smoothies
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Red Mango sold a better dessert. Then it had to sell lunch.
Live cultures gave Red Mango a reason to stand out. A crowded market gave it a reason to rethink what a yogurt shop could sell.
The Soup That Refused to Stay on the Shelf
Grocers would not take Nicole Centeno’s whole soup line. She found her customers online instead - then, a decade later, bought the manufacturing muscle to serve other food businesses.
The Coffee Chain That Puts a Bean on Top
Founded in a Southern Oregon parking lot in 1998, The Human Bean built a 260-location drive-thru empire on fast espresso, direct-trade beans, and an October fundraiser that has pulled in more than $4 million for breast cancer causes.
The Smoothie Chain That Quietly Became a $1.5 Billion Food Business
Tropical Smoothie Cafe built a national franchise by treating the smoothie as an invitation, not the whole meal. Now 1,700 cafes, a serious food business and a fast-growing loyalty program reveal what the brand was blending all along.
How Playa Bowls Turned a Beach Cart Into a 400-Shop Ritual
A blender, an umbrella and a borrowed patch of Jersey Shore pavement became a national franchise. Playa Bowls grew by selling more than fruit - it packaged the feeling of a beach day into a compact, repeatable shop.
The Pineapple That Ate Florida
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.
Dutch Bros Coffee
The Oregon drive-thru that turned a pushcart, a windmill logo and a blue energy drink into a $1.6 billion coffee company - one Rebel at a time.
Botrista, Inc.
Botrista is a San Francisco-based food-and-beverage technology company that builds an AI-driven automated beverage platform. Its flagship BotristaPro machine lets restaurants, campuses, hospitals, theme parks and other venues serve a wide range of craft cold drinks - boba teas, smoothies, refreshers, cold brew, lemonades and more - from a single compact, self-cleaning unit in seconds, without specialized baristas. Founded in 2017 by former Tesla automation engineer Sean Hsu, the company pairs patented multi-ingredient dispensing hardware with cloud-based analytics and demand forecasting, and has raised roughly $126 million to date, including a Series C led by Jollibee Foods Corporation.