On any given Monday, while much of Portland is still asleep, Noah Tranten is already deep into his day. By 4 a.m., he’s in the kitchen, cooking vegetables and setting the pace for a week that will stretch late into the night. By the time he finishes plating meals, locking up, and heading home, it’s often after 9 p.m. The next day brings deliveries. Then menu planning. Then sourcing. Then prep. Then cooking hundreds of pounds of meat. And then, he does it all again.
“It sounds freaking crazy when you say it out loud,” he admits. “But I’ve been doing it for a long time now.”
Topset Meals, Tranten’s heat-and-eat meal service company, approaches its 10-year mark this year. It’s a milestone built without advertising budgets or outside investment, but through consistency, word of mouth, and a relentless commitment to doing things the right way. Of course, Tranten isn’t doing it entirely alone. Over the years, he’s built a small, loyal team— including his partner Amanda—that plates, preps, delivers, and helps keep the operation moving each week.
Ten years ago, there was no polished pitch deck or mapped-out growth strategy. There was simply frustration Tranten couldn’t shake. He graduated from the University of New England with a degree in exercise science, imagining a future in strength coaching at the highest level. “What they don’t tell you,” he says, “is that you either go to PA school or get your doctorate or you try to figure something else out.” Without the resources to pursue more schooling, he started training clients and quickly noticed a disconnect. People were working hard in the gym, but their nutrition told a different story. “I’d have them do food diaries and I’d think, you guys are grown adults,” he says, laughing. “You’re having frozen breakfast sandwiches and protein bars all day.”
Food had always been central to Tranten’s life. His family owned what was once the largest independently owned grocery store in New England. His father worked there for 45 years while his mother ran food operations at the University of Maine Farmington for decades. After school, Tranten and his siblings were dropped off at the store and allowed to choose whatever they wanted for dinner as long as they cooked it themselves. “I was eating like royalty,” he says. “But I was cooking everything.”
In college, he brought a rice cooker and an electric griddle into his dorm room (technically against the rules). He would hang the griddle partly out the window so he could cook chicken or burgers without setting off the smoke alarm. On weekends, he packed his dorm with friends and cooked breakfast for everyone. Feeding people felt natural. It also felt meaningful.
So when personal training started to feel limiting, Tranten pivoted. He began cooking meals for a few clients to bridge the gap between workouts and results. They loved it. Word spread. He made more. In the early days, he’d pack up unlabeled Tupperwares and head to barber shops and gyms, handing out meals like edible business cards. “I’d tell them, ‘I think I’m going to start a meal service. Let me know what you think.’”
Topset’s first “commercial kitchen” was actually the dining room of Tranten’s Park Ave apartment. He gutted it, bought folding tables from Sam’s Club, hauled Craigslist refrigerators up the stairs, and got to work. Deliveries were handled with help from a friend who owned a taxi company. It was scrappy and barely compliant. It worked—that is, until his landlord discovered the operation.
The next move was into a shared kitchen at Woodfords Club with a friend running a food truck, where Tranten learned how little he actually knew about cooking at scale. “I didn’t know how to cook in volume,” he says. “I’d just watch how stations were set up, how food was stored. I was always in the way.” He learned by observation, absorbing rhythm and process from more experienced chefs.
Then that space shut down after a fire department visit revealed the kitchen lacked a proper hood system. Suddenly, he had nowhere to cook. So he went outside.
For nearly three years, Tranten grilled and cooked under pop-up tents through Maine winters. “It could be pouring rain. We could be having a nor’easter. Easy-ups collapsing on top of me,” he says. He strung up Christmas lights so he could see at night. He kept going because stopping was not an option. “I’m an incredibly stubborn individual,” he says. “Once I find something that I really like, I just really love it.”
That stubbornness has defined Topset’s growth. The company has never spent money on advertising. Every new customer has come through word of mouth. “My dad always said pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,” Tranten says. “You can be the hog who’s always wanting more and more and more, and it won’t work out. Or you can grow slowly and organically.”
He chose slow. Not because he lacks ambition, but because he refuses to sacrifice quality. The weekly menu changes constantly. Garnishes are chopped just before plating so they stay fresh. Proteins are handled carefully. Sauces are made from scratch. Tranten personally writes the menus, calculates the macros, and types up the descriptions, often finishing late at night. “I’m absurdly Type A,” he admits. “I want everything from A to Z to be presented to the absolute best of my ability.”
That level of involvement comes at a cost. Sundays are meat days, with six to eight hundred pounds of protein cooked for the week. Tuesdays stretch late into the night as he writes the next menu. Wednesdays and Saturdays have recently been devoted to building out Topset’s new permanent space, much of it done by hand because hiring everything out was not financially possible. It is, by any measure, an enormous investment of time and energy.
But for Tranten, the work is less about productivity and more about purpose. “I love being able to be a part of so many people’s lives that I haven’t even met yet,” he says. Food, he believes, is deeply personal. It builds connection in ways few other things can.
Tranten is candid about why people struggle to nourish themselves consistently. “We’re so motivated and scared of not working enough,” he says. “We say we don’t have the time.” Then he smiles. “Everyone has the time.”
He understands the barriers. Cooking takes effort. Cleaning takes effort. Fast food is convenient and satisfying in the moment. But he believes many people underestimate how dramatically better they could feel with consistent nourishment.
“Once you get a taste of what it feels like to feel good, that’s a turning point,” he says. “You only have one body. You deserve to treat it a certain way.” Watching his father navigate stage two Parkinson’s has sharpened that perspective. “It’s a blessing that we have a body capable of a lot more than we use it for,” he says. “At some point, you don’t want to look back and say, I wish I took better care of myself.”
As someone currently navigating life as a postpartum mom, I can attest to that firsthand. On days when cooking feels like an Olympic sport and sleep is in short supply, having Topset meals in the fridge has meant eating something genuinely delicious instead of whatever’s quickest. The convenience is real, and so is the quality.
With Topset celebrating its 10-year milestone and preparing to move into a fully built-out space of its own, Tranten’s definition of success hasn’t changed much. It isn’t about how many meals are sold. It isn’t about scaling to multiple cities. It’s about the emails, the quiet thank-yous, the customers who say the food helped them through a chaotic stretch of life.
“The level of support,” he says softly. “That’s what means the most.”
Ten years in, the mornings are still early. The days are still long. The standards are still high. But the energy remains the same as it was in that dining room kitchen: Cook good food. Do it consistently. Take care of people. Trust that the investment—in time, in energy, in health—will compound.
“It’s super hard,” Tranten says. “But it’s rewarding beyond any type of measurement.”
“I love being able to be a part of so many people’s lives that I haven’t even met yet.”