Southwest Florida is not an obvious market for vegan food.
That was the thing everyone told me when I started. You're in steak and seafood country. You're in snowbird territory — people who've been eating the same things since 1987 and are not looking to be converted. You're going to have a hard time.
Some of that was true. Some of it wasn't.
What I didn't expect was who actually started ordering. Not the vegans — I knew they'd find me eventually. It was the people adjacent to veganism who surprised me. The gym guys who'd never considered plant-based eating but were trying to get leaner and heard that the food was actually good. The women in their 40s and 50s who were tired of feeling heavy and had been told by their doctors to reduce inflammation. The husbands who ordered because their wives were vegan and they needed something in the house they'd actually eat too.
The customers who turned into regulars almost never started because they cared about veganism. They started because the food worked for them. They felt better. They were eating more protein than they thought possible from plants. They stopped spending Sunday afternoons prepping food and started spending that time doing other things.
That's the business, honestly. Not converting people to a philosophy. Just feeding people good food.
The meals that didn't work — I had a few in the early days — were the ones where I prioritized interesting over good. Some fermented black bean dish that was technically fascinating and genuinely unpleasant to eat. A jackfruit preparation I was proud of that nobody reordered. I learned to trust the food that people actually wanted rather than the food I thought they should want.
The delivery geography here is also real. Naples to Fort Lauderdale is not a small run. I know which areas get Saturday, which get Sunday, which get Monday. I know which customers leave a cooler out and which ones will be home. That kind of thing isn't in any business plan. You just learn it.
Three years in, the thing I'd tell myself at the beginning is simple: make food that's so good people don't think about the category. Don't make vegan food. Just make food that happens to be vegan. The difference sounds small. It isn't.
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