235. Founder Stories: Loopini – Damiano Messineo

0:00Damiano Messineo:Welcome to Startup to Scale, a podcast by FoodBevy. I'm your host Jordan Buckner. Join me as I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, seasoned industry experts, and everyone in between as we unlock the keys to growing from startup to scale.

0:18Damiano Messineo:Pizza is one of those food categories that is really popular and is probably one of the highest awareness and consume categories, especially in the US, but around the world. But there's been this also craze in the intersection of having high protein and foods and better for you, healthier options. And my guest today sits at the intersection of both of those. So I'm talking with Damiano Messineo, who is the founder of Lupini, which is a protein packed pizza. It contains 50 grams of protein and just 560 calories, 20 grams of fiber for some of their products and amazing quality. I'm talking with Damiano today as well because he's recently run the Whole Foods Pitch Competition, is a Naturally Network Pitch Finalist, and had a lot of momentum behind growing the brand.

1:10Damiano Messineo:Damiano, welcome to the podcast today. Hi, thank you, Jordan. It's an honor to be here today. So as we're recording this, you are preparing for the Naturally Network Pitch Competition that's happening at Newtopia. You have a lot of things going on. So, but I'd like to kind of start at the beginning. Tell me about what led you to start Lupini and how the brand got started. Yeah. So I like to say that I got a PhD in pizza because I'm Italian and I moved to New York City. So I guess that's good enough to give you the title for any person that is Italian and living in New York City or born in New York City and moved to Italy.

1:49So I was living here in New York. I was studying and I was eating pizza almost every day because I love pizza. It's my favorite food. And I was looking to do something in food, but I was looking obviously for something scalable, something, you know, that I could innovate. And I realized that pizza was invented a long time ago, but it was never, never improved, never innovated, except for toppings. The crust has been all the same. And so I started thinking about it and how to innovate the pizza. So let's bring down the calories. is let's get pizza more functional, so more protein, more fiber. Let's make pizza healthy.

2:24The same feeling as you're eating a salad, but you're eating a pizza. And so I start looking at tons of different flours from all over the world. Even the okara flour from Japan, everything. Until I stumble into the lupini beans, which is something that, especially in southern Italy, we consume. And I was like, astonishing. Lupini beans are amazing. And so I decided to make the first pizza out of it and it didn't taste good. It was horrible. But the macros were amazing. The benefits for you and for the planet were there. So I was like, let's try to make it work. It took me 13 months, but we made pizza great with lupini beans.

3:06That's amazing.

3:07Damiano Messineo:I'm kind of curious, what was the hardest part about getting the crust right? Was it the texture or the taste or all of it? All of it, exactly. Yeah, the texture. I remember that the first experiment that I did, it was an elastic roll. I had to use, you know, a piece of wood to roll it. I mean, consistency wasn't there, taste wasn't there because lupini beans is a very nutty flavor. and and so we wanted to almost get rid of the of the flavor and we wanted to have an authentic taste of pizza something so you cannot even tell that it's made with lupini beans and yeah it was very difficult i mean we tried everything and and it took us as i said 13 months and i worked with even the best chefs in the world for pizza chefs i worked with a guy that was number one in napolitan pizza i worked with a guy that was number 15 in the world these restaurants and they couldn't even figure it out and this was at the beginning and so i was like well better doing myself i wasn't a pizza chef but i started studying the chemistry behind it and yeah we made it we launched in january this january 2025 the first store was pop-up grocer and it's been amazing for us there because we've been they have a ranking and we've been number one in the freezing sprays since then.

4:28So it's more than eight months now. You know, they do a couple of rotations and we're expanding about 100, 150 stores in the Northeast. And we have huge velocity, three times faster than any other frozen pizza out there.

4:41Damiano Messineo:That's amazing. What do you think is leading the velocity out there? Is it the protein cream? Is it kind of a new style of pizza in the freezer aisle? What have you been hearing from your retail partners and customers on why people are buying? Yeah, definitely. I think it's a combination of everything. I would say protein grabs the attention. Right now it's the number one. The protein grabs the attention, but now consumer is getting, we are having connoisseurs of protein. So people don't want, they want the protein, but then they go deeper. They want a clean label. They don't want isolate. They don't want whey protein.

