Victor Penev, Founder and CEO of Edamam LLC, is on a mission to help people make healthier food choices by organizing the world’s food knowledge, while building a Zero-Spend Marketing Engine that fuels sustainable growth through a proprietary semantic food database. By combining food science, nutrition expertise, and AI-powered technology, Victor has built Edamam into a trusted food intelligence platform that enables businesses to develop innovative health, wellness, and nutrition applications while making reliable food data accessible at scale.

In this conversation, Victor introduces The Democratic Decisions Framework—No Pre-Judgement, Freedom to Speak Up, Intellectual Environment, Robust Discussion, and Work Towards Consensus. He explains why removing preconceived opinions encourages better ideas, how open dialogue and diverse perspectives lead to stronger decisions, and why working toward consensus builds lasting commitment across teams. Victor also shares how partnerships, referrals, and search authority fueled Edamam’s sustainable growth, and why proprietary data and continuous human refinement remain the company’s competitive advantage in the age of AI.

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Zero-Spend Marketing Engine with Victor Penev

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. Today, my guest is Victor Penev, the Founder and CEO of Edamam LLC. Edamam is helping people eat better by making daily food choices simple and easy, eventually organizing all the food knowledge in the world. To that end, the company has built a proprietary semantic food knowledge base and is creating, on top of it, a range of consumer and business applications to solve real-world, everyday problems. Wow. Victor, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Good to be here. I’m very excited.

So I was shocked to learn that you’ve got 900,000 foods in the system and 2.3 million recipes. I mean, I don’t know who is even able to create so many recipes. So how did that whole thing come about? How did you come up with this idea? Are you a foodie?

I am a foodie. Yeah, that’s kind of the origin story. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve done a few startups. I had a successful exit about 15 years ago. A friend of mine and I built Bulgaria’s largest internet company. Then I started looking for what to do next. I was actually going to start a news organization, but then I realized one day, on a beach in Thailand, that I think about food five hours a day, and I cook every day.

So I might as well do something around food that helps people. I married my passion for food with my passion for technology and built a company.
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The problem we set out to solve back then is still a very valid problem. People need the right information, just in time, to make the right food choices. The data is always inconsistent, incomplete, and lacking. So we set out to organize the world’s food knowledge so we can help people make the right food choices.

Wow, this is fascinating. So what is your personal ‘Why’ that you’re manifesting in this business?

So, in terms of philosophy—and my philosophy changes. Everybody’s personal philosophy changes over time. But where I am right now, I think

there are a couple of things that really matter if you want to live what one would call the good life—a meaningful life. One is to be really present in the moment. You know, be here now. The other is to help people. I think my business falls into…
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For us, the measure of success is not revenue or profit.

It’s how many people we ultimately reach through our data. It’s worth noting that we’re a business-to-business company, so we don’t reach people directly. But we have partnerships with companies like Nestlé, Microsoft, Amazon, and Food Network. Through those partnerships, we think we reach at least a billion people. For us, that’s the real measure of success.

Helping everybody eat better and live longer, healthier lives.

My vision is that everybody can live to 120 without chronic illness or mental conditions. A big part of that is food. So we're trying to help people. That's my 'Why'.
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Yeah, I love it. Obviously, eating healthy is a big thing. You know, garbage in, garbage out. This is fascinating. Do you find that certain cultures have better eating habits than others? And what drives it?

I think history and geography, to some extent. Everybody knows about the Mediterranean diet. And it’s not only the countries around the Mediterranean. Vietnamese and Japanese cuisine are Mediterranean in the composition of the food. A lot of it comes from being close to water, living in a certain climate, and having a huge variety of fruits, vegetables, and fish. But I think the biggest change over the last hundred years hasn’t been culture. It’s been technology—quote-unquote—and the processing of food so it’s shelf-stable, can be shipped, and sold at a lower price.

I think that’s the biggest problem. It’s changing eating habits everywhere in the world. It’s very well known in the United States and, to some extent, in Western Europe. But even places like Japan are starting to eat a lot more processed food. Mexico is starting to eat a lot more processed food. This is more technology-driven than anything else.

If I had to say one thing that would help people, it would be this: Go back to your roots. Get food directly from the soil. Cook it at home. It's a question of time and effort, but if you value your health, that's one of the best investments you…
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Yeah, as we’re getting busier and busier, the opportunity cost of cooking our own meals is becoming higher. And that’s the real problem.

It is a problem. I mean, it’s a question of priority. I cook every day. I’m very busy, but for me, it’s an important enough thing. Food, apart from nourishment and nutrition, is also a very social thing. People connect through food and spend time together, and that’s another thing that correlates very well with longevity and a well-lived life. So there’s a lot more to be said about having good food.

