If you don’t have hope, what do you have?
That’s the mindset Elizabeth Raymond recently adopted for NoBull, the vegetarian burger and brand she launched almost a decade ago with her mother, Crissanne, and her sister, Heather.
Crissanne, a “wickedly talented” chef and caterer, raised her children to be cautious about what they were consuming, and created homemade veggie burgers based on her own mother’s lentil soup recipe. “It was a big treat when mom made a batch [of veggie burgers] for us,” says Raymond, who was one of six children. “People wouldn’t remember her name, but they did remember her as the veggie burger lady.”
Fast forward to 2011: Raymond was finishing graduate school at UVA and bartending at the now-defunct Blue Light Grill downtown, her sister owned a massage therapy practice, and Raymond’s mother was enjoying her new role as grandmother. But Raymond and her family had always wondered about marketing their mother’s veggie burger, and the timing seemed right, so they pitched NoBull to Raymond’s food industry connections.
“Veggie burgers were just starting to come to the market and just did not compare to mom’s recipe,” Raymond says.
Her chef friends began putting the burgers on their menus, and Raymond landed a spot at City Market, which introduced her to key connections at Bodo’s Bagels and Charlottesville’s Whole Foods Market. Little by little, the brand grew—the burger was picked up by dozens of Whole Foods stores in the mid-Atlantic, 60 Krogers in Virginia, and half of Wegmans 100-plus stores on the East Coast.
Raymond thought 2020 was going to be her year. The nationwide brand was about to enter into its seed-funding stage to raise capital from investors. Her team—a “family unit,” she calls them—was expanding, working on semi-automated production processes, and seeking to scale the company.
“We had great projections for the year,” says Raymond. But as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Raymond watched her business “totally halt.” The company lost 90 percent of its food service revenue, as restaurants, breweries, and universities shuttered.
“I felt a sheer panic toward what was going to happen. …Mom and I were looking at each other and saying, ‘What are we going to do?’”
So Raymond did what many entrepreneurs are forced to do at some point, global pandemic or not: She pivoted. Her employees began following strict social-distancing guidelines, wearing personal protective equipment, and performing increased cleaning procedures. The company started providing meals to the Boys & Girls Club, The Haven, and Feed the Frontline.
“For us, food is love,” says Raymond. “We have to take care of our community because they’re taking care of us.”
For nearly two years, Raymond has worked with Tara Eavey of 4P Foods and the Local Food Hub to increase NoBull’s distribution and customer base.
“I have seen local small businesses and farms go from thriving and fruitful, to an entity that is struggling to make it from week to week with non-existent sales,” Eavey says of the pandemic’s impact. When the COVID-19 crisis first began, 4P Foods realized it could serve farmers and small business owners like Raymond by continuing to order as much product as possible. Because of that shift, Eavey recently coordinated one of the organization’s largest orders of NoBull Burgers for its CSA members.
For now, Raymond can breathe a little easier. Her production team has better access to PPE, for example. And NoBull just expanded into two new markets—a natural foods store in Michigan, and Whole Foods in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It’s a region Raymond had been trying to break into for years.
“Our retail sales are spiking, especially in the frozen foods category, since everyone is staying home and packing their freezer. Through all of this, we’re still producing,” Raymond says.
And it’s Raymond’s method of safe, organic food production that the COVID-19 crisis has brought to the forefront of many shoppers’ minds. In April, over 100 poultry and meat processing plants owned by corporations like Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, and Perdue Farms reported nearly 5,000 coronavirus cases. By the end of April, prices for meat and other animal-based food products had jumped by at least 8 percent.
Those numbers didn’t surprise Raymond; she hopes the crisis will remind consumers that what they put in their bodies matters. “I hope these events will guide people’s shopping behaviors towards ingredients they can pronounce, farmers or owners they know, and putting a face to a name and how all those things matter,” she says.
Raymond believes nourishment is about finding a balance and eating intuitively. That’s always been her story, and it isn’t over yet. She feels confident that NoBull will be back on menus when restaurants are ready to reopen, and she takes pride in NoBull’s growth and grit in spite of the fragility and fear affecting consumer’s decisions. Pandemic or not, she still has big plans.