How Clean Kitchen Club aims to be the ‘plant-based McDonald’s’

‘Vegan food is just normal food – but vegan,’ the founders of Clean Kitchen Club tell Andy Martin

Verity Bowditch and Mikey Pearce showcase their wares (Clean Kitchen Club)

I sample the truffle burger and the katsu curry and chips – followed by red velvet cake and a brownie. All vegan. All delicious. All in the line of duty. “Vegan food is just normal food – but vegan,” as Mikey puts it. I’m sitting upstairs in Clean Kitchen on Camden High Road, across the street from Pret, having lunch with Clean Kitchen Club co-founders, Mikey Pearce and Verity Bowditch, who look as if they could be contenders on Love Island if they weren’t doing this.

Mikey hit a fork in the road at the beginning of the pandemic. He had been a YouTube influencer but he had run out of steam where pushing brands and playing pranks were concerned. And his weight had risen to an alarming 18 stone. Even at around 6ft 3in, that was maybe a bit too high and mighty for comfort. “I was a big fan of bacon sandwiches and beef burgers,” he admits. He went back to his mother’s house in Rottingdean down in Sussex to regroup. In a way he owes it all to her, because she was the one who got him into plant-based foods – which, combined with 6am 10k runs, slimmed him down, toned him up and gave him the idea for Clean Kitchen Club: vegan for meat-eaters.

“I wanted to do something real and meaningful,” he says. They started on the beach at Brighton, flipping burgers in the summer of 2020, between lockdowns, and their popularity grew apace on social media. Soon Mikey was doing deliveries all over London, which is where he joined forces with Verity. “This could be a business,” he told her at a party. “It’s becoming self-sufficient and we need to expand.”