Eight Outliers Changing Our Relationship With Food

CookUnity

Mateo Marietti grew up on a farm south of Buenos Aires, surrounded by local seasonal produce. Moving to the city for college was a rude shock: no more easily accessible, healthy food. Restaurants were expensive or impractical for daily life and supermarkets often stocked imported, non-seasonal food. Mateo had a clear sense of the disconnect between the food we eat and the planet we live on. 

In 2017, Mateo moved to New York and decided to bring his local, seasonal eating habits with him. He launched CookUnity, a subscription-based delivery service providing chef-made meals from Michelin-starred chefs, James Beard Award winners, and Food Network icons. CookUnity offers food ready “to heat-and-eat” in two minutes for consumers while also providing chefs with an alternative income source, transforming a market otherwise crowded with poor quality delivery food. 

And consumer appetite is high: the company has seen 75% year-over-year growth in total meals and announced at the end of 2025 that it secured $250M in non-dilutive funding from General Catalyst. A new partnership with Airbnb followed.

Mateo became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2021 and just one year later, in 2022, CookUnity became one of Endeavor’s Outliers — our annual program which celebrates and supports Endeavor’s top 10% of companies.

Whether working at the source or in distribution, these companies are tackling our broken food systems and finding new ways to sustainably feed a growing population.

Strong Roots

Samuel Dennigan is a fresh-food scion. The heir to Dublin-based global fruit and vegetable distributor Sam Dennigan & Co., he grew up in the family business, spending his weekends “[hanging out] on production lines with potatoes.” It made him uniquely able to recognize the issue facing Ireland’s freezer aisle, which had limited options despite growing consumer interest in veganism and fresh food. To answer that demand, Samuel founded Strong Roots.

Beginning with just one product — their now ubiquitous sweet-potato fries — the company now offers a range of plant-based products with environmentally friendly farming practices and climate footprint transparency in over 10,000 stores worldwide, including major retailers in Ireland, the UK, Europe, North America, Dubai, Australia, and Singapore. 

In 2020, Samuel became an Endeavor Entrepreneur and in 2021, the company was chosen as an Outlier for the first time. In 2024, Strong Roots was acquired by Canadian giant McCain Foods and experienced 30% growth between 2023 and 2025.

Farm Fresh

In Malaysia, milk was a problem. The country’s tropical climate and local infrastructure made milk distribution difficult, and many people relied on milk powders or imported milk. Then Loi Tuan Ee, a corporate director turned entrepreneur, started buying and breeding goats. He expanded into cows, buying just 60 imported cows from Australia and founding the Holstein Milk Company — which became Farm Fresh — in 2009. In 2016, Loi became an Endeavor Entrepreneur, and Farm Fresh has been consistently in the Outliers program since 2021. 

Today, Farm Fresh is Malaysia’s largest dairy producer. Determined to develop Malaysia’s dairy industry by supplying high quality and fresh milk to Malaysian consumers, Loi now leads Farm Fresh as CEO and in 2025 saw new record high earnings with 21% year-on-year growth. The next step is expansion across Southeast Asia, as the company moves into the Philippines, Cambodia, and potentially Indonesia.

Kopi Kenangan

Indonesia is the fourth-largest coffee exporter in the world and is the fifth-largest coffee consumer. For a long time, though, 87% of that coffee consumption was sachet coffee, with only 7% of coffee consumption freshly brewed retail coffee. Coffee was either too expensive or too basic. Into that gap stepped Kopi Kenangan (which means “Coffee Memory” in Bahasa), which began as a local coffee stall.

In 2020, Kopi Kenangan founder Edward Tirtanata became an Endeavor Entrepreneur and the company was an Outlier in the same year. In 2021, Kopi Kenangan became the first Indonesian food and beverage unicorn and continued to report growth even through the pandemic, turning in its first profitable year in 2025, and enjoying a 159% surge in new customer acquisitions. From its humble beginnings, Kopi Kenangan has now opened 1,000-plus stores across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, and Australia.

Tovala

Part meal kit, part robot chef, Tovala has a simple desire at the heart of its complex product: to reinvent home cooking. Led by CEO and co-founder David Rabie, Tovala’s pre-prepped meals are designed to work with their proprietary smart oven which downloads the recipe from the cloud and then cooks the meal itself in under 20 minutes, moving through a number of preprogrammed cooking modes, including steaming, baking, and broiling.

Beloved by customers, Tovala had a rocky start with troublesome funding rounds and a switch in direction from scaling to profitability, which David was grappling with when he became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2022. But by 2023, Tovala was an Outlier, and David led his team to two straight years of profitability in 2024 and 2025. Today Tovala makes nine figures in annual revenue and has grown roughly 20% year-over-year.

Pickup Coffee

Over 80% of Filipino adults consume an average of 2.5 cups of coffee each day, so it’s no wonder the coffee market in the Philippines is worth $6.5 billion. But Jaime Gonzalez Fernandez and Diego Lorenzo along with their other co-founders noticed the issue at the heart of the Philippines’ apparently-booming market: the gap between affordability and quality, with consumers faced with choices by either expensive, premium coffee or cheap, low-quality coffee. Inspired by a tech mindset, they founded Pickup Coffee.

The key to Pickup Coffee’s success lay in prioritizing low-cost, high-margin kiosks and a user-friendly mobile app that allows the company to sell coffee which is roughly 70% more affordable than other leading brands. A $41M Series A in 2023 helped the company pick up speed and Jaime and Diego became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in 2024. This year is their first as an Outlier, and they’ve kicked it off with the ambitious goal of opening at least 20 new stores per month.

Kitopi

There’s a lot to love about traditional restaurants: the ambiance, the amazing food, the neighborhood charm. But delivery efficiency is not on the list. Traditional restaurants have high rental costs, inefficient labor, inconsistent quality across various locations, and other issues facing delivery efficacy. But Kitopi — which was founded in 2018 by Mohamad Ballout, Saman Darkan, and Andres Arenas, who became Endeavor Entrepreneurs the same year — offered another option.

Kitopi pioneered the “cloud kitchen” model — a delivery-only restaurant that has no physical storefront or dining area for customers, offering the infrastructure and technology that enables food brands to cook and deliver food easily to consumers. A standout from the start, Kitopi has been an Outlier every year since 2018, even as they shifted away from B2B and acquired brands like Operation Falafel and Right Bite to fuel their pivot up the value chain. The company now has 200+ outlets across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait and kicked off 2026 with a $50M growth capital round led by EvolutionX.

Honest Greens

Christopher Fuchs had a fairly simple wish: healthy, ethically sourced meals at an affordable price. That didn’t seem like too much to ask for, except that in his travels globally and in his adopted country of Spain, he couldn’t find the restaurant he’d been dreaming of. So he set out to create it himself.

Honest Greens is the result, offering farm-to-table chef-driven and plant-forward meals at affordable prices across Europe. Since opening its first restaurant in Barcelona in 2017, Honest Greens has opened 30+ locations in Spain, Portugal, and the UK. More are coming with the help of a strategic investment from Act III Holdings. Christopher became an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2021, and Honest Greens was an Outlier the same year.

Discover the full class of companies building the future from Elsewhere. Meet the 2026 Endeavor Outliers class.