5:16And so they're pretty good at understanding if the protein comes naturally. For example, our comes naturally from the beans. And so this is what people are looking right now. I think we are leaning more into the natural protein rather than the performance chemical stuff. That's all. Those are the main two things. Protein and clean label. That's what they're. And obviously fiber, I think we're seeing the rising of fiber. And I think it's going to be the next protein. And protein is here to stay. I think protein calories, sorry, protein fiber, and obviously the fewer calories, the better. And so those are the three combinations that are winning.

5:56And that is why we put it on the package. On the top right, we have the number of protein, the number of calories, and the number of fiber.

6:04Damiano Messineo:I think that's really exciting. It really stands out. And it's like one of the first things you notice in addition to the great looking Neapolitan-style pizza. So manufacturing frozen products are notoriously difficult, along with just like the right new ingredients in finding manufacturers who want to make something with lupini beans. And so tell me about how and where you're manufacturing the pizzas. Yeah, so we manufacture the pizza in Italy just because the ingredients are better there. We have our manufacturing facility is within five kilometers of where we source our toppings. Toppings being tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese.

6:40And consider that we are right in the middle between the San Martano area, which is, you know, it's world famous tomatoes, the best in the world. But on the other side, there is another story that no one knows about it. I mean, it's less common. It's that we have the Milky Mountains, which is the mountain overlooking the Amalfi Coast. And it's called Milky Mountains because the Romans started crafting mozzarella cheese 2 ,000 years ago. So we are exactly in the middle, within five kilometers of radius between the best tomatoes in the world and the best mozzarella cheese in the world. And obviously we make pizza.

7:16So we couldn't go anywhere else to make our pizza. And so there it's make we make those in Italy. But it's extremely difficult to, you know, for the supply chain. But, you know, we do it. We do it. It's just a little bit more difficult for us. But for me as an Italian, it was a non-negotiable thing that our pizza must be made there.

7:37Damiano Messineo:That's definitely amazing to hear. And just looking at the reviews, a lot of people are very complimentary and love the fact that it has that handcrafted quality and texture and actually tastes good. It tastes like pizza. I remember when, you know, cauliflower pizza crust first came out. it it you know it's more like a flatbread type but like it definitely didn't taste like like pizza it was more like toppings on top of a cauliflower flatbread kind of thing and so it's exciting to see this being more of an actual pizza and so with it being manufactured it sounds like you were at the perfect combination of like why you're so perfect for starting a pizza company i'm curious did you have a like family history in food or in the food industry at all right interesting enough yes but i never met him because he was my great grandfather and he had a tomato sauce manufactured company but i obviously i never met him my grandma sold the company like in the in the 60s he founded the company after the world war ii but he i i mean from what i saw from the picture he started exporting to from sicily to argentina and london So I always grow up with the dream of doing something like my great-grandfather, but I never experienced directly because I just saw very, very old pictures.

9:01But it's crazy to think about it that my great-grandfather was in the CPG industry and now I'm again in the CPG industry. I'm very sorry that my grandma didn't live long enough to witness this, but I know she will love it. that I'm in there. Actually, when I was a kid, I always told her, like, I promise you I'm going to bring your father's company back. I mean, it doesn't have the same name.

9:24Damiano Messineo:And it made me proud that you made it your own too, right? Because a lot of, I know, like my parents and grandparents are still like, you don't do the exact same thing that we did, like do something better, do something your own, do something different. So it's exciting to see this. And I love that it has that family connection to it. My family was in the food industry. And so I know how just like exciting and important that that is in terms of like continuing on that legacy and in your own way and doing that yourself yeah i am really curious around the supply chain for your business because it's made in italy you have to have it imported here in the u.s and it's all frozen right the entire chain and get it frozen to your retail partners what is that process like and what are the complexities there and how have you or are you learning how to manage that whole process yeah i mean the most important thing is that our lead time obviously is slightly longer because our pizza spent 20 days in the ocean and and so you always want to be stocked for supermarkets and stuff like this so what we do is like we calculate in advance and we have our warehouse in in williams in um brooklyn and so our warehouse is always stock and and so we distribute from there uh but definitely uh we We just need to plan ahead, but it's definitely manageable.

10:43It's way more difficult, but I guess I never worked in the food industry before, so I don't know how we ever experienced how easier it is to do frozen. So I guess if in the future we have to plan another product that is not frozen, it's just down nil, I guess.

