Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Serota.
Hi Adam, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
As my quarantine hobby during the COVID pandemic, I taught myself how to roll sushi by watching YouTube videos and practicing the art daily. That hobby grew into making dumplings at home, and eventually, I created an Instagram account in late November 2020 to showcase my culinary creations. I had never cooked in a restaurant before -I just loved good food and enjoyed getting better at making it. Within weeks, I had multiple people within my network asking me to cook for them. I didn’t take the first two seriously, but when the third group reached out and wanted to pay me to make dinner one night for their family, I took the opportunity on. By the end of December 2020, I had already done three bookings, two of which I cooked for over 30 people, and received outstanding feedback. From there, word of mouth spread, and by February 2021, I was getting booked to go cook on yachts. This is where I started meeting celebrities. By June 2020, I had already gotten booked to cook for Jordan Poyer & Rachel Bush, Mitchell Trubisky, Ben Simmons, Dave Portnoy, and Jorge Masvidal. I decided to quit my full-time job and dove all the way in.
Before all of this, I started a custom apparel business while attending Florida State called Heritage Apparel. I specialized in Greek Life clothing and worked with dozens of sororities and fraternities at FSU, UF, UCF, and other campuses around the country. We generated over half a million dollars in sales in two years, and I then sold the business after I graduated in 2019. I have always been highly entrepreneurial since I was a little kid. Those experiences prepared me to turn this hobby of cooking into a legitimate business once I saw the opportunity.
Specializing in sushi, dumplings, and wagyu, I carved out my niche for high-end luxury bookings throughout South Florida, servicing Miami to West Palm. I have been flown all over the country to cook for clients. The business flourished over that first year and continues to expand.
Heading into 2022 NFL offseason, Jordan Poyer asked me to handle his offseason meal preps. This was something I had never done before, not even for myself. But I took the opportunity, and Jordan loved it. By the next NFL offseason, I had a dozen NFL athletes asking me to handle their offseason meal preps as well. This is when I made my first full-time hire, expanded into a large commercial kitchen, and locked in on creating a legitimate Performance Nutrition division for my Chef Adam Serota brand. As the offseason went on, locals began signing up and the meal plan business grew into a massive segment for me. We weren’t just doing basic meal plans. By this point, I was working intimately with Pai Dayan, founder of Everest Wellness, who specialized in alternative medicines and therapies for professional athletes. He had a system of diagnosing food sensitivities and micronutrient deficiencies that we used to create custom meal plans for every athlete. We built every meal in lockstep with the athletes’ team dietitians to give our clients the exact macronutrients they needed per meal, timed up with their training schedules to help them achieve their offseason composition goals. After a few months of operating this meal plan, the professional sports teams themselves began reaching out to us to handle performance-based catering for their teams. First, the Miami Marlins contracted us, then the Atlanta Braves, and then the floodgates opened. Word of mouth spread quickly in the tiny world of professional sports, and this team-catering segment has grown into the biggest piece of my business.
In April of 2024, I rebranded the Performance Nutrition division of the Chef Adam Serota brand to “Game Changing Fuel.” Game Changing Fuel has blossomed into one of the fastest-growing and most exciting start-ups in the world of sports nutrition. In our first year, we amassed over 50 team clients, expanded by opening kitchens in Detroit, Orlando, Denver, and Dallas, and continued pushing our performance nutrition practices across the country. Now in year 2, we expanded again into Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Atlanta, and continue growing as we develop our systems and culinary talent in new cities. We help professional sports teams with our suite of robust offerings: elevated catering solutions, offseason meal plans for their athletes, and private/executive chef staffing all over the country.
