It Ain't Over (31 page)

A few days later, Anna officially declared herself a vegetarian. “I don’t want to be a part of killing animals.” Veronica wanted to honor her feelings but worried how she’d get her to eat foods she wasn’t used to, like lentils, beans, and other vegetables, to make sure she would have a nutritionally balanced diet.

So Veronica began looking online for meatless recipes, reading ingredient labels and visiting health food stores. “It was one of the many times I’ve realized that you can learn a lot from your kids. They have this simple, innocent wisdom that we often lose as we grow up.”

What Veronica discovered from her research was that the simpler the meal, the more her kids (she also had a preschooler and toddler) liked it. Breakfast might be oatmeal with sliced fruit and dinner some baby spinach, rice, hummus, and crackers.

“I remember one night our friends came over, saw my kids having dinner and were like, ‘Your kids will eat that? We just left our kids with a plate of mac and cheese and hot dogs.’ It made me realize that even though I wasn’t creating gourmet meals for my kids, they were leaps ahead of where a lot of kids were in terms of nutrition.”

While mealtimes sailed relatively smoothly, packing Anna’s school lunch every day proved trickier, as the traditional bologna or tuna sandwiches were now clearly off-limits. “And there was only so much peanut butter and jelly she could eat,” Veronica says. At that time, it was difficult to find packaged
foods in her local grocery that tasted good, gave Anna all the nutrients she needed, and were easy to toss in a lunch box.

Veronica’s solution came through experimentation. One evening while she was trying out a new dessert recipe—a piecrust made of dates, almonds, and a little bit of salt and cinnamon—she decided to mix in some cocoa powder, too. “It tasted like a brownie,” she says—and her kids gave it a thumbs-up.

“So I began to think like a sneaky mom,” Veronica says. “What else could I hide in this newfound ‘brownie’ that would be good for my kids’ lunch boxes? I thought about Anna’s needs as a vegetarian, so I substituted walnuts for some of the almonds to get in the omega 3 fats and added brown rice protein.” Then Veronica took a reindeer cookie cutter, reshaped it into a rectangle, punched out bars from the rolled-out dough, wrapped each one in waxed paper, and stored them in the freezer. The next morning, she put one in Anna’s lunch box, knowing that by the time the school lunch hour came, the defrosted bar would be soft and chewy.

“That did the trick!” Veronica says. “It ended up being my sandwich replacement, and Anna loved it. It was filling but better than a sandwich because it was nutritious and had everything I wanted to put into my kids.”

Buoyed by her success, Veronica started trying out different variations on her invention, adding high-antioxidant fruits like dried cherries and cranberries. “I would pulverize everything in the food processor so my kids couldn’t see chunks of stuff,” she says. “You know how kids are, they tend to pick out things that are bigger than a fingernail. I threw a lot away until I got the texture and taste down to where I wanted them.”

Then Veronica started widening her consumer base. When she was the “snack mom” at school, she’d bring in a batch of the food bars, or take them along to parties. “Everybody seemed to love them. They said the cocoa ones
tasted exactly like brownies. They couldn’t believe they weren’t baked in a pan with eggs and sugar.”

As Veronica continued to get raves over the next year, she started to wonder: Wouldn’t other moms want these healthy snacks for
their
kids? In the back of her mind, she could hear her dad’s voice: “That’s a million-dollar idea!” A physician with an entrepreneur’s mind, her father was always coming up with revolutionary ideas and taught Veronica how to think outside the box. “Because of Dad, I was always coming up with ideas for what I thought would be innovative products, and I thought this one might just work.”

So she did it. In 2005, Veronica brought a sample to a friend of a friend who owned a nearby bakery and had turned part of it into a manufacturing plant for Kellogg’s. He looked at one of Veronica’s bars, opened it, tasted it, then leaned over his desk and looked her in the eye:

“I would never tell anybody in a million years to get into the food business, but I think you have something here.”

Those words were just what Veronica wanted to hear, even though she knew the odds were stacked against her.

“It’s a cutthroat business,” she says. “And I had heard that 99 percent of new food products fail. But the fact that he was encouraging was huge to me.”

“So what do I do next?” Veronica asked her new mentor; and, on the spot, he gave her a crash course in how to proceed: Send a bar away to an expert to get its nutritional breakdown; connect with an ingredient broker to save money by buying in bulk; and, most important, find a company to manufacture the bars.

Easier said than done. Despite her efforts to engage an eager manufacturer, no one was interested—unless she wanted to produce at least 50,000 bars. Still, she made call after call, hoping to talk some factory owner into working with her, even promising to give them her business if she grew.

“I wanted to make this happen so badly. So I decided I would do a little something every day to try to push it forward. The way I figured it, if I didn’t do this now, I’d always wonder what could have been. I had to at least try.”

Nine months later, while chatting with a salesman from a California farm where she had bought her dates, she was introduced to a small, family-owned and -operated food manufacturer in Oregon that was interested in giving her bars a try.

By now, Veronica had dubbed her company “Pure” (“That word really described what I was trying to do: create something pure and wholesome for my family”); and with $10,000 from savings and a $50,000 bank line of credit to get started, she watched the first 4,500 bars—chocolate, cherry cashew, and apple cinnamon—come down the conveyor belt. “I could have stood there all day,” she says, “it was so exciting.”

Stuffing as many bars as she could into her suitcase, Veronica flew home to wait for a truck to deliver the rest to her tiny office. Her brother-in-law called her crazy: “You made 5,000 bars and you don’t have a single customer?” But Veronica wasn’t worried. “The customers will come,” she said.

