BALTIMORE — When Tori King got gallbladder disease in 2018 - "all from bad eating" - it caused devastating consequences, and made it very difficult to eat out in her community of Prince George's County.
"Out of nowhere, I could no longer process food. I had lost 22 pounds, and it had gotten to a point where the only food I could really consume was salads with no salad dressing; it was either lemon juice or lime juice. I could maybe do chicken broth and rice, but if I stepped away from that, I would end up in the hospital with debilitating pain," she said.
That's how Fresh Green was born. Her husband, Duane King, who himself struggled with high-blood-pressure-related symptoms, began making truly healthy food.
Having opened five corporate stores and seven franchisee stores, in Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties, the Kings are planning to soon bring Fresh Green to the Baltimore suburbs.
The eatery plans to open in Pikesville's Festival at Woodholme shopping center, Owings Mills' Valley Centre shopping center, and near Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia.
It's part of the couple's plan to "attack food deserts and to create jobs," by creating 250 to 300 jobs in the next two years.
After getting her gallbladder removed, "it was almost like a reset button," Johnson explained. "I totally changed my entire lifestyle, and in support of that, Duane started - because he is the cook of the family - creating these beautiful salads."
King explained that what sets them apart is a low-sodium salad dressing, which helped him with his own challenge of fogginess, dizziness and being off balance, as well as high blood pressure. "Now I could enjoy the salad dressing without feeling these major symptoms that I was having with eating salad," he said.
"We just had to change our lifestyle of how we eat, and what prompted us to Fresh Green is just making a change with our health and identifying, what can we do to really resolve our health challenge?"
King and his wife are originally from Washington, D.C., and have lived in Prince George's County for about 30 years, where they ran several area Smoothie King restaurants.
The chain offers signature salads - with proteins that include chicken, shrimp, jerk chicken, crab meat and tofu - or customers can create their own. There are also newly-added salads for kids.
