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Key Takeaways Messineo used a spreadsheet to come up with his ideal nutrition label.
His research unearthed the lupini bean: a complete protein packed with fiber.
He and his co-founder used pitch competitions and on-the-ground tactics to grow the business.
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with New York City-based entrepreneur Damiano Messineo. Messineo and Lorenzo Felli both attended NYU and co-founded Loopini, a high-protein pizza brand made with lupini beans that has surpassed $700,000 in revenue this year. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.
Image Credit: Loopini. Damiano Messineo.
I’ve always been interested in being an entrepreneur. The first venture that I tried to start while growing up in Italy failed after five minutes. My mom was not home, so my brother and I, ages 5 and 7, tried to turn the garden into a parking lot because we lived close to the beach. So, my mom went out for literally 20 minutes, and when she came back, she saw my brother on the beach with a cardboard sign saying, “Parking $5.” And so we got shut down after five minutes. That was the first experience.
But after that, as a 17-year-old in Sicily, I was organizing events. I’d moved to the U.S., then back to Italy, where I set up a soccer academy with my roommate. We wanted to recreate the American university where you can play sports and study. But we realized that you can’t build a university experience at 19. Then, I moved to the U.S., and while there, I jumped into another venture, which was renewable energy. We were trying to build a dam — a hydropower project in Nepal.
Starting a food-related business in the U.S.
After all of this, I realized my dream was to start a business in the U.S. related to food. I wanted to do something entrepreneurial that I really loved. Food has to be scalable, so let’s not do a restaurant. Let’s start with a consumer product, CPG. My favorite food has always been pizza. But I needed to make something different. What’s the problem with pizza? Pizza is the most loved food in the world, but people try to avoid it because it’s considered junk food. So I was like, “Imagine if pizza were healthy, and you could eat pizza with the same feeling as eating a chicken salad.” So you can eat it every day. That was the dream.
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