Today we’d like to introduce you to Marti Lieberman.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started Mac Mart in 2013 with a pink food truck, a Drexel degree, a borderline inappropriate love for mac & cheese and truly NO idea what I was doing. I was 23, scrappy as hell and pretty much just figured things out as they came at me… which, honestly, is still kind of the business model.
Somehow that little pink truck turned into 13+ years of Mac Mart. We opened our first brick-and-mortar in Rittenhouse, catered hundreds of weddings and events, landed on national TV, sold out on QVC four times, expanded into wholesale and vending and made more mac & cheese than I could ever attempt to calculate. My sister eventually joined me as my business partner, my husband got roped into the madness, and Mac Mart became a VERY family-run business.
At the end of 2025, we made the incredibly hard decision to close our Rittenhouse shop. After 13 years in business, I had to really ask myself what success actually looked like NOW — not what I thought it was supposed to look like when I was 23.
So, naturally, we pivoted. Again.
Today we operate Mini Mac Mart inside the Comcast Technology Center, cater all over Philly, work with and feature other awesome local food businesses and have figured out how to make Mac Mart smaller, smarter and a whole lot more sustainable for this stage of our lives.
The road from a pink food truck to where we are now has been anything but linear. There have been wins, failures, insane opportunities, plenty of “WTF are we doing?” moments and probably 900 pivots along the way. But I think being willing to pivot — without losing what made Mac Mart *Mac Mart* in the first place — is exactly why we’re still here.
Thirteen years later, I’m still figuring it out as I go. I’m just a lot better at figuring it out now… and there’s still a LOT of cheese involved.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth?! Absolutely not 😂. I don’t know a single small business owner who would describe the road that way, but Mac Mart has certainly given me a RUN for my money.
Over 13+ years, we’ve been robbed NINE times, made it through COVID, riots in Center City, food truck breakdowns, staffing nightmares, insane food cost increases and a work-from-home shift that basically obliterated the lunch business our Rittenhouse location was built around. And somewhere in there, I also managed to have a collective FIVE male business partners who, in one way or another, completely screwed me. Soooo… there have been some lessons learned.
I also started Mac Mart at 23, which meant I was quite literally growing up while trying to grow a business. I had to learn some things the very expensive way — who to trust, when to advocate for myself, when to walk away, when to pivot and, probably most importantly, that bigger does NOT always mean better.
Closing our Rittenhouse shop after almost a decade was probably the culmination of all of those lessons. From the outside, closing a location can look like failure. For me, it actually took more confidence and business experience to close that chapter than it ever took to open it. Philly had changed, the way people worked had changed, our business had changed and I had changed too.
There have been some insanely high highs and some “you literally cannot make this shit up” lows. But every single one taught me something and made me scrappier, smarter and much less afraid to change course.
At this point, I genuinely believe surviving IS a business skill. Being able to get knocked around, laugh about at least some of it, pivot for the 900th time and still genuinely love the business you started at 23? I’m pretty damn proud of that.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
At the simplest level, Mac Mart makes really freaking good mac & cheese. 😂 We take our signature seven-cheese mac and let people completely Mac it out with toppings, sauces and combinations that range from classic to borderline ridiculous. It’s indulgent, customizable, approachable and never takes itself too seriously.
But after 13+ years, I think what I’m most proud of is that Mac Mart has become so much more than the food.
We started as the Big Pink food truck and somehow created a brand that people genuinely recognize, remember and have grown up with in Philly. People who ate at our truck as Drexel students have hired us to cater their weddings, brought their kids into our shop and now come find us at our Mini Mac Mart. THAT is the stuff that still blows my mind.
We’ve always been scrappy, loud, a little shameless and very authentically ourselves. We’ve never had some massive marketing budget or corporate team behind us. A lot of what you see from Mac Mart is quite literally me, my sister or my husband with an iPhone, an idea and probably cheese somewhere on our clothing.
And I think that authenticity is what sets us apart. We don’t just say we’re a Philly small business — we operate like one. We collaborate with other local businesses, promote our friends, feature their products, hire local artists and creatives and genuinely believe there is room for all of us to win. Our new Mini Mac Mart is less than 100 square feet and somehow features products from multiple other Philly small businesses alongside ours. I’m insanely proud of that.
Brand-wise, I’m probably most proud that through food trucks, storefronts, catering, wholesale, vending and now our tiny little kiosk, Mac Mart has ALWAYS still felt like Mac Mart. The business model has changed about 900 times, but the personality AND missios never has.
We make mac & cheese, yes. But I think what we’ve really built is a little piece of Philly food culture that people feel connected to — and after everything this business has been through, the fact that people still see that pink logo and say, “OMG, MAC MART!” will never, ever get old.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
This isn’t exactly one specific childhood memory, but when I think about my childhood, my favorite part of it was being born to be my sister’s sister.
I genuinely had a beautiful childhood, and it’s something I will never take for granted. Of course there were the normal things that life brings — divorce, moving, changes, growing pains — but when I look back, I have beautiful memories all around. I was loved, I had fun, I felt safe and I was lucky in ways I probably didn’t fully understand at the time.
But the greatest gift in all of it was my sister.
When you’re a kid, you don’t really recognize how special it is to have your best friend built into your life from the very beginning. She was just… my sister. We grew up together, experienced all the changes together, annoyed the hell out of each other I’m sure, laughed together and made all of those childhood memories side by side.
Now as an adult, I can look back and realize how much better she made my childhood simply by being in it. And somehow, all these years later, I still get to go through life with that same person next to me — as my sister, my best friend and even my business partner.
So I don’t know if I have one favorite childhood memory. I think my favorite part of my childhood was getting to share the whole thing with her. I truly feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have had a best friend for my entire life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://macmartcart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themacmart/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheMacMart/
