By Chadner Navarro

In 2008, Kristen Thibeault left a career in public relations and marketing to focus on healing herself through nutrition. She had been diagnosed (and has since won her battle) with cancer and wanted to change the way she ate. From her home kitchen in Boston, she started cooking healthy meals, first for herself, then her friends, then her friends’ friends.

“I started with wanting to heal myself and as I got deeper into it, I realized there wasn’t a lot out there on healing yourself, your community, and the planet,” Thibeault says. “I told one friend, she told another, and then I was cooking for executives who didn’t have time in their lives to eat healthily.”

Thibeault, 53, focused on home deliveries of plant-based, high-protein meals in Boston under the name Kombu Kitchen. In 2015, she snagged a massive client in Oracle, and that’s when she shifted her focus to corporate catering under the Nybll brand. 

Today, Nybll, which is based in Oakland, Calif., counts the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and the Golden State Warriors as clients. Since launching, Nybll has served about 4 million meals from nearly 150 different health-conscious recipes. But with 2020’s coronavirus crisis forcing most companies to shift to a work-from-home structure, the need for on-premise dining disappeared nearly overnight and with it, Nybll’s $1.4 million monthly business.

Thibeault has adapted to current circumstances by going back to her meal-delivery roots and launched Nybll Home in March. For Thibeault, introducing a delivery service is a direct response to help feed workforces in California’s Bay area and Los Angeles during a public health crisis.  

“We wanted to make sure all the employees we normally feed through our corporate lunch program could access healthy food,” she says. So far, companies like Giphy, Lattice, and CrowdStrike have all signed up for the service, as has the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks. 

But now, anyone can order these nutritious meals; Nybll is now shipping nationwide, and Californians can even enjoy same-day delivery. 

Along with launching Nybll in 2015, Thibeault introduced a charitable arm called The Patra Project, a buy-a-meal, give-a-meal program aiming to help feed at-risk children with health-conscious meals.

See more at Barron’s