Summerhill Market escaped the supermarket price war by making dinner itself. Its six-store system offers a useful lesson in how an independent retailer can turn a costly back room into the reason customers cross town.
Goldbelly is a New York-based online marketplace that ships iconic regional dishes and gourmet foods from more than 1,000 restaurants, bakeries, and food makers across all 50 U.S. states directly to customers' doors. Founded in 2013 by Joe Ariel, the company lets people order signature dishes - from Nashville hot chicken to New York cheesecake and deep-dish pizza - along with celebrity-chef meal kits, food-gift boxes, and subscriptions, packaging nostalgia and hard-to-get local specialties into nationwide delivery.
Mike's Hot Honey is a Brooklyn-based food brand that makes honey infused with chili peppers - a sweet-and-spicy condiment for pizza, fried chicken, cheese and more. Founded by Mike Kurtz in 2010 after he discovered chili-infused honey at a Brazilian pizzeria, the company pioneered the hot honey category in the United States and now sells through more than 30,000 retail locations and 3,000-plus restaurants. Led by CEO Matt Beaton since 2015, it has grown from a one-man operation at Paulie Gee's pizzeria into a nationally distributed brand with an estimated $40 million in annual revenue.