11:02Damiano Messineo:Yeah, I guess it's good. Like frozen, you'll have that longer shelf life, but I've never had to or thought about ordering a frozen product from another country and having to import it. Like, do you have to do like a whole container of frozen products? Like, how is it even shipped? I'm just curious. Yeah, it's, I mean, from our factory, then comes a truck, a refrigerated truck. We put everything in there and then it goes to the ship and the container is itself refrigerated. And so for the whole process is refrigerated. And we have some chips that we like a little chip that we put in some sample to monitor the temperature of the course.

11:43If, you know, it was always under minus 18 Celsius. And then once arrive at the Newark port and then another truck go collect it and bring it to the to the to our warehouse, which is also frozen. And yeah, but definitely for shipping, it's crazy because right now we're doing nationwide shipping online. and the dry ice and it's super hot outside. It's definitely a challenge. I think we're going to move away from D2C and just focus on retail. But it was always the plan. It's just because with D2C, you get to know the names and the email of the people. So I like to speak with those customers at the beginning just to know what they think about the product to build that family.

12:28Damiano Messineo:That makes a lot of sense. And I know a lot of brands do that as well, where you need to see at the beginning, you want to reach as many people as possible. Otherwise, you're very constrained to a small geography, which, you know, can be good. Also, I have those challenges. I guess it's great that you're in New York City as well, because then there's a very large market in a very small geography. And so it's probably a good combination. So tell me about your growth in New York City and how you're thinking about managing that and building these partnerships. Yeah, so I mean, I got the first supermarkets just knocking on the door, having my sell sheets printed and talk with the buyers.

13:08And this will enable us to get us in around 100 stores in the city. And I think we, I mean, the velocity is great. So we are graduating from that. Now we have two distributors and actually we will start in September with them. So this will definitely fuel our growth to having distributors. And we are about to close the deal with a couple of big chains that we will announce in the fall. And so this is going to be an exciting second part of the business where we know more. I mean, we're still within the independent one, but we are going to grow with some important chains. and definitely step up our marketing.

13:54Because right now we have done very little marketing. We've been very scrappy. We have a nice marketing plan that we will start in the fall. So definitely super excited to do, you know, to grow the business and to entering the second phase. I like that. That's really exciting.

14:11Damiano Messineo:You know, I'm curious around thinking through the branding for the company. I think one thing in like growing awareness, because lupini beans have a very low awareness in the U.S. And I've talked to other founders, Hunter Brumme, who also is pioneering lupini beans in the U.S. And I think it's a pro and a con, right? Because on one hand, there's little competition, but on the other hand, it takes a lot to educate people on what it is. But maybe they do or don't want to know because you're selling pizza. Everyone understands pizza. They understand high protein. They want to know that's a natural source, but they don't.

14:50Damiano Messineo:And so you have this weird thing where like it's Lupini, the name, like Lupini Bean, but it might not be as directly a correlation. So I'm just curious on like how you're thinking about that whole branding name relation to the product. Can you only have Lupini Beans in every product from now on? Or does Lupini just become the name and it might not happen? You can stray away from the bean. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the reply or the response yet if we're going to do all the products Lupini related or not. But definitely on purpose, I didn't put an image of Lupini beans or made with Lupini beans on the package, at least in the front, in the back.

15:30We have explicit that it's made with Lupini beans just because people don't know about it. And they just want to eat great pizza with benefits. And so that's what we put. Then if they are more curious, because there are customers, they say okay as long as you have protein and fiber and lower calories i don't care what you put in there but there are people like as long as it's clean but there are people that are more curious so i say okay how do you get the protein where do you get the protein where do you get the fiber and then you know it's the lupini beans and the package we explain something but it's not the main focus just because people don't know about it the beans on the other side i think it's great that are companies like Ramy because we I mean we help each other to to you know to make the culture of lupini beans in the U.S.

16:17and on the other side it's great because we're first in the market it was first in the market making pastime first in the market making pizza and looking where we are heading with food natural fiber protein I mean lupini beans have phytosterols which is something that lower your cholesterol loglicemic index I think is the perfect ingredient for the future. It's super sustainable. So I think it's going to be the next edamame or soy. And definitely with more company using Lupini beans, we're going to have more chance that Lupini can go viral, let's say. And everyone is going to go Lupini nuts.

16:53Damiano Messineo:I think it's definitely a strong chance of that as well. And really focusing on that, you know, made in Italy as well. And for pieces, I think it's the right combination. Damiano, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. this is extremely inspirational and helpful and a lot of great tips for brands and founders listening. And so if you haven't already, if you can check out Lupini, try out the pizza and you'll be disappointed. Thanks Damiano. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you so much. And I'll see you in a week in Utopia.