TASTE MAKERS

The gorgeously styled photos of Trish Thomas and Nichole Wilson shown on these pages weren’t quite what these two North Shore entrepreneurs had in mind. “We asked if we could have our pictures taken in our usual work attire—lab coats and hair nets,” jokes Thomas.

Down-to-earth, reluctant to stand in the spotlight, and deeply committed to helping others, Thomas and Wilson launched Every Body Eat® to create a world where everybody feels welcome at the table, regardless of dietary restrictions or preferences.

With their line of snack thins, crispbread, crackers, and cookies, they target the 64 percent of U.S. families who have special diets and 100 percent of the people who just really like tasty food. “The reason customized eating is so hard on people with special diets is that it comes with social and emotional isolation,” Thomas says. They often miss out on the classic bonding that happens at social occasions when food is shared because they’re faced with a few undesirable options: not eating, bringing their own food, eating and getting sick, or telling the host of their needs and feeling like a burden. Thomas and Wilson both know this feeling firsthand.

For Wilson, it started when her daughter came home from preschool one day, doubled over in pain. “I thought her appendix had burst,” Wilson recalls. The third pediatric gastrointestinal specialist they consulted finally determined the culprit: a dairy allergy. “The dairy had been impacting her for so long that it took a year to undo,” Wilson says. Eventually, Wilson, her husband, and their younger child were also all diagnosed with food sensitivities.

Thomas’ food issues stem from an autoimmune disorder that hit her hard soon after she had children. “I was super sick, felt terrible, had no energy, looked terrible, and was put on medication after medication,” she says. “I thought, there has to be a better way.” That’s when she discovered an integrated medical doctor, Evanston’s Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark, who searched for the root of Thomas’ problems—and it all pointed to food. “I learned that my sensitivities were gluten, dairy, soy, corn, and egg, and if I took those things out of my diet, all my internal inflammation went away.” That was about 8 years ago and, since then, Thomas has rarely needed any medication.

When the two women met at a North Shore Country Day School book fair, they initially connected over their shared passion for helping entrepreneurs. They also realized that combining their entrepreneurial spirit and unique backgrounds could lead to something much bigger. Thomas, a mom to a blended family of six boys, teaches Principles of Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and is a self-described serial entrepreneur—as a teenager she built a thriving babysitting business that employed several of her peers. Later, she built and sold a toy company, as well as the first safe online community for kids, and a children’s media company with distribution in more than 100 countries. Wilson, a Stanford-educated former Wall Street dynamo, spent time handling mergers and acquisitions for Merrill Lynch and FritoLay, in addition to running a $33 billion R&D portfolio at PepsiCo, but she always knew she wanted to run her own company.

Their combined credentials forged a perfect yin and yang. “I’m the kite. She’s got the string,” Thomas says of their partnership and close friendship. They soon started cooking up their business idea for good-tasting food that was free from most inflammatory ingredients (common food allergens and corn).

Less than two weeks after launching their initial product, the pandemic shutdown forced operations into Thomas’ house for nearly a year and derailed plans to distribute their snacks on college campuses—they’ll get there soon. They persisted, knocking on doors of grocery stores everywhere. They quickly landed on local shelves such as Foodstuff ’s, Sunset Foods, Mariano’s, Winnetka’s Grand Food Center, and then nationally at Sprouts Farmers Market and Whole Foods Market. Despite many naysayers in the snack food industry, they won Whole Foods 2021 Midwest Supplier of the Year.

They currently market a handful of flavors of Every Body Eat® crispy thin crackers with names like Cheese-Less™ and Fiery Chile Lime™ and crispbread cracker options like White Pepper & Garlic™. Grain-free crispbread crackers and cookie bites are coming soon.

Their secret recipe? Instead of reverse-engineering “regular” products, they took a different approach. “There’s a beautiful universe of ingredients that are free of the top food allergens and corn and, from that, we build up,” Wilson explains. “We wanted to create delicious and interesting flavor profiles that are so good, you don’t even ask what’s missing.” They also wanted their free-from foods to taste good for everyone, so people who have special diets didn’t feel singled out. “Our barometer is how to make food that tastes so good that people want to eat it with or without a special diet,” Wilson says.

Sales numbers prove the two women have created a recipe for success. “The demand just from our existing customers has been coming in at about three times what we can make for the whole year,” Thomas says. They’re already expanding production.

Just as important as the products they make are the people who make them. “Our mission is to give everybody a seat at the table, and we do it literally with our food, and we do it figuratively with our team,” Wilson explains.

When they started to gather their team, they wanted to “leverage our privilege in service to our team,” Wilson says, noting that most of their employees hail from the south and west sides of Chicago. About 65 percent of them have been involved in the criminal justice system or formally incarcerated, others chronically underemployed, 20 percent had been homeless, and nearly all had experienced food and housing insecurity.

During interviews, Thomas and Wilson looked for passion, a positive problem-solving attitude, and a growth mindset, no matter their resume. “I’ve worked with titans of industry, and this team is by far the team I would go into the trenches with every single day again and again,” says Wilson, who also helps employees build a stable future by teaching them money management skills.

“People talk about how delicious our food is, and that’s because our food truly is made with love and it’s made with intention and with purpose, and that’s 100 percent due to our team,” Wilson says.

“Our team is the company. We just have the good fortune to sell what they make,” Thomas agrees.

Our practical, hair-net-wearing women wanted readers to learn two more things from their experiences: One, that if you’re not feeling well, look at food as a possible source. And two, if you have a business idea that solves a problem, find other people who are committed with you. “Entrepreneurship is like sprinting a marathon,” Wilson says. “You’ve got to have folks cheering you on, and you can’t be afraid to stumble in front of them. They’re your springboard and your safety net.”

Thomas and Wilson are in it to win the ultimate marathon— making it easier for everybody to share delicious food with the people they love. Thomas observes, “The ironic thing about all the effort we are putting into creating products people can share is that the one thing we hear from customers again and again is, ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole bag.’”

For more information, visit everybodyeating.com.