After studying at Columbia and Harvard, Emanuel Steiner launched his career in Switzerland—only to be met with an unexpected frustration: lunch.
“There’s simply nothing good to eat,” he would complain. “Take-away? Not tasty! Supermarket salad? Too expensive! Restaurant? Takes two hours! And worst of all—everyone splits up over lunch because they want different things. This can’t be it!”
Determined to fix the problem, Steiner and his wife, Daniela, co-founded Felfel in 2014, bringing Michelin-starred chefs and farm-fresh meals directly to corporate office lunchrooms. After scaling to more than 1,000 offices across Europe, the company expanded to the U.S. in 2024, setting up shop in New York City and now serving corporate offices throughout the Tri-State area.
Felfel’s rapid growth offers key lessons for any CEO navigating expansion, workplace culture and the evolving needs of today’s workforce. Here, Steiner shares his strategies for scaling a business, fostering a high-performance team and why great food is more than just an office perk.
What strategies have led to the company’s hypergrowth?
When we started Felfel in Switzerland, our mission was clear: to revolutionize workplace food by making high-quality, delicious, locally sourced meals easily accessible. Our growth came from a strong product-market fit, an unwavering focus on customer experience and an efficient operational model.
Expanding to the United States has presented new challenges, but we’ve applied the same principles: understanding workplace leaders’ needs, prioritizing quality and maintaining a strong company culture.
While our food is sourced locally—with the exception of Swiss chocolates and cheeses—and we have adapted our logistics model to navigate New York traffic, we’ve been able to build on the existing technology, expertise and lessons learned from the past 11 years operating in Europe that are key to our success and strong customer satisfaction.
The most important factor for success when in hypergrowth mode is having a small, nimble team with diverse talents and perspectives fully immersed in product and growth. With our headquarters supporting our essential operational and organizational functions, including finance, human resources, technology and data, we can remain fully focused on what matters most: our customers.
Please share your insights about providing exceptional employee experiences.
The workplace is evolving rapidly, and the best companies recognize that employee experience isn’t just about perks—it’s about creating an environment where people feel valued, connected and inspired.
More leaders are prioritizing culture, wellness and flexibility as they recognize that employees seek more than just an office—they want a compelling reason to show up in person. Food plays a bigger role in this than ever, fostering collaboration and strengthening team culture in a hybrid and RTO world.
At Felfel, we see firsthand how a well-designed workplace experience leads to better engagement and performance. When people feel good and eat good at work, they do their best work.
By virtue of the service we offer to our clients, we have always aimed to be thoughtful about making the office a special place for our own team and many of our product innovations, including our coffee bar concept, were born out of these in-house offerings we first started providing our workforce.
You like to say that creating a supportive work environment and being success-driven are not mutually exclusive. Can you elaborate?
A high-performance culture and a supportive work environment aren’t opposites, they go hand in hand. When people feel trusted and valued, they’re more engaged and motivated. At Felfel, we set high expectations while giving our team the freedom to be creative, innovative and work in their own way.
We balance performance with well-being, whether through great food, flexibility or fostering a strong and positive team culture. I believe that success-oriented people enjoy working with other success-oriented people, and it is seeing and interacting with these individuals that makes them excited to come to the office every morning.
What’s in the future for Felfel?
We’re just getting started. The rapid growth of Felfel NYC has proven the demand for better workplace food, and we see huge potential to eventually expand to other U.S. markets.
However, with food specifically, it is super important not to scale too fast—because quality always comes first. Every single batch of food that is produced daily by our partners is tasted by our foragers before it is shipped to our clients. Before we set up a new market, it’s imperative we are certain that we have the local partnerships, proper procedures and support to maintain and even exceed our own standards of quality.
