Born from a real kitchen.

In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Diogo Borges and his cousin Frederico Neves started delivering something they couldn’t find anywhere else: vegan food that was practical, nutritious, and genuinely tasted good. Diogo came from tourism. Frederico flew planes. Neither had run a food business before.

By January 2021, deliveries had grown into a physical store in Parede, Portugal’s first vegan butcher shop of its kind. Chef Luccas Paixão joined the kitchen soon after, and the plant-based range grew from there: burgers, meals, snacks, and sweets. For Luccas, cooking this way was never a trend to adopt. It was how he grew up eating, his family cooked with vegetables, plant protein, and spices as a matter of course, long before he ran professional kitchens like Boshq, at the Mercure Lisboa Almada. That’s still the standard every recipe is built to: not an approximation of meat, a dish that was never missing anything to begin with.

People kept coming back. Then they brought someone else. National press took notice early, Time Out and Portugal’s biggest morning show both featured the store as something new in Portugal’s food scene, and a second location followed in Cascais. Then restaurants and supermarkets started asking for the same thing.

That demand for something bigger is what brought new ownership to the table. In February 2026, Mabílio de Albuquerque, together with a group of partners acquired a majority stake in ASÖKA. Mabílio founded Nata Pura in 2014, starting with a single product and a plan to take it far beyond Portugal. Today, Nata Pura is sold in 38 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, on the shelves of Costco, Pret a Manger, Domino’s Pizza, and Paul Bassett in Korea. His ambition was never just to sell a product. It was to make people ask for a Nata Pura by name, the way they already do in South Korea, not just a pastel de nata.

The plan for ASÖKA follows the same logic: take a product people already love, and get it onto shelves and menus well beyond where it started.