As a private chef, I still take on bookings to cook intimately in clients’ homes and venues for events and special occasions, but my main focus these days is on growing Game Changing Fuel into a nationwide powerhouse, fueling professional sports.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I don’t think any business owner would describe their path as ‘smooth.’ Entrepreneurship is a journey of adversity, self-growth, and constant learning and adaptation. There is a huge gap between a boutique one-man business cooking in people’s homes vs. scaling a multi-faceted business operating in ultra-high-pressure environments, such as pro sports. The challenging part of growing a business is that as you grow, your role constantly changes. In the beginning, my job was to sell the service, buy the food, prep the food, cook the food, clean up, and then go home and work on securing the next booking. All of those pieces of the process get replaced by new systems, new employees, and more sophistication. Nowadays, my operation is in the hands of many different people. Whether it’s client-facing representatives, prep cooks, managers, delivery drivers, etc… I’m no longer the person solely responsible for my client’s experiences. I do everything in my power to create systems to set my team and clients up for success, but systems break… people fall through… nothing is perfect. I have chefs all over the country who are representing my brand when they fulfill orders for our clients, and sometimes things don’t go the way I envisioned them to. People are always going to be the hardest part of any business, and finding high-quality people in the culinary world can be very challenging. I have often said that scaling a start-up is the most difficult thing any human can willingly subject themselves to. Nothing about it is easy, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. The amount of growth that comes with the challenge, and the reward that comes from the success make all of the risk and chaos worthwhile.
We’ve been impressed with Game Changing Fuel, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Game Changing Fuel (GCF) is a special business. I’ve operated many hustles in my life, but never received the amount of market validation we’ve received with GCF. New sports teams reach out to us weekly – our client list and business continues to grow at a remarkable pace. What we do in the sports nutrition world was completely new when we launched, and now big industry players are launching copycat segments to try and replicate our visible success. GCF specializes in providing professional athletes and sports teams with top-notch culinary solutions, from highly customized meal preps to performance-based catering solutions and private/executive chef staffing.
-For athletes, we’ve engineered a meal plan that is entirely custom-built around their individual, specific dietary needs to help them unlock their maximum potential through expert-crafted Michelin-level meals. Our cooking techniques and macronutrient deployment protocols help them train harder, recover faster, and avoid injury. From each ingredient to the way we prepare and cook our meals, everything we’ve put into our meal plan was designed to help athletes achieve the most out of their careers. The meal plan doesn’t only serve professional athletes, though. Many high-powered business executives have joined our meal plan, also looking to unlock peak performance in their own lives. Our anti-inflammatory meals help business executives power through long days, minimizing mental fatigue and maximizing their output potential. When operating at the highest levels, whether in business or in sport, the fuel we put into our bodies can make a massive difference and we strive to provide our clients with the best of the best.
-For professional sports teams, we offer a suite of solutions to help their nutrition departments operate with ease and reliability all over the country. From staffing high-caliber performance chefs in their team facilities and kitchens, to providing catering for training days, game days, and travel days, GCF is a trusted and dependable arm of dozens of professional sports teams across every major league, as well as minor leagues and collegiate sports. We work in tandem with Delta Airlines to provide robust in-flight meals for teams featuring healthy sweet treats and decadent meal options such as lamb chops, wagyu steaks, and sushi. We work directly with over half of the MLB teams, providing game day catering and in-flight catering whenever they visit one of our cities. We currently service 8 MLB cities with plans to double that number over the next 12 months. We don’t just work with MLB, though. We work directly with sports teams across every league to handle in-flight catering, catering in stadiums and training complexes, and chef staffing needs. We’ve worked with teams from the NFL, NBA, MLS, NHL, WNBA, NWSL, MiLB, and NCAA.
Any big plans?
Our plan with GCF is to expand nationwide to provide our robust offerings in every major sports city, as well as smaller hubs to continue servicing Minor League Baseball and collegiate sports. Our immediate focus is on opening new kitchens in major sports cities, though, such as New York, LA, Boston, and Chicago. I don’t foresee us making any major changes to our offerings as of now – what we have is working really well. We were the first company to bring what we do to the market and are almost ahead of our time with the offerings we have, so we are set up to continue our services for at least the next few years, but the business landscape is always evolving, and so will we!
For the Chef Adam brand I’m planning on launching a few exciting things including a product line of spices, marinades, and sauces. I also have been working on a pop-up restaurant concept that I believe will be the first pop-up to win a Michelin star. Michelin currently doesn’t give stars to pop-ups but I can see this changing as the dynamics of food concepts evolve. I believe the concept we are putting together with some of the brilliant chefs on my team will be incredibly impactful.
Pricing:
- Private bookings start at $2500
- Meal plans start at $35 per meal
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chefadamserota.com & www.gamechangingfuel.com
- Instagram: @chefadamserota and @gamechangingfuel
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhserota/
Image Credits
Headshot – David H. Roth
Photo with Von Miller – Josh Goldberg
the rest are photos taken on my phone!
