Nicole Bernard Dawes, 52, has spent nearly 25 years building food and beverage businesses — but her journey started even earlier. She spent her childhood observing her mom run a health food store and watching her dad start Cape Cod potato chips, a kettle-cooked potato chip company. 

“The whole reason he started Cape Cod potato chips was because of the products that my mom had in her store,” Dawes tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “He didn’t understand why you couldn’t create traditional-tasting snacks that had clean ingredients.”

Dawes says she took her dad’s philosophy one step further and built a career out of creating organic products that tasted like their conventional counterparts. She started her career in management consulting, then joined her dad’s company, running the marketing department. 

“I loved it,” Dawes says. “I recognized immediately that this is definitely what I wanted to do.”

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Dawes then struck out on her own and founded Late July Organic Snacks in 2003 at the age of 29. She built up the food company, which makes organic chips and salsa, to $100 million in annual sales.

In 2014, Snyder’s-Lance acquired an 80% majority stake in Late July Organic Snacks. Later, in 2018, The Campbell’s Company acquired Late July along with other brands as part of its $4.7 billion acquisition of Snyder’s-Lance.

After selling Late July, Dawes was intent on finding the next opportunity to bring organic products to the market. She turned to beverages. 

In 2020, Dawes founded Nixie, a beverage brand that takes a “cleaner classics” approach to diet soda — a $10.8 billion market. Nixie Organic Zero Sugar Sodas are USDA-certified organic, have zero calories and are sweetened with organic stevia leaf extract.

Nixie immediately ran into problems. The brand hit stores a month before the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown. The company was about to go to its first trade show in March 2020 and had retailer appointments set up, but all of those plans came to a screeching halt. 

“As an entrepreneur, you’re just waking up and figuring out who your most injured patients are, and that’s the problem you’re solving,” Dawes says. “During Covid, on the one hand, it was so much worse, but on the other hand, everyone was in it together.”

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Despite those initial hurdles, Nixie persevered. Since launch, it has expanded to 11,000 retailers, including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway and Ralphs, and secured $27 million in new funding. The brand hit a $50 million run rate this summer and is on track to double that growth next year. Run rate refers to a rough estimate of a company’s annual earnings based on monthly or quarterly financial data. 

Dawes says putting the taste of the products first was her key to unlocking Nixie’s growth.

“We would never launch a product that we didn’t think was delicious,” Dawes says.

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Dawes drinks around four Nixie sodas a day, and calls the Classic Cola zero-sugar soda one of her “proudest” research and development moments. Nixie is her chance to drink all of the soda she never got to have as a kid, she says.

Dawes also says entrepreneurs have to be “relentless” in pursuing growth. There’s never a moment when they can pause because there is always going to be a new challenge or competitor. 

“I really do believe that success is tied almost directly to your ability to persevere and never stop,” Dawes says. “You just learn that the sun will rise tomorrow and you’re going to figure it out because you have to.”

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