To make sure of that, Veronica went door-to-door. Hitting the streets in her SUV—with boxes of Pure bars packed all around the kids’ cars seats—she
delivered samples to every natural food store, coffee shop, and juice bar within an hour of her home. “At every single store,” she says, “they took one bite and said, ‘We’ll take a case.’ ” And one month later, she got the break she’d been dreaming about: The CEO of the Meijer grocery store chain read an article about Pure bars in the local paper and wanted to stock them in all 200 of his stores.

“I called my manufacturer and said the four most exciting words of my life: ‘I need more bars!’ ”

For the first time since spooning that experimental dollop of cocoa into her home recipe, Veronica now knew this thing was for real. With her older two children in school, she started sending her little one to day care two days a week so she’d have the time—from eight a.m. to three p.m.—to contact distributors who stock food-store shelves. She also worked during the kids’ nap times, after they went to bed at night, and, of course, on weekends.

“I was a still a full-time mom,” Veronica says. “I was really adamant about being present with my kids as much as possible.”

Trade shows took Veronica’s business to the next level. She’d pay a friend a couple hundred dollars to come along and they’d set up a table where the floor space was cheapest—in the back corner near the restrooms. Although the spot was less than glamorous, Veronica knew that everyone has to go to the bathroom. “And as they came by I’d have my chance at them. By nature, I’m not outgoing, but I would grab people, smile, and stick a sample in their face. It was nuts.”

But the effort paid off. “A lot of those buyers were looking for the next cool thing,” she says. “My bars were minimally processed, organic, and had never been heated,” at a time when “raw foods” were becoming a big thing.

A little more than four years after making her first batch of bars in her kitchen, Veronica had placed her product in thousands of natural food stores across the country, including the very important Whole Foods chain.

“By 2008, my sales were about three-quarters of a million dollars,” she says.

But Veronica was still a one-woman show, handling the finances, inventory, marketing, and even hand-delivering shipments to local customers.

“It was exhausting,” she recalls. “I needed capital, people, and experience. I had very little knowledge of how things worked in the grocery world or what my next steps needed to be.”

So when Promax Nutrition, a California maker of high-protein energy bars, offered to partner with her in 2008, it was a deal she couldn’t refuse. “They had a sales team, accountants, operations managers, order takers—all the jobs I was doing alone,” she says. “It freed me up to concentrate on marketing the brand and growing the company.”

Veronica agreed to a deal that was incentive-driven: The bigger and more successful her company got, the more she would earn. “I had people say, ‘You should just get the big check right now,’ ” she says. “But I had so much confidence and faith in my company that I wasn’t afraid to take this deal—and I was right.”

Today, Veronica maintains a share of the company, sits on the board, and okays every major decision that has to do with Pure.

“We have grown the company by over 50 percent a year since Promax came on board,” she says.

Pure is now also sold at Trader Joe’s, comes in nine flavors, and has expanded to include a new line of ancient grains bars and fruit and veggie strips. The best part of her job, she says, is hearing from customers. She gets daily emails saying, “These are a lifesaver!” or “My kid will eat two!”

“Even if all of this ended tomorrow,” Veronica says, “knowing that Pure helps people eat better and feel better means the world to me. It’s fun, rewarding, and a huge blessing to grow a business that enriches people’s lives and gives back to the community in a meaningful way.”

Laura Treloar, 42

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

I
n college, Laura Treloar was the artsy, tattooed girl who vowed that she would spend her life as an artist, making art every day. But that’s not quite the way it worked out.

“The day I got out of art school, I slipped into a panic, asking myself, ‘Oh my God, what am I
really
going to do?’ ” So she enrolled at the University of British Columbia to get a teaching degree.

There, at a pub near campus, she met a six-foot, four-inch, dark-haired, blue-eyed lifeguard, also studying to be a teacher. His name was Dave. It took a year for their first date to happen, but ten months later the two were a solid couple, and they bought a small, dilapidated heritage house in Vancouver and began restoring it to its original condition.

Shortly after their dream cottage was complete, the punk-rock-girl-turned-high-school-art-teacher and the high-school-gym-teacher-and-basketball-coach married. For five years they worked, adopted rescue dogs (three) and
cats (two), and tended multiple fish tanks. During all that time they had exactly one fight. “It was so stupid,” Laura recalls. “It was about which restaurant to go to, and at one point Dave just picked me up and held me upside down over the sidewalk until we both started laughing.”

Then one day Laura, who’d never thought she wanted children, was on her way to pick up a third cat and had an epiphany. “I realized that it wasn’t really a cat I wanted. I wanted a baby.” She went home to tell Dave. “He literally started jumping up and down with joy. ‘I
knew
you’d change your mind!’ ”

After struggling to conceive, Laura had three miscarriages, but finally Austin arrived. “We called him the lucky swimmer,” she says, laughing. Six months later, lucky swimmer number two, Michaelie, was conceived—and suddenly the couple who had given homes to cats and dogs and now kids was in need of a bigger place.

Their second fixer-upper was a 100-year-old, apocalyptic mess. “Rats. Bedbugs. Everything you can imagine was wrong with it,” says Laura. “People would walk in and say
What have you done?!
And we’d laugh and say, ‘You gotta have the
vision
!’ ”

Their common work ethic and Dave’s “Failure is not an option” motto kicked in. Dave lived and worked in the house for months until it was habitable enough for Laura, Austin, and Michaelie to move in for good. The family soldiered on and, room by room, the restoration began to take shape.

Less than a year later, baby Aiden came along. Feeling the financial pinch of raising three children on two teachers’ salaries, Laura also started tutoring to bring in extra cash, but it was too stressful. So Dave suggested she try something creative instead and urged her to do her jewelry-making on the side.

A few years earlier, Laura’s school had asked her to add a jewelry-making class to her art curriculum, and she jumped at the chance. She had always
fantasized about taking up jewelry-making so she eagerly checked out some books on the subject from the local library to keep one step ahead of her students.