meal-delivery
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Elise Densborn Bought the Smoothies. Then She Helped Run the Company.
A birthday-party conversation turned a busy MBA student into a customer, an investor and, eventually, Splendid Spoon's co-CEO. Her unlikely promotion tells a quieter story about ambition: sometimes the sharpest operator in the room begins by asking where to sign up.
Danielle Duboise and the $700 Dinner That Became Sakara Life
A seventh-grade friendship, a Soho apartment and $700 from a dinner party became a nationwide business. Fifteen years later, Danielle Duboise is learning that a founder's most consequential move may be stepping back without stepping away.
Nicole Centeno Built a Food Company One Borrowed Kitchen at a Time
She began with one soup, a bicycle and a borrowed pizza kitchen. Thirteen years later, the biologist-turned-chef is still turning the daily scramble for lunch into a lesson in how companies grow.
David Rabie Put Dinner on Autopilot. Then the Money Ran Out.
A failed funding round left Tovala with three weeks of cash. David Rabie answered by making a complicated company simpler, sharper and hard to dismiss.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Julie Nguyen
Julie Nguyen is the CEO and co-founder of Methodology, a Bay Area premium meal-delivery service that ships chef-cooked, ingredient-strict meals nationwide in reusable glass jars. A Stanford economics grad who jumped from J.P. Morgan to Lumosity to founder life, she bootstrapped the company in 2015 by emptying her 401(k) and has grown it to eight-figure annual revenue.
Ashwin Cheriyan
Ashwin Cheriyan is the CEO and co-founder of Thistle, a San Francisco-based plant-forward meal delivery company he built from a cold-pressed juice pop-up in 2013 into a nationwide subscription service delivering over 20 million meals. A self-described 'recovering corporate lawyer,' he traded a career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett doing billion-dollar M&A deals for the chance to fix how Americans eat — driven by his parents' experiences as physicians watching patients suffer from diet-related chronic disease. Thistle, which he runs alongside his wife and co-founder Shiri Avnery, has raised over $20 million and now serves the West and East Coasts with chef-designed, nutritionist-approved meals that are gluten-free and dairy-free by default.