We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cristiano Azevedo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cristiano, appreciate you joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

The name What Soup Miami is a play on words that worked really well for the brand, both phonetically and catchy at the same time. When we decided to launch this project, we wanted something we could both grow at the local level, but national too and this name fitted right in. It came up accidentally on a work brainstorm between me and Luisa while trying to grab her attention by saying “what’s up?’ a couple times, that’s when we looked at each other and the name clicked, and voila, What Soup Miami was born.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

What Soup Miami started in January 2020 between myself and Luisa Lopez, my wife and partner, from the kitchen of our Midtown apartment where we started to make a couple soups for neighbors. Today we distribute both to direct consumers and retail stores hundreds of fresh soups weekly, and have served over 60 different worldwide recipes. I’ve always had soup in my life, either from my humble roots in mom’s cooking where soup would always be present like any other Portuguese family, or in my personal cookings once I moved on my own. I’ve started hospitality when I was 15, my career had me move for management and consulting of fine dining restaurants in cities like Porto, Tenerife, New York, London, and now Miami (since 2018), and in cities as busy as these, the soup was an always a good way of eating/cooking quick and also staying healthy. Upon moving in with Luisa, she started taking soups for her offices (she’s a Dental Hygienist), which became very popular, and so did amongst our neighbors. A little push from Luisa and that was how the company started.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Once we’ve started to sell our product in retail stores, it was extremely important to place it in key locations where we’d have the right following. One location where we started to sell our soups was underperforming with almost zero sales, and I remember having multiple conversations on how we shouldn’t sell anymore at this specific location. We’ve decided not to pull our product out and to trust the gradual growth of the sales there, by supporting them everyday with all we could, as ultimately they’re an extension of our product and brand. Today it is one of the best locations, and they simply can’t get product on the shelves long enough. This only happened with a lot of support at all the sectors of the supply chain, and with resilience. Nothing makes us happier than the store customers reaching out to us via them.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

In today’s World we need to fully understand our team, and what really drives them – not just at work, but them as people. It’s very rare today to find someone to commit for many years or a career with you like it used to happen in the past, therefore it is imperative the leader knows its team players motivations, likes and dislikes, so that through the workplace they can help them get closer to their personal objectives as well. That whole understanding will result in a better performance and motivation, and make an employee feel not just as number, but as a part of something important.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.whatsoupmiami.com
• Instagram: @whatsoupmiami
• Facebook: What Soup Miami

Image Credits
All photos are ours