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Our StoryHow We Accidentally Became a Waffle Company
It started with a kitchen we never planned to own, tucked inside the largest Crunch gym in Brooklyn.
Eugene & Jian — Zen Kitchen, Brooklyn
Eugene and I wanted to back a meal-plan business we thought was brilliant. Long story short: it didn't work out, the space opened up, and we found ourselves staring at an empty commercial kitchen thinking, "Well… we're not doing nothing with this."
So Zen Kitchen was born, mostly out of stubbornness.
Then we did something gloriously dumb. We went all in on full meals. Hired chefs, fired up the line, the whole operation. And promptly got hammered with every headache nobody warns you about: the costs, the chaos, the spoilage, the math that just doesn't math. Turns out cooking full meals at scale is a special kind of pain.
So we pivoted to baked goods. Fresh juices, smoothies, protein cakes, even protein ice cream. We were so committed we drove hundreds of miles to another state just to haul back the right equipment. And we had the perfect audience right outside the door: thousands of gym-goers walking past every week, hungry and already bought into the whole better-for-you thing. They became our taste-testers, our critics, and our most loyal regulars. Everything sold. The problem? Half of it was still a nightmare to scale. (Protein ice cream, it turns out, does not love a road trip either.)
◆ ◆ ◆Then Jian, who's spent years in the food world, floated an idea: protein waffles. Not the sad, chalky kind. Real ones, built on one rule, fewest ingredients, maximum flavor. We recruited Mary, a baker with serious credentials, to perfect every recipe by hand.
The gym crowd voted with their wallets. The waffles crushed everything else.
So we did the only logical thing: we bet the whole company on breakfast. Every flavor people actually crave, sweet to savory, done clean. That's how Protein Waffles was born.
We've since outgrown our little Brooklyn kitchen and are taking over a Belgian facility to make these things at full scale, because apparently you can't out-stubborn a good waffle.
We didn't set out to make waffles.
The waffles kind of chose us.
— Eugene & Jian, Founders
How We Accidentally Became a Waffle Company
It started with a kitchen we never planned to own, tucked inside the largest Crunch gym in Brooklyn.
Eugene & Jian — Zen Kitchen, Brooklyn
Eugene and I wanted to back a meal-plan business we thought was brilliant. Long story short: it didn't work out, the space opened up, and we found ourselves staring at an empty commercial kitchen thinking, "Well… we're not doing nothing with this."
So Zen Kitchen was born, mostly out of stubbornness.
Then we did something gloriously dumb. We went all in on full meals. Hired chefs, fired up the line, the whole operation. And promptly got hammered with every headache nobody warns you about: the costs, the chaos, the spoilage, the math that just doesn't math. Turns out cooking full meals at scale is a special kind of pain.
So we pivoted to baked goods. Fresh juices, smoothies, protein cakes, even protein ice cream. We were so committed we drove hundreds of miles to another state just to haul back the right equipment. And we had the perfect audience right outside the door: thousands of gym-goers walking past every week, hungry and already bought into the whole better-for-you thing. They became our taste-testers, our critics, and our most loyal regulars. Everything sold. The problem? Half of it was still a nightmare to scale. (Protein ice cream, it turns out, does not love a road trip either.)
Then Jian, who's spent years in the food world, floated an idea: protein waffles. Not the sad, chalky kind. Real ones, built on one rule, fewest ingredients, maximum flavor. We recruited Mary, a baker with serious credentials, to perfect every recipe by hand.
The gym crowd voted with their wallets. The waffles crushed everything else.
So we did the only logical thing: we bet the whole company on breakfast. Every flavor people actually crave, sweet to savory, done clean. That's how Protein Waffles was born.
We've since outgrown our little Brooklyn kitchen and are taking over a Belgian facility to make these things at full scale, because apparently you can't out-stubborn a good waffle.
We didn't set out to make waffles.
The waffles kind of chose us.