Yeah, I think Woody Allen said in one of his movies that eating together is the second sexiest thing to do, or something like that.

Yeah, there you go. I’m not going to ask what the first one is.

Yeah. That’s awesome. So let’s talk about frameworks. This podcast is all about frameworks. What’s a framework that you’ve discovered along the way that helps you think about your business, create outcomes in your business, help other people be productive, or whatever it is that’s driving results in your business?

A couple of things come to mind. I’ll start with the non-obvious one. Some people speak about it, but I’ve practiced it, and I think going slow gets you further. You know, the hare and the tortoise. I am definitely against growth for growth’s sake. That drives a lot of decisions: who you raise money from, how you run your business, and so on. Over the years—and I’ve been an entrepreneur for probably close to 40 years—I’ve discovered that every successful product has its timing and its soul.

You just have to let it come to fruition. Sometimes that means slowing down instead of rushing forward. For me, being deliberate about the end goal without having time constraints is a framework that’s always helped me. It’s not for everyone. Definitely not for the modern world, where VC money is trying to get you to grow very fast, and everybody competes based on how fast their revenue or customer base has grown.

But I find that this does not lead to lasting results in terms of impacting humanity and having a meaningful life—both for yourself and for everybody in the company. So that’s one framework. The other, which is also very simple, though not too many people execute it, is just: treat people like people. This means there’s no hierarchy in my company. I’m super proud to say that in my last company, I never had an employee leave. And that was over 15 years.

It’s because I treat people as people. Going back to the Latin origin of the word companion, companio, which means “to break bread together.” We are a band of people breaking bread together on a journey. That’s how it works. That means doing things that are not intuitive in business. For example, having no advance notice requirement for vacations. If you want to take a vacation, take it now. Giving responsibility to people and treating them well. Those are the two frameworks that I think have helped me. In addition, making decisions democratically, which is a very contentious thing in business. Okay.

So how do you do that?

There is always, ultimately, an arbiter, which is oftentimes me or some kind of board. But that means having a robust discussion around a topic without preconceived notions of what the end decision or result should be.

Creating a culture where everybody can speak up, argue, and tell you they disagree with you. Having that freedom creates an intellectual environment where people really debate.
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At the end, more often than not, the obvious decision emerges. It takes a long time, but the reality is that once a decision is made, everybody has bought into it, and it’s usually the right decision. So I don’t make wrong turns. Now, there are times when it’s a coin flip. There are two equally good—or equally bad—options, and somebody has to make the call. Then it falls to me. But for the most part, it’s democratic decision-making.

So how do you cultivate that? How do you foster it? How do you make sure people contribute to it?

I’ve had the luxury of starting a company from scratch. It’s a lot easier to do when you start from scratch because you establish the culture with the first hire. It’s a lot harder to change a culture and instill new values.

For me, it's been a very deliberate choice about what I want the company to be. People working together toward a common goal. People who don't get overworked. People who always have something exciting to do and an amazing group of people to work…
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So it’s about hiring people who are reliable, self-sufficient, and want to move things forward. Then really showing that any conversation and any intellectual argument is absolutely allowed. There is no hierarchy where you can say something and I’ll just shut you down because I’m the boss. You have to demonstrate that in practice. You have to actively solicit everything a person has to say. After the first couple of hires, it becomes easier with the next ones because they see what’s going on. That’s how you do it. It’s a deliberate choice to build the culture through day-to-day interactions. There’s no easier way, unfortunately.

So how scalable is this flat, democratic culture? Does it impact scalability in any way?

It is scalable. My current company is small, but my previous company had about 150 people. Even when we sold the company and had to find a replacement CEO, the candidates had about 50 interviews each. At the end, the whole company voted on who the CEO would be. It is scalable. It slows down the decision-making process, but it speeds up the progress of the company.

An individual, even the smartest individual, is more likely to make mistakes than the crowd. Now, there are exceptions. I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs would have done it differently. But for the most part, I think people make fewer errors through a democratic process than by making decisions on their own. So yes, I think it’s scalable. It’s really a matter of deciding which decisions belong at which level. You don’t have the entire company of, say, 10,000 people voting on one thing. For a particular problem, there might be 10 people who are the relevant decision-makers. They get together and sort it out, and everybody else accepts what those people decide.

So it’s more of an approach to tapping into the minds of the people who can potentially bring diverse opinions.

Yeah. Diversity of opinion. They all have a different angle from which to look at the issue that needs to be resolved. So different angles. Because they’re all impacted, everybody can contribute. There’s respect in listening to everybody else. It’s not that one person establishes the ground truth and everybody else has to agree. There is actual debate.

