A married couple built a single South Beach cafe into a 45-store wellness chain on one stubborn idea: food you would actually feed your own kids, served all day. Then a $13 billion private-equity firm bought in.
The story Pura Vida likes to tell about itself starts on a highway. Sometime around 2011, Omer and Jennifer Horev were driving from Orlando to Miami and got hungry. What they wanted was simple - something fresh, fast, and not fried. What they found, exit after exit, was the usual roadside menu. The gap between what they wanted and what existed became the business plan. A year later, in 2012, they opened one small cafe in the South of Fifth pocket of Miami Beach and called it Pura Vida, the Costa Rican phrase for “pure life.”
Thirteen years on, that one storefront has become roughly 45 of them, spread across Florida, New York City, and Southern California. In November 2025, the couple sold a minority stake to TSG Consumer Partners, a consumer-focused private-equity firm with about $13 billion under management, and kept the majority - Omer stayed on as chief executive, Jennifer as chief brand officer. For a restaurant deal, that split is the notable part. Founders usually hand over the keys. These two did not.
What it actually isStrip away the wellness vocabulary and Pura Vida is a fast-casual, counter-service cafe. You order at the register, you get a bowl or a plate or a cup, you sit under a pastel-blue umbrella. What separates it from the burrito line next door is the menu's center of gravity: acai bowls, superfood smoothies, cold-pressed juices, chef-driven salads, grain bowls, and a breakfast that runs all day. That last detail is quietly the whole strategy. Most kitchens cut breakfast at 11am. Pura Vida never does, which means the “you missed it” problem simply does not exist for its customers.
The kitchen preps its produce in-house from whole ingredients, and the founders have long used a plain-language sourcing test in interviews and on the wall: they serve only food they would feed their own children. It is not a certification or a supply-chain audit. It is a rule of thumb, and rules of thumb are what scale to 45 kitchens when a 400-page manual will not.
The catalog itself is broad without being sprawling. Acai and superfood bowls anchor the menu; a smoothie and cold-pressed juice program runs alongside it; the salads and grain bowls skew toward chef-driven, and the proteins reach as far as grass-fed steak for customers who want the plate to be a meal rather than a snack. Catering and private-dining orders extend the same food to offices and events, and the app handles the order-ahead, skip-the-line pickup and rewards that keep the lunch rush moving. The 2025 gelato addition at the Coconut Grove flagship is the one flourish that sits slightly outside the wellness lane - a reminder that the brand reads its neighborhoods before it reads its own rulebook.
“We didn't invent the healthy food segment, but we've created something unique by combining various aspects - healthy, vegan, and more - into one cohesive concept.”Omer Horev, Co-Founder & CEO
The numbersFlorida is the base - the large majority of stores sit in and around Miami and the rest of the state. The first New York cafe opened in Manhattan's NoMad neighborhood in July 2024, with the stated ambition of ten or more Manhattan locations by 2026. Southern California came next. In 2025 the company also opened a 6,000-square-foot flagship in Coconut Grove and used it to introduce a signature gelato concept - a small tell that the brand is willing to widen beyond strict “health food” when the location warrants it.
Pura Vida's audience is the health-leaning urban customer - office workers grabbing a smoothie between meetings, families who want a salad the kids will actually eat, tourists who found the pineapple logo on a map, and the loose category of people who describe themselves as “trying to eat better.” The all-day format means the same store serves a 9am breakfast crowd, a noon salad rush, and a late-afternoon juice run. Mobile ordering, order-ahead pickup, and a rewards program are built to smooth those peaks and keep regulars regular.
That breadth of customer is easy to state and hard to build. A menu narrow enough for a smoothie purist tends to alienate the person who wants a real breakfast; a menu wide enough for the whole family tends to lose focus. Pura Vida's answer is to organize the counter around dietary flexibility rather than a single signature - so the vegan, the gluten-free eater and the person ordering grass-fed steak all leave satisfied, and none of them has to explain themselves to the register. In practice, that is what turns a health cafe from an occasional treat into a Tuesday habit.
The problem it solvesThe problem is old and specific: fast food is convenient but rarely good for you, and food that is good for you is rarely convenient. Pura Vida's entire proposition is collapsing that trade-off - keeping the speed and price accessibility of fast-casual while moving the menu toward whole, plant-forward, transparently-sourced food. The vegan and gluten-free options are not a side project; they are how a group of four with four different diets can all order from the same counter without a negotiation.
“Health is happiness.”
Pura Vida did not invent acai bowls, and it says so. In a category crowded with Sweetgreen, Cava, Playa Bowls, Juice Press, and Joe & the Juice, the differentiation is less a single hero dish than a bundle: a genuinely all-day menu, a recognizable visual identity built around a pineapple mark and pastel-blue umbrellas, local sourcing, and consistency from store to store. None of those is exotic. Together, executed on every good corner in a city, they add up to a brand that Miamians treat as a default rather than a destination.
There is also the values layer, and to the company's credit it is operational rather than promotional. Produce is prepped in-house to cut waste; food scraps are composted into soil; that soil is donated to local farmers, closing a small loop back to the supply chain. The brand runs quarterly beach cleanups with local partners. It is the kind of thing that reads as a slogan until you notice it is actually a workflow.
The moneyThe business model is unglamorous and durable: revenue comes mostly from company-operated cafe sales of food and drink, topped up by catering, private events, and app ordering. Public estimates put annual revenue in the neighborhood of $100 million. The November 2025 investment from TSG Consumer Partners - a minority, growth-oriented stake with financial terms undisclosed - is the fuel for a national rollout. TSG has a long history in consumer brands, and its arrival is a signal that the healthy fast-casual trade is being underwritten as a national bet, not a regional novelty.
Founders usually sell to exit. The Horevs sold to accelerate - and kept the majority.
Where it fits in the market is a fair question for any regional darling going national. Pura Vida sits between the polished salad-chain leaders and the smoothie-and-bowl specialists, occupying the “all of the above, all day” middle. The risk in scaling that position is dilution: the further a health chain travels from its kitchen, the harder consistency gets. The bet the founders and TSG are making is that a simple sourcing rule, a tight menu logic, and a recognizable look travel better than a complicated one.
The peopleAt the center is a married co-founder team dividing the work the way founding couples often do - one on operations and capital, one on brand and experience. Omer Horev, who moved to the United States from Israel in his early twenties, runs the company as CEO; Jennifer Horev leads brand. Their public framing has stayed consistent for over a decade: they built the place they wanted to eat at, and they scaled it by refusing to serve anything they would not put in front of their own kids. Whether that holds across three time zones is the open question. For now, the pineapple keeps showing up on new corners.