Today we’d like to introduce you to Marco Biscarini.
Hi Marco, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
By the time, I turned 14, I had already moved 8 times and lived in 3 different countries and on 2 continents. I was born in San Diego, California before my parents moved back to Northern Italy, where my father is from. I spent most of my adolescence living first in Lake Como, then in Florence to ultimately end up in Rome for several years. At 14, I moved to Germany where I attended an American boarding school.
No, I am not a military kid, although it would appear so, my father was an entrepreneur, who eventually felt led to become a missionary. In 2010, I moved back to California, with the intent to join the Navy SEALS, after starting ‘indoc’ and meeting with one of my mentors at the time, I decided I would hit ‘pause’ on continuing with the SEALS and instead focus on my education and continuing my swimming career.
To support me through school, I started buying and selling watches, motorcycles, and motorcycle accessories on eBay and flipping them on Craigslist for a profit. In my junior year, I traded my job as a waiter for a local medical service-based company. This company worked with vendors having clients in Italy. These clients had to sign lengthy legal documents, which were predominantly in English.
I recognized an opportunity to offer to translate these documents as a means to make a side income. I reached out to some friends in Italy to that I could outsource this, charging the client a fixed fee per page and splitting the earnings with my friend. I wouldn’t have called any of these activities ‘businesses’ at the time, but they certainly helped me continue to develop skills I had no idea I would later heavily rely upon.
In my senior year of college, my family moved from southern Italy to Chattanooga, Tennessee. On first hearing the name, I asked “What country is that in?” not knowing it was on the other side of the US. Upon visiting them in December 2014, I was offered an internship with a local tech incubator. This experience gave me a great amount of exposure to many different startups and teams operating in different industries.
There was energy and it was exciting. After my year working for Lamppost Group, I ventured out to try my hand at a few different ideas of my own and also helped others with their ideas, this spanned everything from an app for renting out unused parking spaces to ‘Uber for childcare’ to a wedding-based startup. It wasn’t until I met my now wife, who was living in California at the time and was working with UFC fighters by providing them custom meals as a service, that we started Vibrant Meals in 2017.
Getting to where we are now taking a lot of blood (literally), sweat, and tears. Starting, from scratch, in the food industry was something neither of us really had any experience in. But combining my tech and business experience with her culinary skills we launched Vibrant Meals.
We now employ almost 30 employees and deliver meals from Chattanooga to Knoxville, operate 3 retail locations, and several micro-kiosks, and have partnered with dozens of health-related partners. We found that Chattanooga and Knoxville are both incredibly supportive communities in which we have had the opportunity to experiment, fail, learn and grow.
I truly believe that if it were not for the failures, successes, mentors, and community that met us along the way, we would not be where we are today.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? Hah, not a chance! Nothing has really been ‘smooth’ per se. We hit a myriad of obstacles and challenges along the way. We first started out in Romana’s studio kitchen before finding a commercial rental kitchen which was great at the time but not at all designed for how we needed to operate.
We built out a larger custom kitchen, which was also the birthplace of our first retail location, with the help of her parents. We’ve since moved, again, into a larger, 11,000 sq. ft. facility which has given us the luxury of designing our operation to be as efficient as possible. Each move, each change had its challenges but it really wasn’t until 2020 that we hit the hardest roadblocks.
Since 2020 our food cost has gone up 34% while other supply costs have also skyrocketed. We had plenty of “oh sh*t” moments where we had orders to fulfill but no cooler bags to put them in, or Tupperware to pack them in. We had two employees tragically pass away in 2021 and operated the entire year at a 6-7 employee deficit while still maintaining a steady growth trajectory.
We even had our one, and only, refrigerated truck totaled (when car prices started soaring). None of us could have ever predicted what the last few years would be like, but our team is so much stronger for it. Through the pain, stress, and fear we have forged stronger relationships, a stronger mentality, and resilience like none other.
It was the ‘focus on our blessings, not our problems’ mentality that got us through. The moments of genuine prayer, reflection, and problem-solving allowed us to further refine our systems and make better hiring decisions, even during a labor crisis, all while continuing to meet or exceed our standard of excellence.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Vibrant Meals is a healthy, ready-to-eat meal delivery service. We make macro-focused, made from scratch meals that are convenient, accessible, and affordable.
We operate through DTC delivery, B2B, and through our growing retail locations. Most of our meals are gluten-free and dairy-free with a focus on paleo, although we offer meals to fit many other dietary preferences like keto, low carb, whole30, and plant-based.
Our biggest differentiation has honestly been the quality and effort we put into our meals, we literally make it all from scratch including our sauces, this has allowed us to fully control our quality by making sure we aren’t using any preservatives, hormones, or other unwanted additives.
Genesi Labs is a small software development company I started a few years back. We are a boutique full-service (web and mobile) service, provider. We’ve built some pretty cool products for some big companies over the years and it allows me to still continue to stay ‘relevant’ in the tech space while applying what I learn to what we do at Vibrant Meals.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Don’t let fear hold you back, or over-analyzing.
If you’ve got the passion and grit to do something, go for it. That can often be enough to get you where you want to be. If you start to focus on all of the ‘what ifs’ then you’ll always wonder and never truly take the leap and try something of your own.
It’s exciting, it’s terrifying, it’s exhausting (especially when simultaneously raising two kids under two) but I think it is worth it. This is the country of opportunity, still. Take a short while you can, allow others to speak into your life and business, and don’t be too proud to take suggestions.
Contact Info:
- Email: marco@myvibrantmeals.com
- Website: www.myvibrantmeals.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vibrantmeals/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VibrantMeals/
- Other: www.genesilabs.com
Image Credits
Uriah Young
