From Citi Bike Deliveries to Whole Foods Shelves

Damiano Messineo spent his early days in New York City pedaling a Citi Bike to deliver pizza to independent retailers. Today, his high-protein, lupini-bean-based brand, Loopini, has moved far beyond local bike routes, securing spots in Whole Foods, Wegmans, and Target while tracking $700,000 in annual revenue.

The path to a $700,000 business began with a spreadsheet. Messineo, seeking a scalable alternative to traditional junk food, identified the lupini bean as a nutritional powerhouse—a complete protein packed with fiber that required significantly less water to cultivate than wheat. After months of kitchen experimentation to perfect the dough, he and co-founder Alessandro Pignataro launched the product in early 2025. By choosing to bypass early, unfavorable distribution deals in favor of winning pitch competitions, the pair maintained leverage that eventually caught the attention of major retail chains.

To validate the product, Messineo turned himself into a test subject. While training for an Iron Man in Lima, Peru, he consumed his own pizza for 100 consecutive days. The results, tracked via blood and stool samples, showed a gain of six pounds of muscle and a loss of four pounds of fat, bolstered by an improvement in his overall health biomarkers. Now, with the brand expanding, the focus has shifted from survival to scale. The founders are currently scouting larger co-packers to increase production capacity, aiming to support a full national rollout while maintaining the quality that propelled them from a single pop-up store to nationwide retail shelves.