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Amy\u2019s Kitchen frozen meals<\/a> began 38 years ago, when Rachel Berliner was pregnant with her daughter Amy, who the brand is named after. In the last few months of her pregnancy, the doctor said Rachel should stay in bed and stop doing housework or cooking. So Rachel tasked her husband, Andy, with making dinner.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI went to a natural food store because we always ate organic, and I didn\u2019t know how to cook,\u201d Andy tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. \u201cI bought a few things, and they were horrible. So that was a big part of our inspiration to start.\u201d<\/p>\n Walk into the frozen aisle of any Whole Foods, Target or Walmart, and you\u2019re sure to spot Amy\u2019s frozen meals on the shelf. However, most shoppers are unaware that Amy\u2019s only serves vegetarian meals \u2014 there\u2019s nothing on the packaging to give away the secret.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re a vegetarian company, so we have to make products that anybody would like, whether they are vegetarian or not,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cWe never put vegetarian on the box because we don\u2019t want to send people away who are not vegetarians.\u201d<\/p>\n The promise of serving organic<\/a>, vegetarian meals is important to the Berliners. The husband-wife duo modeled Amy\u2019s after their own lifestyle, the way they ate. Over the years, their company has grown, despite the fact that they haven\u2019t advertised.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe actually sell more entrees than the biggest brands,\u201d Andy says. \u201cAmy\u2019s is the number one entree brand now in two of the largest retailers in the country. We\u2019re in 57,000 grocery stores now.\u201d<\/p>\n The Berliners brought on Rachel\u2019s mother to develop their first recipe: a vegetable pot pie. It was the most popular frozen meal at the time. Rachel\u2019s mother worked on the sauce and the pie\u2019s components.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rachel notes they faced a \u201cbattle\u201d to change the perception of frozen food, because most people thought that frozen food tasted like cardboard and wasn\u2019t healthy. They came up with new recipes to appeal to a wider audience and kept close to their mission of delivering healthy, vegetarian food.<\/p>\n After the vegetable pot pie, the Berliners, with the help of Rachel\u2019s mother, developed a broccoli pot pie and then a mac and cheese. They have since expanded to canned organic soups and beans. Their goal was to put their own spin on food that was already popular that people liked to eat. They used clean ingredients and made their products taste \u201creally good,\u201d Rachel says.\u00a0<\/p>\n They also differentiated themselves by cooking food the way they did at home, even when they moved to manufacturing centers. In an industry driven by efficiency, shortcuts and additives, they insisted on processes that looked more like a restaurant kitchen than a factory line.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t realize at the time that other people weren\u2019t cooking food,\u201d Andy says. \u201cThey were manufacturing food. We make food, cooked the way you do at home, but in big kettles. We marinate things, we make broth for all of our soups.\u201d<\/p>\n Amy\u2019s runs like a \u201cbig restaurant,\u201d not like a food manufacturing center, according to Andy. That commitment makes Amy\u2019s products more expensive to produce than most frozen meals, but the Berliners have never been interested in cutting corners to boost margins. Instead of pouring money into advertising, they put it back into the meals themselves and relied on customers to carry the brand forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t advertise because all of our money goes into the meal that we\u2019re making,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cSo we\u2019ve always grown by word of mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n That word-of-mouth engine has proved powerful enough to create a billion-dollar business. In 2025, shoppers spent about $1 billion on Amy\u2019s Kitchen products at cash registers across the U.S., translating to roughly $600 million in gross sales, Andy discloses. Today, Amy\u2019s entrees often outsell legacy names like Stouffer\u2019s and Lean Cuisine, despite being 25% more expensive than these conventional competitors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andy estimates that about 95% of Amy\u2019s customers are not vegetarians, but \u201cflexitarians\u201d who simply want food that tastes good. Amy\u2019s serves roughly 500,000 meals a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n The brand is intensely personal. Rachel shapes the packaging with fabrics sourced in India and Mexico, flowers from her own garden and plates from her kitchen, all to signal that there is a real home behind the brand.\u00a0<\/p>\n The way they find new recipes is also unique. \u201cWe get homemade recipes from friends, and they come and teach us how to make it,\u201d Rachel says. The goal is to get the product to taste as homemade as a boxed meal can get.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearly four decades after founding Amy\u2019s, the Berliners remain at the center of the company. Andy, Amy\u2019s CEO<\/a>, had already built and sold a herbal tea company in the 1970s, before starting Amy\u2019s. He watched the acquirer dismantle what he had created, an experience that still shapes him many years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons we haven\u2019t sold the business all these years is because I saw the business that I had built and we sold it. I saw it destroyed by the people we sold it to,\u201d he says. \u201cSo that\u2019s always given me a built-in resistance to doing that again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Rather than chasing a fast exit, the Berliners have grown Amy\u2019s slowly, funding expansion through profits, cautious debt and long\u2011term relationships. The company has averaged roughly 20% annual growth and expanded from a 3,000\u2011square\u2011foot facility to multiple plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n For aspiring entrepreneurs, Rachel advises starting with a real, unmet need. To start a new food line, she would look around and say, \u201cHey, this doesn\u2019t exist. Or if it does exist, it\u2019s not very good.\u201d And Andy says entrepreneurs should build to last rather than to sell the business in a few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think true entrepreneurship is doing something you love and building it to last,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nHow Amy\u2019s works<\/h2>\n
Building a billion-dollar business<\/h2>\n
Choosing not to sell<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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