Neve Foods Brand Interview
How Nora Fierman bootstrapped a sports nutrition brand between ski tours and sleepless nights
A few weeks ago, Nora Fierman flew to her current manufacturer's facility to hand-fill smoothie pouches one by one for twelve hours straight. She didn't know you could get blisters from screwing caps on. She did not let that stop her.
The founder of Neve Foods, a Vail-based sports nutrition brand, is bootstrapped, self-funded, working a full-time day job, and building something she genuinely believes in on every hour she has left over. The blisters were because a big string of orders came in fast, including, casually, from a few NFL teams, and she was about to run out of inventory.
Nora calls herself an "accidental endurance athlete." She grew up ski racing, moved to Colorado, and fell hard into backcountry skiing, always chasing what was around the next corner, over the next ridge. The days got long. The fueling didn't keep up. She was underfueling in ways that started edging toward disordered eating territory, something she talks about with real honesty, and is a deeply relatable reality, "I hated energy bars," she told us. "I wanted nothing to do with them, so I was like, I'd rather just not eat." She started making her own trail snacks, noticed people using applesauce and baby food pouches in the field, and thought: interesting concept, but sixty calories isn't going to cut it for a twelve-hour day in the mountains.
The concept clicked during a month in Chile, ski mountaineering as a vegetarian in a very meat-heavy culture. She tested the pouch concept on a boot pack, resealable, easy to squeeze mid-climb, no gut issues, no stopping, and came home knowing exactly what she needed to build. Nothing like it existed for athletes. She decided to make it herself.
One of the first things Nora did was bring in a registered dietitian, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of product development. She was clear-eyed about why. "There's a lot of bad marketing information around fuel out there," she said, "and I'm just aware that I'm not the expert." The RD came into the food lab in Boulder with her, helped dial in the macros specifically for athlete needs, and made calls Nora wouldn't have known to make on her own. Like adding pea protein alongside rice protein in the tart cherry SKU because together they form a complete protein source.
The result is two flavors: Boysenberry Beet for energy, Tart Cherry Cacao for recovery. Both built on the same philosophy, nutrition that actually performs, and actually tastes good - we can confirm!
Finding someone to make the thing was a completely different mountain. It took four years, and Nora is not being dramatic when she calls it an awful process. Pouches are notoriously tricky. Manufacturers want to run hundreds of thousands of units to make the economics work, and she couldn't take on that kind of risk. She also needed hot fill capability, a specific process where ingredients are heated, sealed into the pouch, and cooled to make the product shelf-stable. Most manufacturers couldn't do both at a small scale.
She posted in a Slack community for CPG founders, got a lead four months later, and got her foot in the door with a manufacturer who, she'll admit, probably took a chance on her partly because he felt a little sorry for her. She'll take it. That relationship eventually fell apart when they started pushing small brands out for higher-volume clients, which is how she ended up with her current manufacturer, the one who was literally hand-filling pouches. "This business wouldn't have survived if he wasn't willing to do that," she said.
Outside of her core athlete audience, Nora noted a few other groups she was surprised to see find Neve. The Cleveland Browns' RD was specifically looking for a product with a certain amount of beet juice. The Boysenberry Beet has beet juice. Order placed. The Pittsburgh Steelers followed. She's still a little stunned by it, honestly, and we love that for her.
Then there are the breastfeeding women keeping Neve pouches on their nightstands for 3am hunger strikes, a market she absolutely did not see coming. And the beet skeptics who try the Boysenberry Beet and immediately recant. These are her favorite reactions, that sports nutrition doesn't have to be chalky and grim and taste like "fine, I guess."
Neve is not Nora's full-time job. She's working a full-time day job, getting tours before work in the winter, mountain biking after work in the summer, and grinding on Neve until she can't keep her eyes open. Fully bootstrapped, navigating the delicate dance of building something on the side while staying fully present at work.
She was the most candid about something that a lot of founder content glosses over. "People don't recognize how utterly painful, challenging and lonely building a business is," she said. "There are so many more reasons to quit than to keep going." Behind every win she posts about are years of quiet, hard work that didn't make it onto anyone's feed. If you have a founder friend who says things are going okay, she points out, there's probably a lot more underneath that.
What I love most about Neve, and about Nora, is that it all started from a deeply personal place. She wanted to figure out how to actually feed herself on long days in the mountains without feeling terrible and created something with serious legs. Start with the Boysenberry Beet. You'll understand immediately!
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