{"id":17020,"date":"2025-10-26T11:35:48","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T11:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=17020"},"modified":"2025-10-26T11:35:48","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T11:35:48","slug":"founder-of-100-million-company-says-she-quit-her-day-job-to-rebuild-her-fathers-cape-cod-chip-empire-and-there-wasnt-time-to-worry-about-nepotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=17020","title":{"rendered":"Founder of $100 million company says she quit her day job to rebuild her father\u2019s Cape Cod chip empire\u2014and there \u2018wasn\u2019t time\u2019 to worry about nepotism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Serial entrepreneur Nicole Bernard Dawes seemed destined to build million-dollar food brands. As a kid, she grew up working the counter of her mother\u2019s health-food store and roaming the floors of her father\u2019s burgeoning snack empire, Cape Cod chips. She would eventually follow in their footsteps as a founder, but Dawes\u2019 first job was a management consultant for food and beverage clients. It was a short-lived career that Dawes tells Fortune <\/em>she didn\u2019t enjoy. Then, in what felt like perfect timing, she was pulled back to Cape Cod chips when her dad, the late Steve Bernard, bought back his $4.87 billion business from Anheuser-Busch in 1996.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI left the consulting firm to go work with him when he bought Cape Cod chips back. So it just kind of all timed out,\u201d Dawes says. \u201cBut I\u2019m glad I did [consulting], because it was really a wonderful experience to work for somebody that I wasn\u2019t related to, have a real boss, and have co-workers that I wasn\u2019t related to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dawes quickly took on a role in advertising, serving as Cape Cod chips\u2019 director of marketing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn hindsight, it was a weird situation, because I was actually the head of marketing who reported to the president, who wasn\u2019t my dad,\u201d Dawes explains. \u201cThere really wasn\u2019t time for worrying about anything but getting this brand back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anheuser had divested almost \u201covernight,\u201d Dawes recalls, and the iconic brand lost all its manufacturers, distributors, and retailers in one fell swoop. Everyone\u2019s focus was suddenly poured into turning things around. Four years later\u2014after Dawes introduced ideas like reduced-fat chips, which went on to become a best-seller\u2014her father sold his company a second time to snack food company Lance. Dawes saw this as her moment to strike out on her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI had realized that this was my chance to create the company that I\u2019ve been envisioning in my head since I was a little kid on my mom\u2019s natural food store counter,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not my father. That was his dream and his company, and it was a little bit of what I wanted, but it wasn\u2019t exactly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaving Cape Cod chips to found Late July and Nixie<\/h2>\n

In 2003, Dawes launched Late July, an organic, non-GMO tortilla chip brand that\u2019s now stocked in major grocery chains across the country, including Target<\/a>, Whole Foods, Kroger<\/a>, and Walmart<\/a>. What started as a kitchen-counter operation grew into more than a $100-million business. Campbell\u2019s acquired a majority stake in 2014, and eventually bought the rest of the company in 2017.<\/p>\n

After more than two decades of working in the food space\u2014reviving her family\u2019s snack empire, and building her own chip brand from scratch\u2014Dawes was ready to move on from starch. This time, she looked at beverages. Walking down the grocery store\u2019s refrigerated sections, Dawes noticed racks lined with Sprite, Coke, and Dr. Pepper\u2014but few healthy options. That observation sparked her next venture: Nixie, a zero-sugar, sustainably packaged soda line offering flavors from cola and root beer to ginger ale and cream soda.<\/p>\n

Investors have taken notice. Nixie raised nearly $27 million in new funding earlier this year, and its products are already sold in over 11,000 major grocers like Whole Foods, Sprouts, Safeway, and Ralph\u2019s\u2014as well as on Amazon<\/a> and Instacart<\/a>. Her second business success into healthy food and beverages has made Dawes a leading innovator in the CPG arena. It\u2019s just one step forward in her goal as an entrepreneur to make sure all of her guilty pleasure treats are keeping up with the times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy entire career has been built around fixing broken parts of the food business,\u201d Dawes says, recognizing how the soda industry still has a lot of catching up to do. \u201cI\u2019m thinking, how has [the beverage] aisle managed to escape, while every other part of the grocery store has improved and become healthier and become more sustainable?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Serial entrepreneur Nicole Bernard Dawes seemed destined to build million-dollar food brands. As a kid, she grew up working the counter of her mother\u2019s health-food store and roaming the floors of her father\u2019s burgeoning snack empire, Cape Cod chips. She would eventually follow in their footsteps as a founder, but Dawes\u2019 first job was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":791,"featured_media":17021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"yoast_head":"\nFounder of $100 million company says she quit her day job to rebuild her father\u2019s Cape Cod chip empire\u2014and there \u2018wasn\u2019t time\u2019 to worry about nepotism | Unlock Informed Choices with Us<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Serial entrepreneur Nicole Bernard Dawes scaled her own multimillion-dollar brands, Late July and Nixie, after getting Cape Cod chips back on track: \u201cI'm not my father. 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As a kid, she grew up working the counter of her mother\u2019s health-food store and roaming the floors of her father\u2019s burgeoning snack empire, Cape Cod chips. She would eventually follow in their footsteps as a founder, but Dawes\u2019 first job was a…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/791"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}