Keva Miller of FeedShine (Photo by Jay Paul)
Pick a word often assigned to millennials — tolerant, confident, open-minded, ambitious, anxious — and chances are most of them fit FeedShine’s Keva Miller.
Those words came to me when I first met the 30-year-old author, personal chef and clean-eating expert last week on the steps of Richmond Public Library’s downtown branch. Miller, who was in the middle of a photo shoot when I approached her, paused to greet me and gave me a hug.
Confidence?
Check.
Later, after we were seated inside one of the library’s conference rooms, Miller revealed more of her journey — and it was mixed with ambition and anxiety.
Ambition, she says, helped her sell more than 300 servings of curried chickpeas, kale salad and jasmine rice during last Sunday’s Stick a Fork in It event at Main Street Station, the culmination of the 2018 Richmond Black Restaurant Experience. In between sales, Miller conducted cooking demonstrations.
Based on the lines in front of her station, bellies were pleased.
Miller’s fascination with food started when she was a child in Atlanta. As the youngest of three children who still lived at home, Miller spent Saturday afternoons watching television cooking shows with her mother, Ruth. Julia Child, Paul Prudhomme and Jacques Pépin were chefs the two watched for hours on end.
Although Miller enjoyed the shows, she didn’t consider becoming a chef until her family dined at an Atlanta restaurant where her brother was a sous chef.
“He asked, ‘You want to see what I do?’ He cooked our meal, and I was in awe,” Miller recalls. “I knew then what I wanted to do.”
Miller prepares a dish at the finale of the 2018 Richmond Black Restaurant Experience at Main Street Station. (Photo by Trevin Curtis)
At the age of 14, Miller developed her own signature dish: chicken tenders and chicken nuggets, which included her own special honey mustard sauce.
Although she continued to dream about becoming a “rock-star chef,” Miller took the safe route in college at Georgia State University. In 2010 she graduated, with honors, in business administration and hospitality management.
A year after Miller graduated, her mother died of cancer at age 64.
“August 26, 2011. That’s the day my mom passed,” Millers says softly. “She saw me graduate.”
After moving to Richmond in 2011 to work for Aramark and the Compass Group, Miller was ready for more. Her ambition led her to a sales management job for Pepsi. Despite the steep learning curve that came with the job, it provided her a flexible schedule, a company car and the ability to prove herself by serving 1,000 businesses while acquiring new customers and expanding the company's dominance in Virginia and surrounding markets, she says.
However, instead of being on top of the world at age 25, Miller found herself mired in darkness and depression.
“My life fell apart, and I had a quarter-life crisis,” she says. “Older people would say, ‘What are you talking about? You’re young.’ I had everything on the outside, but I was empty on the inside.”
No longer excited by her work at Pepsi, Miller realized it was time to return to her dream of becoming a chef. She knew that starting her own business would basically mean starting over. Behind the colorful, mouth-watering dishes on her website, her story is revealed.
“FeedShine is the result of my own journey toward healing me,” she writes about the business that she describes as a lifestyle company designed to be a one-stop shop for practical holistic living. “What I've found with my own life is that finding yourself can be a pretty dope experience. I also realized that there are practical tools that can help us level up in all areas sitting right under our noses.”
Therapy and lifestyle changes such as adopting healthier eating habits helped Miller find the balance necessary to start her own catering business. She quit her job at Pepsi, moved from her apartment and rented a room that she found on Craigslist.
Her first personal catering clients were three women, all named Kim, for whom she prepared a private dinner.
“They loved it, and that gave me the confidence that [my decision] was right,” she says.
Admitting that there have been moments when she’s wanted to give up, Miller knew that doing so wasn’t an option. Since starting her personal chef business three years ago, she has moved into her own place again and is a sought-after speaker on vegan, gluten-free and clean diets.
Miller also has written a book, “Trill Prep: 100+ Recipes, Short Stories and Affirmations to Turn Your Life On.” In addition to dozens of recipes, the book includes pages filled with motivational texts such as “Let Go of the Outcome” and “Your Purpose Is on a Moving Blueprint.”
Asked about her ultimate goal, Miller’s response is what one might expect from driven millennials.
“I don’t have a limit,” she says. “I just want to keep climbing. I want to own a chain of restaurants and gas stations where you can get cold-press juice. There are no limits other than what we impose on ourselves.”
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Twitter and Facebook.
