We create and develop. You try and choose.
Plaenty Test Kitchen is a small research and development kitchen in Stroud, making fermented and plant-based food. It exists for one reason: to find out, before we make anything in bulk, which new products people genuinely want. We make each one in small batches, film the whole process so that you can follow it from the first recipe to the finished jar, send the best of our creations out in One Box, a monthly box of 10 new food discoveries, and then let your tastings and your honest opinions decide what stays and what goes. The kitchen is deliberately small, deliberately curious and deliberately public, because the best way we have found to make good food is to ask the people who will actually eat it.
Who we are
We are a small team with a lot of ideas and a very short route from the kitchen to your table. There is no factory, no minimum order and no committee. Just a kitchen, a lot of fermenting jars, and a growing community of people who are curious about what food can become.
The Test Kitchen is a place to invent, test and prove new products, so that whatever we decide to keep has already been chosen by real people. For a food business, the riskiest moment is the one when you commit to making something in volume without knowing whether anyone will buy it again. We have decided to remove that risk by learning first, in small batches, in public, and with the people who matter most: the ones who eat it.
We are not building a factory. We are building a laboratory. The point is to discover which products deserve to exist, using good ingredients, fermentation as a genuine technology rather than a marketing word, and food that fits into the way people really live. If a product doesn’t work, we say so, we stop making it, and we move on to the next idea. A smaller range of products that people love is a far better outcome than a large range of products they tolerate.
The story so far
The Test Kitchen is the result of more than a decade of developing food. David Bez opened his first shop and café in Covent Garden in 2016, and started creating products there from the very first day, learning what customers ordered once, what they ordered again and what they asked for that didn’t yet exist. In 2018 he opened Plant Hub in Hackney, a restaurant and culinary school, where the research widened to include ferments, kombucha and snacks, and where cooking for guests and teaching students gave him a constant stream of feedback on how people actually use food in their kitchens.
Between 2014 and 2020 David also wrote and published four cookbooks, SaladLove, BreakfastLove, SupperLove and VeganLove, each one a way of working out what makes plant-based food genuinely satisfying. When the pandemic changed everything in 2020, he turned to developing products for food businesses, and has been doing it ever since.
Over those years he has developed or imagined around eighty product concepts. Rather than starting with a business idea and hunting for something to sell, we are starting with years of product ideas and building the kitchen that can bring them to life. Thirty-eight of those ideas are now in development, and the best of them will become real, sellable products only after you have tasted them and told us what you think.
The people
David Bez, founder and project lead. David is a chef, food-product developer and author, with a decade of experience creating food products. He leads the Test Kitchen’s research and development, spending his days in the kitchen developing and testing new products and listening to what people say about them.
Join in
The easiest way to take part is One Box: a monthly box of 10 new food discoveries, tasted and rated by you.