Whatsoup Miami was born in the home kitchen of Cristiano Azevedo and Luisa Lopez. Both Azevedo, from Portugal, and Lopez, from Colombia, share a love of soup. He has childhood memories of his Mom cooking soup on Sundays.

“As a kid I didn’t eat a lot of vegetables,” says Azevedo. But after managing high-end restaurants in London, New York and Miami, he went back to the world of vegetables. “Soup was easy to heat up when you got out of work late, and that got me eating them,” he says.

Wanting to recreate childhood memories using his restaurant training, he began making soups for visiting friends. “My friends would always take soup home,” he says. Lopez, a dental hygienist who was one of his guests, started bringing his soups for clients for lunch at different dental clinics.  

“Luisa was the pillar of how this came to be, encouraging me to start making more soups,” Azevedo says. “We started giving away more soups, around 20 or 30 per week, custom labeling them for our friends.”
 
In late January, while still working both working full time, they came up with the name. A soup-loving neighbor gave them 100 plastic soup containers. Whatsoup Miami was born.

The business has grown quickly. They went from selling their homemade soups through Instagram to working out of a commercial kitchen. They began with three different flavors and now serve a rotating menu of ajiaco, pumpkin shorba, vegan minestrone, butternut squash and red bean and others. More than half of their soups are vegan.