October 25, 2014
Nicole Culver ’06 answers the call for healthful living, food
Like many college students, Nicole Cestaro Culver ’06 initially struggled with the “freshman 15” and commitment to a fitness routine, but she soon learned how to handle the challenges of campus life by cooking for herself and exercising regularly.
Now, as a small business owner, health coach, and mother, she helps others maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet through her granola and snack bar company, Blissful Eats, and her blog.
Culver, who lives in South Hempstead, N.Y., said, “I really fell in love with baking and cooking” while she was working as an elementary special education teacher in Queens.
“My husband [Dan Culver ’04] loves to eat, but he wasn’t eating the healthiest and wasn’t eating breakfast,” she said. “I kept coming up with ways for him to eat breakfast.”
Her reputation as a health guru grew, and so she decided to start blogging to chronicle her baking successes. “I would always have friends and family calling for healthy recipes,” Culver said. “I started the blog as a way to record all of those things.” It expanded over time to include fitness and lifestyle topics, especially after her daughter was born in 2012.
After three years of teaching, Culver enrolled in an integrative nutrition school to become a certified health counselor and in 2010 started health coaching part time. She would work with people by phone or email and also would meet with them to show them how to bake healthier foods.
Culver left education in 2011, after her health coaching clients began asking if they could buy items from her.
“I started looking into how I could do the baking thing more seriously,” she said.
Culver spent Saturdays at yoga and pilates studios offering samples of a bunch of different products — granola bars, granolas — to determine what was popular and what kind of demand she could expect before getting into licensing, finding a commercial kitchen, and other tasks.
The startup costs were steep, but she got a microloan through a company working with the commercial kitchen and a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012.
Her family provided a lot of support. Her husband, an economics major at PC, helped her set up a limited liability corporation and other business tasks. Her uncle, an entrepreneur, offered advice on day-to-day responsibilities like keeping tax records. And her sister, Christine Cestaro ’11, helped watch Culver’s toddler so she could make phone calls and get work done.
“I set out to make a product that didn’t have any junk in it — no unrecognizable ingredients,” she said. “That was my goal, and I achieved it. Sure, it’s not going to be able to sit on a shelf for years and years, but I don’t want it to.”
Now she is selling gluten-free “boost bites” and several flavors of granola through her website, blissful-eats.com, as well as Amazon.com and stores such as T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods as well as others in New York, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The newest variety, “no nutty chocolate chip granola,” includes sunflower butter for people with nut allergies.
“I wanted to make a real food product that was easy, that you could eat when you’re out or when you’re home,” Culver said. “I just believe in real food. I think it should be more accessible to more people.”
