Barnett’s latest venture is a tarot deck for men. | Photo courtesy of Kristen Barnett
Five years ago, Kristen Barnett was at the forefront of one of the biggest trends in restaurant technology.
After helping the New York-based fast-casual Dig Inn launch a ghost kitchen program, she joined ghost kitchen startup Zuul as its director of strategy and later became COO. In 2021, when Zuul sold to Kitchen United, she left to create Hungry House, a different spin on the format that partnered with chefs on exclusive menus. She spun that into Culinary Creators Worldwide, a marketing agency for food influencers.
And then, last year, Barnett left it all behind, in part because she’d realized that scaling tech companies was difficult to square with her personal philosophy on restaurants.
“Food itself is such a pure endeavor of nourishing people,” she said. “When you infuse it with technology and venture capital dynamics around growth and scale, oftentimes the quality and the original intention can easily become degraded.”
Barnett’s reverence for food was sparked by an experience she had in 2015, when she was working as an associate with Boston Consulting Group. She’d been battling Lyme disease for a couple of years, and after antibiotics failed to treat the illness, she took a medical leave from her job to try to get better.
In search of solutions, she came across a raw vegan cancer clinic based in West Palm Beach, Florida, that also claimed to help people with Lyme disease. She cashed out her life savings and enrolled in a 20-day program.
For three weeks, Barnett ate a fully raw vegan diet. That meant no gluten, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, or sugar, including fruit, as well as tri-weekly wheat grass enemas. (“That’s when you know you’re desperate to heal,” she said.)
The hardest part of the program for her was giving up warm food. “People love to cook food over fires for a reason,” she said. “And then all of a sudden it’s just salads every day.”
But the treatment worked wonders. Over those 20 days, Barnett’s condition improved by 70%, a recovery that she said would normally have taken up to two years. Her eyes had been opened to the quasi-miraculous powers of high-quality food. And while most people might take that as a sign to change their diet, Barnett decided to make it her new career.
When she got back to New York, she quit her white-collar job and applied to work at Dig Inn. The chain’s health-focused, farm-to-table mission resonated with her, she said. But it was a risk professionally: She went from working for one of the world’s premier consulting firms to answering customer support emails for a small restaurant chain.
That didn’t last long, though. Within about a year, Barnett was promoted to Dig Inn’s head of supply chain and menu development, then director of strategic operations, and then general manager of Room Service, its in-house ghost kitchen program.
She quit Dig Inn in 2019, feeling burned out after four years and ready for something new. That ended up being Zuul, a ghost kitchen startup that wanted to help independent operators compete in the fast-developing food delivery market. That’s where she first began to feel some of the tensions involved with scaling a tech company that served small restaurants.
It was around this same time that Barnett had an experience that would eventually send her down a totally different path. During a brief break before starting at Zuul, she had a Lyme disease relapse, and went to Costa Rica for another raw vegan retreat. The owner of that program suggested she look into ayahuasca. The psychedelic concoction originated in the Amazon rainforest, where it is used by indigenous people for ceremonial and medicinal purposes.
For Barnett, ayahuasca would prove to be even more transformative than her journey into food as medicine. “I came out of it with a completely new outlook on my chronic illness,” she said. “I dropped the identity of being sick. I was like, ‘I’m actually not that sick.’ And then I never relapsed again.”
The experience got her thinking more about the power of the mind and how it can impact one’s well-being just as much as medication or diet. So when she finally left the world of food tech for good, with the sale of Hungry House last year, she began to point her next entrepreneurial efforts in that direction.
“I just felt like I was disconnected from my original intention of why I’d gotten into the food industry,” she said. “I was doing a lot of tech and marketing stuff, which was super fun, but not soul-connected.”
She took a step back and looked at where the conversation around health was going. When she first got started in restaurants about a decade ago, she was part of the growing farm-to-table movement, a trend that dovetailed with her interest in the healing properties of food. Now, she said, “I think we’re at the beginning of the psychedelic and consciousness movement.”
She decided she wanted to help people improve their spiritual lives, but in a way that was accessible and fun. Last summer, she launched Highest Good Ventures, a company focused on “the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern business,” according to its website.
Highest Good’s first contribution to the burgeoning spiritual economy is, fittingly, a little out there: A deck of tarot cards designed specifically for men, called simply, Tarot for Bros.
Why tarot cards, and why men? In tough times, “a lot of women I know turn to psychics and their girls,” Barnett said, “but the men that I know and love don’t have those same resources available.”
She believes tarot cards are a great way to spark that reflection and conversation. They just needed a rebrand to get guys interested.
The Tarot for Bros deck is the same as a traditional 78-card tarot deck, but with visuals that are less witchy and more masculine. Illustrated by artist Parker S. Jackson, the cards are inspired by vintage military and expedition imagery, field manuals, and woodblock prints. The waitlist is now open, and decks will be shipped out in the next couple of months.
So, as Barnett leaves the food realm for the spiritual one, does she see a place for restaurants in this new frontier?
Maybe not directly. But she does believe the two worlds have a lot in common. Good restaurants, like good spiritual practices, have a strong sense of set and setting, she said. Music, lighting, and hospitality all contribute to a positive — and perhaps transcendent — experience, whether it’s a meal or a tarot reading.
“People who work in restaurants understand the power of set and setting when you want to create a desired experience,” she said. “And that is also really important in all of these consciousness communities that are looking to expand beyond the fringe or the hippie world.”
Her background in restaurants should come in handy, then, as she embarks on this new chapter.
“It’s really interesting times, and I just kind of trust my nose on this stuff,” Barnett said. “I knew farm to table was going to be important. I knew food delivery was going to be important. And while this feels totally out of left field, I really trust that this is a really exciting frontier that more and more people are going to be getting curious about.”
