian one, grilled chicken on a bun, veggie-laden salads that actually fill you up, even warm cookies (only 70 calories each) and strawberry-flavored milk. With every bite, they'll be absorbing West's business plan of "Whole Foods meets In-N-Out Burger." Familiar food made good for you and the environment is served quickly—going from order to your hands in less than five minutes. At a communal table made of wood reclaimed from a barge, customers can meet one another over sweet potato fries.
Employees wear big smiles and big name tags: West's husband carved them out of leftover wood from the table.
"Berkeley is a great place to do business," this former member of the Stanford Axe Committee says. "I'm hoping a lot of Stanford people will come by on Big Game day and get to know us, too."
—TORI RITCHIE, '81
