Gokela: Healthy Fast Casual Restaurant

In 2010, Dan Durda noticed a gap in the Latin American market for healthy food. As an athelete and lover of healthy food, moving to South America was difficult, as it was a struggle to find anything healthy to eat when on the go. Unfortunately, the lack of options led to substantial weight gain, depleted energy levels, and an overall lack of clarity. Even after working harder at the gym and still not feeling like himself, he set out to find the answers in the hope of getting back to normal. He quickly realized that all his gym efforts were only solving 20% of the problem, while the remaining 80% was directly related to nutrition. Further research uncovered all the unsavory effects of a poor diet over time, and he was shocked. After speaking with several people in the community he realized he wasn’t alone. Everyone he spoke to was suffering or had someone close to them suffering in some way from an improper diet. It was clear that something needed to be done to improve himself and those around him. Dan set out to meet as many nutritionists and industry experts as possible to create a concept that would make healthy living easy, fun and delicious. Although this sounded easy at the time, he quickly realized that there’s an infinite amount of personal requirements, objectives, cravings, special diets, food allergies, and generally fussy people out there. To deal with this diversity, he developed a system that would involve customers in the design of their product to ensure they always get what they want, and quickly.

In 2011, Gokela (Go Bananas in Hindi), opened its doors with a vision of helping the world be healthy, one bite at a time.