Courtesy Chef Pure
Kurt Stiles knows all too well what it means when your business is your life.
And then it isn’t.
At one time, he owned several Moosehopper Bakery Café locations. He also did consulting, research, and development for such brands as General Mills, Sara Lee, Marriot, Subway, Coca-Cola, and Land O' Lakes. He served as director of research and development for Minnesota-based coffee chain Caribou Coffee in the early 2000s, when the company went from 40 to 268 stores. In 2006, he started his own company, Good for You Ingredients, and launched a line of gluten-free bars and cookie mixes on December 1, 2008.
Just 16 days later, his life would be forever altered.
Stiles suffered a massive stroke on December 17, 2008. He watched as all the things he built crumbled around him. “My wife, Molly, and I had a $450,000 loan and lost it because of my stroke,” Stiles recalls. “I ordered three truckloads of products for my mix. I had three employees and a warehouse, and then it was gone—my house, my car, warehouse…all gone.”
Molly remembers that time all too well. “He was truly at the top of his game,” she recalls. “He sat on three culinary boards, was making products, had a contract with QVC, and was writing 26 episodes of a cooking show, then had this massive stroke. We invested all this money thinking that between the TV show, QVC, and his consulting, we’d make it all back.”
Starting from Scratch
“After my stroke, I was slight paralyzed on my right side,” Stiles says. “My job now, and in the last five years, is [working on] my speech. Every day. The doctor told me, ‘Do not drive. Do not work.’... I researched online and started [learning about] Chinese medicine. I immediately changed my food plan to heavy fresh juice, vegetables, herbs, several supplements, no red meat, and lower [amounts of] white meat.”
Stiles used several machines that he found through research, including a hyperbaric chamber, electrostatic therapy machine, and a machine known as a BEMER, which targets circulation within muscle tissue. “Stroke survivors don’t know about the resources out there for them," he says, "and doctors can’t confidently stand behind taking alternative medicine and [using] machines and changing what you eat." By adding these tools to his arsenal, however, Stiles says he began to recover.
Courtesy Molly and Kurt Stiles
Molly and Kurt Stiles in August 2020
"He did rehab every single day for the first five years," recalls Molly. "He just kept getting better and better.”
Though his speech was still limited, he began introducing himself to farmers at local farmers’ markets via writing on a white board or using pictures to communicate. This led to some strong relationship-building that would serve him years later, after some of his functions began to return.
While working on his speech, he had to overcome another challenge: He forgot how to cook.
“He had to make a box of brownies [as part of his recovery], and they gave him a box mix,” Molly recalls. “Even though he used to create recipes for box mixes like that, when he first started out, he could not make a box of brownies. The first meal he made me was spaghetti, and he forgot to drain the grease off of it. It was awful. Then he made tacos. We could not eat them. He made them too spicy. He couldn’t taste spices. While other people have to learn to walk, he had to learn how to do the thing he could do in his sleep: cook.”
Several of his friends who were peers in the Research Chefs Association taught Stiles how to cook again. “They brought all their pans and spices,” Molly recalls. “The things he had been teaching to so many for so long, they had to teach him to do again.”
Over time, his ability to taste began to return. “He regained his speech and his ability to create," says Molly. He wrote a cookbook that shared his journey, Cooking to Save Your Life.
In 2018, he earned a master’s in nutrition and dietetics with an emphasis in food innovation and entrepreneurship from Saint Louis University. Still, finding work proved difficult. “I was itching to work again,” he says. “My stroke has made things difficult. Interviewing has been hard because of my stroke. I applied for over 300 jobs across the country and interviewed for 60 of them but wasn’t offered any.”
Then Stiles received a grant to launch a startup based on a novel idea: Pure Plant Jerky was born.
A New Chapter
To Stiles, it made sense to create plant-based jerky, a product that would teach others about using food as medicine and reducing meat consumption. Of the dozen or so companies that existed, he says, a few were using watermelon, jackfruit, and mushrooms, but many were using soy products and chemicals.
Pure Plant Jerky uses no chemicals and is GMO-, cholesterol-, gluten-, and allergy-free, he says, and it supports a healthy diet. Although his products aren’t certified organic, Stiles says he uses such suppliers as O’Fallon, Missouri–based Mushrooms Naturally, which avoids chemicals and pesticides.
“I have three whole-foods jerky products," he says. "Mushrooms have over 100 antioxidants, and umami, which is an incredible flavor from the mushrooms. Shiitake is the best mushroom for flavor and protein. Plus, it mirrors meat [in its texture].”
“Once people started tasting his plant jerky, they were asking him to make it for them and encouraging him to sell it,” says Molly who now serves as president of Chef Pure Foods, the maker of Pure Plant Jerky, which officially launched this April.
Courtesy Chef Pure
Eggplant, Brussels sprouts, and shiitake mushroom jerky, all from Pure Plant Jerky
The Brussels sprouts jerky with Middle Eastern spice is his biggest seller and a labor of love: Stiles cuts each sprout by hand, which takes him four hours on average to make enough for 48 small bags or 25 large bags. The second best-seller is smoked maple bacon-flavored eggplant jerky. He also offers shroomy pizza-flavored shiitake mushroom jerky and is excited to offer a new product: grilled zucchini with non-dairy cheese and dill. “Our 15-year-old loves the new flavor, and he doesn’t like anything,” Molly says with a laugh.
He also appreciates hearing from customers. “People come up," he says, "and tell me, ‘My dad has diabetes, my mom had a stroke, my cousin has cancer, and my passion [now] is getting people to switch to plant-based products.'"
The jerky can currently be found at area farmers' markets and events. “We do the Lake St. Louis Farmers Market and have done Tuesdays at Tower Grove [Farmers' Market],” he says. “We have done local festivals and sold at a few breweries. We branched out to some markets in Minnesota this summer and had great response.” On October 24, he plans to attend St. Louis VegFest and then holiday markets later in the year.
Stiles eventually hopes to expand the business. For the moment, he works out of a 100-square-foot, FDA-approved commercial kitchen space in High Ridge, which he rents from local company Two Men and a Garden. His culinary colleagues also share their slicer, so Stiles can prepare the eggplant-based jerky.
By next January, Stiles hopes to find funding to help purchase equipment, which would allow him to offer six products. He plans to use the post-farmers’ market season to focus on growth. His dream is to one day sell Pure Plant Jerky at such places as Green Bean, local co-ops, and, eventually, Target.
“My wife thought this was just going to be a hobby,” he says. “I always ask her, ‘How’s my hobby doing for you?’”
Find Pure Plant Jerky at Lake St. Louis Farmers Market through October 30, as well as its holiday markets on November 6 and 20 and December 4 and 18. It's also available online.
