Some of my earliest memories are the Sunday lunches that my Venetian grandmother used to cook for our family in her old-fashioned kitchen, at the heart of São Paulo city, in my native Brazil. I was the first granddaughter and proud to be her only assistant in the kitchen, blending egg yolks and olive oil by hand to make aioli, or shaping gnocchi with my little fingers. Little did she know that she was setting my direction and that I would choose to spend the rest of my life exploring the language of food.

I studied Food Engineering in college, worked in restaurants in a handful of countries, assisted cooking classes in the San Francisco Bay Area for a number of years, and worked with renowned chefs and photographers as an assistant food stylist and sous-chef. But all that experience only made me hungrier for a deeper and more intimate relationship with food – and that was what brought me to studying Holistic Nutrition and to start cooking bone broths as a business.

Bone broths are a staple of traditional cuisines, and definitely a powerful food that I recommend to my clients – young and old alike. Although bone broths have recently become very popular in the health food world – enjoying the public interest that once belonged to kale and kombucha – traditional cultures have been using them as a powerful healing and nurturing food for centuries.

My goal is to empower and inspire people to take their health on their own hand, eat well and learn to cook for themselves. My business has many aspect: I run a small culinary school for kids 5-8 years old, I coach families on nutrition and well-being and I make bone broth that is sold by chiropractors, acupuncturists and physicians.

Above all, I believe in integrity and connectedness and apply those principles to everything I do. I live in San Francisco, where I raise my daughter and belong to the local community.

My business guiding principle is to use food as a vehicle to empower and connect individuals, families, children and communities to themselves and the greater world around them. Our mission statement is to develop and market the most nutritious and best tasting bone broths in the local and regional markets and build a business that is founded on the three tenets of Integrity, Quality & Health.
I decided to start the business in March of 2015 when I realized that there was a need among my nutrition coaching clients to have easy access to high quality bone broth that would complement their diets. Around the same time I was asked by a chiropractor friend to make broths for her clients, and then I realized that there was a business opportunity there.
My customers are pregnant and lactating women, patients recovering or dealing with chronic diseases such as arthritis and cancer, and families looking for creating more nutritionally dense meals by incorporating bone broths in their cooking.
My goals for the business are to expand to a subscription model where customers get their monthly supply of bone broth through a direct subscription, through their CSA box, or they can purchase it at their practitioner’s offices. Currently I have three different health clinics that sell my broths and 2 subscription clients.
The part of the business I am most proud about is that I believe I am helping people take their health to their own hands by properly nourishing themselves.

I am planning to spend the loan on the following:
– upgrade my cooking equipment to all stainless steel pots and utensils; that will ensure a cleaner and healthier end product
– purchase a freezer to store finished bone broth, which will allow me to produce bigger batches at a time and free my time to use in other aspects of the business (business development, marketing, sales, research)
– pay for the deposit at a commercial kitchen and move the operations out of my home kitchen
– purchase 3 months worth of supplies at whole sale quantities (jars, raw materials) and increase profit margins
– purchase 2-3 mini freezers for partners so I can expand the network of health practitioners that sell my broth (they receive a consignment freezer when they agree to partner)
– pay for initial costs of setting up the business (liability insurance, taxes, etc)