Meet Our Founder: A Note From Shaun Wagner

Before Prepd, I'd already built a handful of brands across some very different niches — events, clothing, marketing tech, sales, and content creation. I even went to film school along the way. I've always been an entrepreneur, always chasing the next thing that might actually work. Every one of those experiences taught me something, and all of those skills tie into every part of what I've built with Prepd. But food was always the thread underneath everything else. I've always believed in eating well, in fuelling your body with the right nutrition so you feel good and look good. And cooking was never just a task in my family — it was the thing that brought us together, no matter the occasion.

Where it started

A lot of that comes from my mom. She was one of the most organised people I've ever known, raising three sons who were all sporty, active, always on the move — and somehow she always had meals ready to go for us. Watching her do that, keeping three athletic boys fed and fit without ever missing a beat, that's really where the idea for Prepd started. I wanted to build something that could do for people what she did for us: think ahead, so you don't have to.

Finding Jon

Food needed a face and a philosophy behind it, and that's where Jon comes in, our head chef. I didn't hire him off a résumé — I met him over a few months of visiting his café, again and again, just enjoying what he made. He had this warmth about him, this welcoming personality that made him easy to approach. Eventually I realised he was the answer to a question I'd been carrying: how do I find a chef who actually resonates with what I'm building?

How it works

Together, Jon and I developed the menu that's really the heart of Prepd. Here's the part people don't always expect: Prepd doesn't run its own kitchen. Instead, that menu is something cafés around Cape Town can buy into — using it to fill their off-peak hours with meal production, made from ingredients we supply and standards we set. Our drivers collect the finished meals straight from those kitchens, and everything runs through a business portal we built ourselves, so each café can track orders and manage what's coming in. The real challenge has always been consistency — making sure the meals hold to the same standard no matter which kitchen they came out of.

Where it's going

It's a model built to scale outward into new suburbs while genuinely supporting the local café businesses we partner with, rather than competing with them. And the dream sitting at the end of all of it is a flagship Prepd store — hopefully in Sea Point — a proper brick-and-mortar headquarters and cultural hub, hosting run clubs and daily cafeteria-style meals, the place where the whole model finally comes home.

Because at the end of the day, Prepd isn't just a meal prep company. We know how busy life has gotten — most people are stretched thin at work, without the time or energy to be cooking proper meals at home every night. That's exactly why being organised matters so much. We want to be your local cafeteria — the one genuinely taking care of you.

Having just turned twenty-six, building this has been as much about growing up alongside it as building it. You're not just prepped with meals. You're prepped in life.

— Shaun Wagner, Founder