What do you do when your recipe for veggie juice becomes in such high demand from friends, family and your private chef clients? If you’re Veronica Wheat Kress, you throw caution to the wind, dive into the deep end of the entrepreneurial pool and create a mega-successful nationwide Green Drink delivery company.

Veronica, aka Chef V, is a Certified Nutritional Therapist and a self-taught chef. Before becoming a private chef, Veronica worked every imaginable position in the restaurant industry (including dishwasher) since the age of 12.

Considering that about 90% of Americans don’t eat enough veggies every day*, we’re all better off that Veronica was allowed to work at that shockingly young age and her bosses didn’t get in trouble for violating labor laws!

Veronica realized from the time she was 15 years old, while working at a vegetarian restaurant in Southern California, that delicious food and health could be blissfully wed.

Fast forward to 2011, when Veronica started a meal delivery service, which featured her trademark recipe for Green Drink. Veronica would instruct her clients to consume the Green Drink about 15 minutes before eating their meal. Doing this, she explains, accomplishes two things: it makes it super easy to get your daily dose antioxidant-rich, health-boosting green leafy veggies, and also gives your belly adequate time to absorb the micronutrients before eating a meal.

Before she knew it, Veronica was delivering Green Drinks to over 100 clients in the San Diego area alone. Demand for Veronica’s Green Drink started pouring in from nearby areas like Orange County and LA. Soon after, ChefV.com was born.

An avid yoga practitioner and teacher, Veronica wakes up each morning excited to build upon ChefV.com’s success, not so she can sell more Green Drinks and Cleanses, but rather, what motivates her to success is reading the comments in her inbox from customers who have experienced dramatic health improvements, be it weight loss, being able to stop taking diabetes medication, lowering cholesterol by 50 points, sleeping like a baby, having clearer skin and living each day with natural, steady, high-buzzing energy.

Chef V and her cookbook