Entrepreneur of the Year 2025: How Fresh Prep went from a Chinatown basement to a $100-million national meal-kit brand

In a Chinatown basement in late 2014, co-founders and lifelong friends Dhruv Sood and Hussein Rahemtulla started putting together meals. Having managed his family’s business while supporting his father through cancer treatment, Rahemtulla was inspired to solve a daily pain point but also eat healthier while saving time on cooking. Dhruv brought financial and logistics expertise to the (kitchen) table, and the duo was soon joined by another childhood friend, Becky Brauer, who had a background in complex food systems.

“I was working 9-to-5 myself and I always had a really big issue with coming home drained and then not wanting to either spend my weekends meal prepping or my evenings [figuring out] what to make for dinner,” says Brauer. “I just saw so much value in this idea that a service could take away so much work from people’s lives and just allow them to have the fun part of cooking back.”

In just a decade, Fresh Prep has grown from a scrappy basement operation into a $100-million Canadian-owned meal kit company with about 610 employees.

Since becoming a certified B Corp in 2019, the meal kit service has doubled down on innovation with purpose. In 2021, the team tackled one of the meal kit industry’s biggest issues—packaging waste—by introducing the Zero Waste Kit. By swapping out disposable plastics, the patented containers have already diverted more than 68,000 kilograms of single-use plastic from landfills.

While beneficial, it’s not entirely altruistic, says Sood.

“When we started, we never wanted to employ a lot of single-use plastic and did everything that we could while trying to maintain food safety and shelf life,” he says. “But it was also born out of the need to automate more to be able to deliver compelling value to our customers, which we feel really strongly about.” And so, the team decided to combine those two solutions into one. “By employing the Zero Waste Kit, we can really save money,” Sood adds. It turns out Fresh Prep actually spends less to provide the Zero Waste Kit than the version that generates more waste.

In 2024, Fresh Prep started cooking with fire—that is, it acquired Cook It, one of Canada’s first meal kit companies. Now the brand delivers meal kits all over the country, including B.C., Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

They’ve expanded nationwide, yet still manage to keep meals affordable and food waste low—with their lowest-priced recipes costing $11.30 per serving.

“Fresh Prep is officially national. So that’s fresh,” Rahemtulla says, unironically. “So, next for our brand is a big push piece [around that].”

What’s an odd job you’ve had?

BB: I used to work at the As Seen On TV store when I was in high school. It was an interesting job and I learned a lot about responsibility and accountability.

DS: I was a graveyard-shift blackjack dealer at the Grand Villa (Casino) for a summer.

HR: In high school, I sold newspaper subscriptions of the Vancouver Sun door to door. It was a purely commission pay structure so at the start I was earning less than minimum wage!