Restaurant

3 Restaurant Success Stories [2024]

Pat Walls

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Updated: October 6th, 2024

If you love cooking and are passionate about entrepreneurship, starting a restaurant can be a fun and lucrative business.

To get started, choose a great location, and hire an excellent support team. You will need a chef to inspect the food and line cooks, waiters, and waitresses to serve the customers. No matter the restaurant type, you need great culinary and business skills to make your dream come true.

If you plan to open a restaurant , gain insight from consumer preferences and focus on serving modern consumers what they need.

In this list, you'll find real-world restaurant success stories and very profitable examples of starting a restaurant that makes money.

1. Rosa's Thai Cafe ($24M/year)

Alexander Moore and his wife, Saiphin, came up with the idea for Rosa's Thai Cafe after moving back to the UK and being disappointed by the Thai food options available. They started with a market stall and office catering company, serving authentic Thai food cooked in their small flat. The business grew rapidly, and they opened their first brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2008. With a focus on great food and word-of-mouth marketing, Rosa's now has 18 locations across the UK and brings in over $25 million in annual revenue.

How much money it makes: $24M/year
How many people on the team: 373

How This Couple Started A $2MM/Month Business Selling Authentic Thai Food On 18 Locations

How a couple started from a humble weekend market stall in East London to building a Thai food restaurant empire with 18 sites across the UK, now with run rate revenues of over $25mil per year, by combining homely authentic Thai food with local ingredients in a casual cafe environment.

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2. One Life Meals ($1.56M/year)

Andrei Calinescu, the founder and CEO of One Life Meals, came up with the idea for his healthy meal delivery service in 2014. After working in the fitness industry and noticing that his clients struggled with meal preparation and variety, he decided to start preparing meals for them himself. With his background in operations and nutrition, he saw an opportunity to provide a complete solution and launched One Life Meals, which has now grown to make 14,500 meals per month and generate $130k in monthly sales.

How much money it makes: $1.56M/year
How many people on the team: 29

Starting A $1.5M Healthy Meals Delivery Business

One Life Meals is a Toronto-based healthy meal delivery service that made 14,500 meals per month and generated $130k in monthly sales in 2018 through their one-on-one consultation, lean protein and seasonal veggies-based meals, and their focus on the client experience.

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3. Urban Smokehouse ($1.5M/year)

Andrew Buehler, founder of Urban Smokehouse, came up with the idea for his business after noticing the growing market trend and opportunity for online delivery of perishable items during the COVID-19 lockdown. As a foodie with a background in financial services, Buehler saw the rising demand for BBQ, a food that tastes great but is often inconvenient to make, and decided to create a digitally native BBQ brand that offers pre-cooked and sauced ribs that can be easily prepared at home in under 20 minutes. He launched Urban Smokehouse as a Kickstarter project and quickly surpassed his goal, raising over $30,000 in pre-orders.

How much money it makes: $1.5M/year
How much did it cost to start: $15K
How many people on the team: 5

How We Hit Our Goal Within 24 Hours On Kickstarter And Raised $30K+ Worth of Preorders

Andrew Buehler launched Urban Smokehouse, the world’s first digitally native BBQ brand, through a Summer Kickstarter campaign, raising over $30,000 in pre-orders; since then, the company has achieved monthly sales of over $5,000 split between their website and in-person pop-ups and events, relying heavily on word of mouth and organic social media.

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Read by 3,151 founders