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A decade ago, moved to New York from Argentina with one vision — to create a food delivery service that democratized food and gave customers healthful, quality options. 

The result? , a platform that did $750 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. It’s on track to do $1 billion in annual recurring revenue this year, Marietti disclosed in a new interview with �鶹��.

CookUnity positions itself as a hybrid between home cooking, grocery and restaurant delivery — “an intermediate solution” that fits modern lifestyles, Marietti explains. Customers share their flavor preferences, diets and health goals “almost as if you’re talking with a personal chef,” and CookUnity then routes those preferences into its network of independent chefs cooking in centralized kitchens. Meals are prepared in small batches, fully cooked, never frozen and shipped once or twice a week.

On the consumer side, the promise is restaurant-level flavor at near-home-cooking prices. Meals range from about $8.99 to $22, with an average ticket of $12 to $13, a fraction of what the same dish might cost in a fine dining restaurant. “You can have convenience, and you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen,” Marietti says. 

CookUnity’s origins

Marietti traces CookUnity’s roots back to his childhood on a farm in Argentina and nearly 20 years of building companies at the intersection of technology, food and logistics. “I’ve always been connected to food,” he says, adding that he spent the decade before CookUnity running an early food delivery business that scaled to 50-plus locations and 1,000 employees. The company worked, but it exposed two structural problems that would define his next act: Consumers wanted more personalization and variety, and quality was notoriously hard to scale across many sites.

Those constraints pushed him to a marketplace mindset. Inspired by platforms like Shopify, Airbnb and Etsy, Marietti began to imagine a horizontal model where chefs are the sellers and entrepreneurs, not cogs inside a vertically integrated restaurant brand. 

“What if we empower them with technology, with supply chain, with infrastructure?” he says. That idea, treating chefs as creators and owners, became the core of CookUnity’s business model.

Turning chefs into high-earning creators

CookUnity’s most eye-popping stat is what its chefs earn. On average, chefs on the platform make around $850,000 a year in earnings, with top sellers approaching $10 million annually. “That’s not the total transaction volume, that’s their earnings,” Marietti stresses. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to make a living cooking for others.”

CookUnity pays chefs through a revenue-sharing model, with their percentage tied to ratings and popularity. The platform gives them two powerful incentives. First, they have the opportunity to build their own brands. Second, they have an untapped economic opportunity based on popularity. 

Expansion is also dramatically easier. A chef who once could only reach a two-mile delivery radius can now serve new cities by plugging into CookUnity’s one million square feet of kitchen infrastructure throughout the U.S. and Canada. 

The pandemic was a turning point

Marietti officially CookUnity in 2016, with the current weekly meal plan product launching in April 2018. When the company shifted to subscription-style weekly plans, “the unit economics were very healthy and allowed us to reinvest in marketing, and since then, growth has been consistent and steady and very healthy,” Marietti says.

The pandemic became a turning point not primarily from a surge in demand, but from a surge in supply. Before 2020, chefs often responded to CookUnity pitches with “maybe next year.” When restaurants shut down, those same chefs suddenly had the urgency to experiment. 

“Unlike some of the other things that they tried, they saw real revenue, real profit, stable, predictable consumer behavior, and they stick with us,” Marietti says. That unlocked a virtuous cycle: more top chefs, more press, more word-of-mouth and faster growth.

Today, growth is driven by three main levers: chef-led promotion, referrals and partnerships. “First and foremost, the chefs,” Marietti says, noting that they bring CookUnity bags on TV, post on social media and mention the service when they launch restaurants. The company also leans on a classic “refer a friend” playbook and a growing portfolio of partnerships with organizations like and sports groups such as and .

Fostering a culture of ownership

Internally, Marietti believes CookUnity’s structure gives him “200 co-founders” or chefs. “They feel like owners in the business; they are pushing as hard as I am,” he says, arguing that more industries should consider this model. Beyond the tangible economics, he points to intangible benefits: chef-driven marketing, introductions and brand equity. 

On the talent side, he credits a shift from chasing prestige resumes to defining a custom talent profile. “It’s not about competing for the talent that is defined as the best talent for the industry,” he says. Instead, CookUnity looks for people who love the intersection of culinary, hospitality and technology, and who resonate with cultural traits like truth-seeking and letting the best ideas win regardless of hierarchy. Being explicit about values, he says, made hiring, promotions and performance more predictable and aligned.

Advice for founders

Marietti is blunt about missteps. One he highlights: waiting too long to make CookUnity’s unique supply available beyond its core subscription channel. He wishes the company had moved faster into other modalities and partnerships so that fans with less predictable schedules could access meals in more places.

Founders looking at CookUnity’s growth curve might assume it was fast. Marietti would disagree. “It’s almost always the case that… the majority of the value happens at the end tail of the compounding curve,” he says, noting that most of CookUnity’s value to date was created in the past three years, but he’s been working on it for more than a decade. 

His favorite advice for founders is radically simple: “Just don’t die.” Building a generational company, he added, is “a multiple-decade journey” that demands “almost irrational” levels of resilience and persistence.