Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristen Thibeault.
A Female Founder, Kristen launched Nybll in 2015. Since its inception, the Oakland-based corporate foodservice has grown into a multi-million-dollar company, expanding across California with kitchens in the Bay Area and Southern California. As stage-3, double cancer survivor, Kristen credits a clean, plant-forward diet for her speedy recovery and second chance at fulfilling her dream to become a chef. Drawing from this imperative life experience, Kristen integrates this health-minded practice into Nybll’s menu development to disrupt the corporate meal service industry. As a result, she has curated more than 1,000 nutritionally dense recipes to fuel Fortune 500 companies and world champion athletes. Kristen’s devotion to healthy eating does not end with workplace food service but extends to the company’s charitable counterpart —The Patra Project— a 501(c)(3) through which Nybll has donated more than 100,000 meals and counting to children in underserved communities in an effort to resolve food inequality.
Kristen studied nutritional science at Stanford University and focuses on high-performance foods using clean, plant-focused ingredients to curate globally diverse meals. She also holds a French culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu and is trained in Ayurvedic, Paleo, and Macrobiotic cooking techniques.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Managing rapid growth is a great problem to have, but it’s been like drinking from a fire hose. In the past year, Nybll has nearly quadrupled in size and output, and continues to grow.
What are you known for?
We believe access to beautiful, healthy, nutritious food is a human right shared by all – whether world champion professional athlete; tech futurist; unicorn CEO; or at-risk child living in a food desert, we are relentless in our commitment to fueling peak performance in the locker room, the break room, and the inner city preschool playroom using the cleanest, most sustainably sourced ingredients in our plant-forward delicious meals that satisfy cravings, heal bodies, restore dignity, and unleash the unlimited potential in everyone we feed – and we won’t stop until everyone has a seat at the table.
What are you most proud of as a company?
Nybll is proud to serve top-performing athletes along with over 10% of all U.S. based unicorn companies. Chef Kristen is the only chef in the world that can say she served four world champion teams at the same time: NFL, MLB, NBA, and the Rugby World Cup. Nybll believes it is everyone’s right to have access to clean healthy food, Supporting this belief, the company redistributes healthy food to those in need through its 501c3, The Patra Project. Catering is notorious for copious waste and while other caterers toss out unserved meals, Nybll’s food recovery program yields hundreds of donations every day. On any given day, our chefs cook and present the same clean menu to all walks of life, whether it is served to MVPs of major league sports, the titans of tech, or the homeless living in tent cities in Oakland. We are proud to do our part to help resolve food inequality each day.
What sets you apart from others.
1. Performance Food with Flavor: a high-performance meal provider, Nybll successfully targets MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL and Fortune 500 companies she caters for.
2. Unrivaled Nutritional Science and Varied, Extensive Menus: Nybll has developed an unmatched menu catalog of 1,000 recipes and 150 global menus are designed to fuel peak performance. They all avoid the use of gluten, dairy, and refined sugars.
3. Proprietary Software: Nybll developed its own software enabling service on a national scale. Nybll orchestrates the production, delivery, and presentation of more than 5,000 meals per day across all markets.
4. Feeding Those in Need: Nybll launched its own 501c3, The Patra Project in 2017, which donates meals from the production of daily meal service to at-risk kids and families in Oakland. Through this program, meals are donated to underserved communities daily.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I was raised in a small farming community on the great plains of Minnesota. Two hours to the nearest big city – the “finer” things in life felt a world away. My parents are second-generation Scandinavian Lutherans and a connection to the land, an unwavering work ethic, and how to make a killer church hotdish were imparted on me from an early age. I was detasseling corn in the summer heat by the time I was 9 years old. I grew up helping my grandfather tend to his strawberry bushes and green beans. He taught me to bait my pole and fish over a small hole in the ice and be still while we waited patiently in a duck blind for the Mallards to fly overhead as the sun crested a crisp autumn sky.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nybll.com/
- Phone: 415.617.9691
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nybll.eats/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nybll/
Image Credit:
Nybll
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