Yeah. Interesting. By the way, I just want to comment on this bootstrapping aspect. I saw your post on bootstrapping. You spoke at a recent conference on it. So what are your thoughts on bootstrapping? What are the critical ingredients there?

So bootstrapping is the way business has been run for a very long time. It’s only recently—in historical terms—that the venture capital industry emerged and allowed businesses the luxury of building without thinking too much about the bottom line. But I think the disciplining effect of constantly thinking about the bottom line is super important. To some extent, it takes a certain kind of individual to do it, which I call the true entrepreneur. Those are the people who are risk-takers and can live with a very high degree of ambiguity.

When you don’t have money in the bank to cover next month’s expenses, you have to be comfortable with that. To me, that’s the right entrepreneur. It has become too easy for people to become “entrepreneurs” by raising tens of millions of dollars. That’s not to say they might not be brilliant people who execute very well and create amazing companies. I think those are probably one in a thousand. The majority get the money, spend it in two years, and they’re gone.

So for me, bootstrapping is the proof in the pudding. If you do it day in and day out and keep moving forward, you're actually building something that's valuable.
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Yeah, I agree. Some people say it’s akin to being an employee when you raise money and just have to get to the next fundraising round, and then the next fundraising round. It’s almost like executing the business plan your board has given you.

Exactly.

Worst case, you go take a job somewhere else if things don’t work out. But you’re not losing your livelihood, and your family isn’t going to starve, right?

It is a certain type of personality, and I don’t think it’s for everyone. But my personal belief is that if you’re going to build a business, you’re better off building it with a little bit of hunger. Not always having enough. Having just enough so you can keep moving forward.

Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? If you don’t have too many resources, that’s a constraint you can push against and come up with better ideas. It’s a forcing function.

Correct.

There you go. So, Victor, what drives growth in your business?

Like I said, I’m not pro-growth per se. This was also a deliberate choice for the company. Just as a parenthesis, the last business I ran before this was a media business. We sold advertising. I personally don’t believe that spending money on advertising is a good idea. So I built a business with the explicit desire not to spend any money on marketing. That meant I had to build mechanisms for referrals, inbound traffic, and so on.

A lot of our early customers—including companies like The New York Times and Food Network—received very high discounts, but with the requirement to display “Powered by Edamam,” linking back to us. Search engines like that. It builds authority and so on. Over the years, we’ve built enough authority that most of our traffic now comes from search engines and chatbots. That’s what’s driving our growth.

The other thing is that we try to stay nimble. We build technological assets and products, but the market changes. Who needs the data? For what use cases? It’s important to stay aware of the market and adjust to wherever the opportunity is. That’s how I’ve built the business. I’ve built it to generate lots of inbound traffic and then adjust very quickly if the market changes. The rest is we’re almost like a spider waiting for the flies to come in.

So you say you’re not pro-growth. Do you mean you don’t want to make this a bigger company?

No. I’m not for growth just for the sake of growth. Let’s grow 300% this year in top-line revenue. For me, as I said, what drives the business is how many people we reach with our data. That’s the metric I’d like to grow as much as possible. If possible, I’d like to reach every person on the planet. That’s the aspiration. When I say I’m not for growth, I mean that

sometimes growth becomes its own incentive. You grow without asking, “What’s the ultimate goal here?” Why do you have to grow?

Oftentimes, the answer is because you want to sell the company at a big profit. That’s why VCs put money into your company. You’re feeding the VC business model. But if you’re not feeding the VC business model, why do you have to grow the company? What’s the point? You may have investors, but you have patient capital, and they’re aligned with you. Eventually they’ll get their money back, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of the company’s mission. When I talk about growth, I mean the pressure to constantly grow top-line revenue, which has become very popular over the last couple of decades.

So when you say you eventually want to organize all the food knowledge in the world, it sounds a little like Google organizing the world’s information—just for food. Isn’t that a big vision that requires growth?

No. Again, I don’t think growth is necessary to execute that vision. I think you can organize the world’s food knowledge, and we’re already well along the way. There’s always more to do. Even with very limited resources, we’ve been able to do it. I think that having more customers and more revenue would probably help, but only on the margin. It’s not a prerequisite.

The prerequisite is having the right technology and the right setup to constantly ingest new information about food, pass it through our pipeline, clean it, verify it’s accurate, structure it, organize it, and link it to other data. Food is a relatively limited universe. You started by asking whether people really create 2.3 million recipes. There are only so many ways to combine food items into something people eat. So it’s a limited universe. What’s exciting is the depth of food.

