The Leiths Diploma graduates working at Mindful Chef

A Leiths training travels a long way, and into more corners of the food world than the kitchen alone. Four Culinary Diploma graduates now work at Mindful Chef, the B Corp premium recipe box company known for its provenance and its health credentials, of the four, three help to shape the menu.

At the centre of the food team is Jesse Kempner, who joined as a development chef four and a half years ago and is now head of food. Indeed, it was the breadth of the training that made her choose Leiths in the first place. ‘It was the only school of that calibre putting as much emphasis on all the other parts of the food industry,’ she says, ‘not just restaurants and hotels.’ 

Her route to Mindful Chef took her to most corners of the industry first. After the Culinary Diploma, she spent two and a half years as a private chef in Oxfordshire, using vegetables grown in the kitchen garden and cooking game shot on the estate. A spell at Oklava in Shoreditch followed, then a development chef role at HelloFresh and a catering company. 

But she kept getting drawn back to Mindful Chef to apply for roles. ‘Everything they spoke about came back to quality,’ she says of what drew her back. ‘And I wanted to be part of that. That focus hasn’t changed. The quality of the produce, the quality of the protein is always at the heart of our decision making.’ And on her third attempt, she successfully applied for a role as a development chef. 

In the time she’s been there, the ethos has remained the same. ‘We practise what we preach on sustainability and being a B Corp. It’s not just a badge we stick on the website.’ That philosophy extends to supplier decisions, rather than being driven solely by the commercials, new products are put through rigorous chef tastings before sign-off. ‘Before we change anything, we benchmark it against what we are already using. It is the chefs tasting it and deciding what we need to keep or improve. Quality & taste always comes first’

It puts Mindful Chef at the premium end of the market. ‘We are proud to be at the top, and if you are going to deliver the best, that comes with a price.’ Mindful Chef is often described as taking the effort out of cooking, but Jesse is precise about which effort. ‘We want to remove the mental load from our customers,’ she says. ‘What we find is that people don’t mind being in the kitchen. They’re happy to make dinner for half an hour. It is all the other stuff we can remove.’ That other stuff is the planning, the shopping, the balancing of a meal so it works nutritionally, and the question of whether a recipe can be trusted. ‘I always say anyone can cook, but if you get a bad recipe you cannot recover from that.’ 

The same thinking runs through what the team chooses to put in a dish. ‘When creating flavour, it’s not always about adding more to a dish’ ,’ Jesse says. ‘It can be technique-driven, or flavour-driven, or achieved by incorporating unusual ingredients . Our customers want those little secrets too. Ways of creating deliciousness, without complexity’

On a related note, healthy eating is no longer, in Jesse’s experience, a fad but more a year-round preoccupation. She puts much of that down to a wider change in how people think about food, and to the growing awareness of ultra-processed food in particular. Customers have moved from wanting things labelled as healthy to wanting whole foods they can trust, which puts the weight on provenance and on a company keeping its word. The ready-to-go side of the business, which Jesse leads, is where the team has the most control over what goes into a product, building real functional benefits into smoothies, porridges and the like. Those lines went straight in among the bestsellers.

If Jesse sits at the strategic end of the kitchen, Celia Price is at the development bench. After the Culinary Diploma, she took a private chef season in the south of France, arranged through the Leiths List, then a stint as a chef de partie at Sune on Broadway Market, before joining Mindful Chef recently as a recipe developer. Much of her work is on the family range. ‘You need to balance simplicity and ease ,’ she says, ‘while providing inspiration, novelty and excitement.’ Both graduates describe the job in the same way. For Jesse, development is ‘more like puzzle solving than being creative’, the flavours and ingredients fixed in advance. Celia uses the same image for building a recipe against the company’s ingredient system, balancing protein, vegetables, flavour and nutrition without losing the original idea. On the Diploma, a huge part of the course is learning why something goes wrong. Knowing why a dish works, and not just that it does, is what tells you which pieces can move and which have to stay.

The customer feedback Celia values most echoes Jesse’s point about confidence. ‘The most rewarding comments are when someone says that they tried a new skill or flavour combination that they wouldn’t have thought of on their own and were surprised by how much they loved it.’

Leiths, she is clear, gave her more than the cooking. ‘Coming out of Leiths, you are ready to  cook and create beautiful food. Success going forward is to resonate with people.’ The rest is attention to detail and organisation, ‘which is something Leiths teaches so well’. She has not got used to seeing her recipes go live, styled by the in-house team. ‘It is everything I ever wanted. Leiths made that possible, the connections and the skills.’

Ask Jesse what links Leiths and Mindful Chef and the answer comes quickly. ‘The ethos of quality is probably the biggest thing.’ In both, quality is the starting point rather than a label, and both rely on a depth of knowledge that lets a cook understand not just what they are doing but why. 

If you’re interested in doing the Leiths Culinary Diploma like many of the team at Mindful Chef did, find out more here.