Innovation in the Time of COVID: Food & Beverage Entrepreneurs To Watch in 2021

If running a food business during the pandemic is tough, imagine how much tougher it is to start one. Especially for an unfamiliar product. The four entrepreneurs featured as part of our September cover story had to struggle to develop, market and start manufacturing their products, either just before or during the period when the pandemic drove the food industry haywire.

Planning sessions on Zoom, shipping samples to people’s houses, searching for hard-to-find contract manufacturing, trying to interest restaurants that are struggling to stay afloat – these and other adaptations had to be made. Two of our four entrepreneurs are making plant-based analogues for familiar proteins. One is making snacks from vegetable pulp that would otherwise be discarded. The fourth is taking a decidedly more traditional dish – loukoumades, or Greek doughnut holes – and reinventing it in frozen form.

Read each of their stories by clicking on the names below:

• GW Chew's Something Better Foods
• Tammy Levent's Heavenly Puffs Greek Donuts
• Kaitlin Mogentale's Pulp Pantry
• Michelle Wolf's New Wave Foods