There are macronutrients, micronutrients, allergies, diets—we all know about those. But there’s much more. There are many more molecules in food. Eventually, even the soil it was grown in and the amount of sun exposure could become valuable data. There’s always more work to do, but we focus on what’s actually doable right now.

So do you envisage that the growth of technology, especially AI, means you can keep the company the same size as it is and accomplish your ultimate mission?

I think so. Similar size. To some extent, AI is helping us because it’s bringing a lot more customers. People are building all kinds of applications with large language models and agents, and they need accurate, deep data, so they come to us. We are also using AI to build tools and meet the demand, so our engineers are becoming more effective. So, to some extent, that helps keep the team small.

That being said, in terms of the speed with which AI moves, it’d be nice to have a few extra people. That doesn’t mean doubling the size of the company. I think it’s probably having 20 to 30% more people would be sufficient to actually leverage the technology—which is AI—to the best effect. So that’s kind of my view now. Ask me in two months, I may have a different view.

So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business right now?

Well, AI is throwing a wrench into everything, so it is a very fast-moving environment. Our clients are constantly changing their demands. The profile of our clients is changing. There’s a lot more new health, wellness, prevention, and weight-loss companies that are showing up and starting because they can now build with AI. So all of that makes for a very choppy sea. We can’t figure out exactly where the wind is blowing from and where we should head.

So for me, it’s kind of like having the North Star of, “Okay, we are a data company. We leverage our data asset, and we just keep doing that. Then we’ll innovate on the technologies that we need to offer, but stay there, as opposed to trying to change what the company does.” That’s kind of what’s keeping me steady. But again, it’s a very choppy sea, so I don’t know what’s going to happen. One big worry is whether Anthropic or OpenAI are eventually going to replicate everything that we’ve done. I don’t know. I don’t think so. But artificial superintelligence is something that nobody knows about.

Yeah. So the technology evolves very fast. So how do you avoid being commoditized by AI?

I think the data—our moat is the data, right? It’s taken us so much time to actually clean, organize, and structure the data, and that’s not a process you can do easily just by throwing people or AI at it. We’ve used what used to be called AI since the beginning of the company: machine learning, natural language processing, and so on. Now we use generative AI. But we’ve used that, plus super-smart engineers, food experts, nutritionists, and week in, week out, we’ve been improving the data, improving the algorithms, refining it, and so on. That is not something you can just throw resources at.

It requires that constant iteration between humans and technology in order to get there. So for us, I think that’s an important moat because if somebody wants to build it and commoditize us, they’ll have to replicate that. I think the more likely scenario is they may end up buying us. Like I said, artificial superintelligence could be a completely different ballgame. But with the technology that exists right now, with large language models, I don’t think that’s replicable. We know it because enough people have tried.

Yeah. Would you be okay with someone buying you? Is this your…

Sure.

Yeah?

Yeah. The way I think of companies is the following. They’re like children. At some point, children become 18-year-olds. They can earn their own bread. They can walk on their own two feet. You kind of have to let them go. I think this company has gotten to that stage. It’s a teenager that can walk on its own. It doesn’t need me. And I have ideas for 10 more businesses. Who knows? If I’m healthy, I think I could probably build another four or five businesses in the next 40 or 50 years. Why not?

Yeah. I love it. So who do you want to connect with you, go on your website, check things out, and what’s the best way to engage with what Edamam is doing?

Two categories of people or entities. One is companies that are building something around diet management, nutrition, health, or food. I think they’ll find that we have valuable resources that can speed up whatever they’re developing. So that’s one category. The other is like-minded individuals. They could be investors, but they could also just be people who really care about healthy eating and the prosperity of humanity.

Those are the types of people I’d like to talk to because aligned minds often come up with new ideas. It’s kind of the Y Combinator thing—lateral thinking. If we have an aligned goal and we come from different fields, we may come up with something new.

Okay. So that’s a way for you to find people worth brainstorming with, I guess, who have the same ideas: healthy eating, helping people live longer—to 120 years. And other companies that could be using the data you’re processing and organizing. So if you’re out there and you’re in the food business or the healthy living business, then definitely pay attention.

Check out Edamam LLC‘s website. Talk to Victor Penev on LinkedIn. So, Victor, thank you for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because we have wonderful entrepreneurs like Victor every week. Anything else, Victor, you want to share? Any famous last words?

Yeah. I just want to say thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Keep up the good work. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you, Victor. And thanks for listening.

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352: Zero-Spend Marketing Engine with Victor Penev

Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

352: Zero-Spend Marketing Engine with Victor Penev