Mindset 3-Prototype Everything

Prototyping is a great way to experiment and learn about how to best format your products and how consumers will react to them. A business that is a prime example of how prototyping can create great results is Clover Food Lab. Clover Food Lab is now a chain of fifteen restaurants, but in 2008, it was just a dream. Ayr Muir, the founder of Clover Food Lab, had absolutely no restaurant experience and a very limited budget. He started Clover Food Lab as a way to help the environment. He recognized than many environmental issues were being caused by meat production. For this reason, he wanted Clover Food Lab to be vegetarian. At the time he started this business, there were little to no completely vegetarian restaurants. No restaurant experience coupled with no similar restaurants to learn from meant that Muir had a great challenge ahead of him. And how did he solve it? Prototyping.

The first Clover Food Lab “restaurant” was actually a food truck parked on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. The cooks tried different recipes, often getting feedback from customers, especially at the start. The menu changed every day that they were open. Now THIS was prototyping. Something interesting is that Clover Food Lab was not advertised as a vegetarian restaurant. It just was.

As the food truck gained traction and customers, they were able to expand the menu and try new things. One thing they prioritize is making dishes with the foods that are in season at that time. For example, if they get good, in-season strawberries for four weeks out of the year, they will work those into their dishes within those four weeks.

To this day, over a decade later, the menu is still changing frequently. Maybe not every day, but the flexibility is still there. Overall, prototyping helped Muir and his team hone in on the perfect dishes and serve the community better, all while striving for positive environmental goals.