Clean Kitchen Club: Influencer-Owned Former Vegan Chain That Added Meat to Menu Shuts Last Location

British fast-food chain Clean Kitchen Club, a formerly vegan business that began serving meat last year, has reportedly ceased operations after closing its last remaining site.

Influencer-owned former vegan restaurant chain Clean Kitchen Club, which started selling animal products in a bid to turn the business around last year, seems to have ceased trading after the closure of its only remaining location in London.

The group’s trading agreement for its Battersea Power Station site was terminated in November after breaches in the lease, its development company told Restaurant Online.

The news comes nearly a year after Clean Kitchen Club announced the closure of its Notting Hill restaurant, just as the Camden location was set to be refurbished. At the time, its owners said they planned to open two more brick-and-mortar stores, and had been mulling an expansion to Dubai too.

Co-founder left Clean Kitchen Club after decision to serve meat

Clean Kitchen Club was established by Made in Chelsea star Verity Bowditch and YouTuber Mikey Pearce as a delivery-only service in 2020, selling vegan burgers, plant-based meat bowls, and dairy-free milkshakes. As Covid-19 restrictions lifted, the company shifted to a brick-and-mortar concept in 2021.

It recorded £725,000 in the 12 months after opening the first store in Camden, and was valued at £12M in 2022, before it was injected with a £2.8M investment in a joint seed and crowdfunding round. At one point, it had six locations, including at Notting Hill, Wembley, and Soho, and was catering for brand like Under Armour.

But things took a turn for the worse in 2023-24, a gloomy period for the UK’s hospitality sector, which was still recovering from the pandemic while battling soaring rent and raw material costs.

It led the company to announce its move to add animal-derived foods to the menu in April last year to “protect jobs and protect the company”. “We’ve had a really tough, tough year. We’ve had to work incredibly hard, and the proposition of the brand that we have to change is going from 100% plant-based menu to a much more whole food approach catering for everyone,” the owners explained in a now-deleted Instagram post.

The decision was met with pushback from customers online. And while agreeing that it may open the business up to more revenue opportunities, Bowditch – a lifelong vegetarian turned vegan – stepped down from the group. “I’m so passionate about animal welfare, I can’t physically be part of something that isn’t fully plant-based,” she said.

But nine months on, Clean Kitchen Club’s website is no longer operational, and its Instagram account has been idle since July.

There were hints of its demise in November, when BrewDog co-founder James Watt said he lost “every single penny” of the £150,000 investment he made in Clean Kitchen Club 2020. “Unfortunately, the business did not quite make it,” he wrote. “This loss remains, the single largest sum that I have ever lost on a single investment.”

Tough going for vegan restaurants in the UK

Clean Kitchen Club isn’t the only UK restaurant to have pivoted away from a 100% plant-based menu. In January 2024, Macclesfield-based Nomas Gastrobar began serving meat and dairy after being a fully vegan eatery since opening in 2021.

Likewise, Bristol-based group Oowie, which had been expanding with a vegan-only approach, is now focusing on growing its diner-style restaurants with meat. In October, it turned a plant-based location into one serving animal products.

Across the Atlantic, too, a host of restaurants are doing the same. In Los Angeles, Sage Regenerative Kitchen – a well-established former vegan chain that turned to “regeneratively farmed meat” – closed down earlier this month.

Back in the UK, restaurants are closing faster than they have in more than a decade – over 1,400 eateries shut their doors in the year ending September 30, 2024, a 19.4% increase from the period 12 months prior. And rising ingredient, utility and rental costs have put more than 10% at an “imminent” risk of closure.

In the last 12 months, fellow vegan fast-food restaurants The Vurger Co, Frost Burgers, Donner Summer, and JJ’s Vish and Chips all closed their doors, while Flower Burger exited the UK market and Lewis Hamilton-backed Neat shuttered half its locations. And just the month, Earthling Ed’s Unity Diner announced its imminent closure on February 1.

Meanwhile, Deliciously Ella also closed its upscale Plants by DE eatery in Mayfair following its acquisition by Hero Group in September, despite the restaurant not being part of the deal.