How Mr Potato’s founders built a $12m business tackling the fast food industry’s unhealthy stigma

Faced with a lack of choices when it came to healthy, affordable and nutritional takeaway, Mr Potato founders and in-real-life partners Jess Davis and Tyson Hoffmann came up with a tasty and simple solution — a modern spin on your traditional baked potato.

And it took only a matter of months from the entrepreneurs cooking up the idea to the doors of their first outlet opening. 

Ever since they got together in September 2018, Davis, a former model, and her partner Hoffmann, a 36er’s basketball player, have been hard at work on a mission to change the face of fast food in Australia and remove the negative health stigma of the good old fashioned, humble potato at the same time.

The idea for Mr Potato was born one month into Hoffmann and Davis’s relationship when Hoffmann mentioned to Davis in a passing comment that he would love to open a loaded potato store and wondered, “Why doesn’t anyone do this as an easy takeaway option?”. A few days later, Davis sent Hoffmann the Mr Potato logo, a mock menu and the start of a business plan. A few weeks later, the pair had secured their first location.