Goldbelly co-founder and chief product officer Vanessa Ariel grew up in Venezuela and moved to the U.S. when she was 18, so she’s well-acquainted with “food nostalgia” — the hankering for a favorite dish that can’t be found where you are. In Venezuela, “Our no. 1 comfort food is an arepa,” Ariel tells Entrepreneur. “An arepa is so comforting that you eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can stuff it with meat, you can stuff it with veggies, you can stuff it with cheese, it doesn’t matter. You can eat this at 3 a.m. — you can eat it at 3 p.m. And it is incredible.”
Her husband and co-founder, Joe Ariel, was familiar with food nostalgia too, in a different way. Born and raised in New York, he attended college in Nashville, and when he returned to his home state, he couldn’t find the Southern cuisine he’d come to love. “We were dating at the time,” Ariel recalls, “and he would always talk about these foods and how he would pay anything to get these foods here so that I could try them. So it went from this beautiful, What if we could do this? to making it into a reality.”
“It felt like a very ambitious idea,” Ariel adds, “but also like the future.” The duo was confident a platform of its kind would exist one day — so why not be the ones to make it happen?