LUHV Food offers delicious food with an inspiring origin story.
Let us introduce you to LUHV Food. With three restaurants and four retail products, this Immigrant-owned vegan deli dominates the Pennsylvania vegan scene! Keep reading to learn more about the company’s humble beginnings and Argentinian-inspired dishes.
Argentinian Immigrants Silvia and Daniel Lucci
Argentinian immigrants Silvia and Daniel Lucci own LUHV Food. The couple immigrated to the United States 35 years ago. About 20 years later, they adopted a plant-based diet after Silvia suffered a stroke and Daniel battled high cholesterol. As a chef, Daniel experimented with plant-based ingredients, crafting flavorful meals like black bean burgers and chickpea tuna salad.
At the time, the Luccis owned a non-vegan restaurant and began introducing these plant-based items. Customers and relatives couldn’t get enough and by 2015, the family opened a factory to produce their vegan food products for retail. A year later, the first LUHV Food deli opened with the help of their children, Facundo, Gabriel, Marcello, and Julietta—who served as taste testers and tech consultants.
Courtesy of LUHV Foods
LUHV Food Vegan Deli
LUHV Food is now an award-winning manufacturing company with vegan delis in Hatboro, Philadelphia, and Point Breeze, Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia location is inside of Reading Terminal Market, marking it the first 100% vegan vendor in the historic food hall. All three LUHV storefronts offer a variety of deli classics, breakfast favorites, and grab-and-go meals and sides. Most of the menu items showcase some sort of Latin fare, like the Black Bean Plantain Poblano Burgers, Argentinian Empanadas, Cubanos, and more.
“Our culture is embedded in everything we do. We came to this country with strong hands, our culture, and many dreams. From the beginning, Daniel created food to nourish our family. [The food items] were not planned as products to be sold. They were rooted in Argentina’s flavors and traditions. In time, after opening several restaurants, he would interlace those flavors we brought from home with new ones from all the cultures we encountered in this country and through our travels. When we became vegans more than thirteen years ago, he infused all his new culinary vegan challenges with those flavors, thus developing unique, delicious, and nutritious foods,” Silvia told VegOut.
Courtesy of LUHV Foods
Vegan, Nutritious, Sustainable, and Plastic-Negative Products
In addition to its deli locations, LUHV offers Black Bean Burgers, Garbanzo Burgers, Energy Soup, Sweet Potato Jalapeno Soup, and Chickpea Tuna Salad in grocery stores across the Northeast. Retailers include Whole Foods, MOM’s Organic Market, Weavers Way, and more.
LUHV’s products are all vegan, nutritious, sustainable, and plastic-negative. “At LUHV, we help people enjoy wholesome lives while saving the planet by manufacturing cruelty-free vegan foods that are nutritionally healthy and mouthwatering. LUHV’s goal is to mainstream veganism, to bring it to every health-food desert, where everyone can access this way of living, which not only offers you a healthy future but a future with a purpose. When you exist as a vegan, it is a win-win-win: Your body gets nourished and cared for, the planet gets healed, and nothing needs to suffer for it. We believe we can change the world with LUHV,” Silvia shared.
Owners Daniel and Silvia Lucci with their son Courtesy of LUHV Food
What It’s Like to Be an Immigrant-Owned Business
Based on LUHV’s immense success, it’s hard to think the process was challenging. However, the nature of starting a business in the US as an immigrant is much more difficult than one would expect.
When asked what it’s like to be an immigrant-owned business, Silvia said, “In general, most immigrants come to this country looking for a future. We come without family or a support system. From the beginning, everything we did had to rely exclusively upon ourselves and our work. A mistake can seriously affect your business, so working 60 to 80 hours weekly is the modus operandi. In our particular case, we also come from Argentina, which follows a predominantly meat-food-based diet. Our families will feel criticized because we stopped eating meat. They literally could not understand it. It was … CULTURAL. In Argentina, food is part of every event you participate in. We celebrate anything and everything with food. Eventually, when they started trying the food Daniel created, they agreed that they could eat it if they had access to it. We now have many new vegan team members or partial ones in the family, especially when we shared many benefits related to our health and the ethical and environmental impact.”
For more information, visit LUHVFood.com and follow @luhvfood on Instagram.
