Transcript
Intro, Leigh Balkom: Hi, I’m Leigh, Founder & Chief Enthusiast at Healthy Anywhere, and today we’regoing behind the scenes with Nico Donielle, entrepreneur extraordinaire – founder of the soon-to-come Marche in Austin, TX, co-founder of the former Phoenix healthy hit Sante, and juggler of many passions and past-times from fast cars to fashion and more.
This interview was originally recorded back in December 2023.. Fast forward to October 2024, Marche is in fundraising mode with some good interest. Be sure to follow their Instagram to stay posted on the anticipated first opening in Austin, TX. Now let’s get to the show…
Leigh Balkom: Let, let’s dive into it. Icebreaker. I ask everyone this question. So what does healthy mean to you?
Nico Doniele: Healthy means to me, I mean, it’s a lifestyle for me. So I guess that’s like a big thing. It’s an absolute like necessity. The word healthy, I think just supports so many different aspects of life though. I think it’s like mental health, spiritual health, relationship health. People tend to just go, Oh, it’s the green things you’re eating, when I just think that there’s so much more mental and spiritual that supports the green things you’re eating, you know, more than anything.
Leigh Balkom: Yeah, I love that holistic view. Why is that important to you and how did you come to that kind of informed level of consciousness?
Nico Doniele: I think more over like we, we all go through phases in our life that are extremely stressful and building a restaurant was really stressful. And, you know, you can be absolutely doing all the right things, but if your stress levels are out of the roof and you have no way to manage it in a healthy way, not just grabbing a bottle of wine or whatever, if you don’t have any outlets that are in a healthy aspect to create the balance in your life, then you’re ultimately unhealthy. It doesn’t mean the green juice that you’re drinking is going to solve your stress problems, right? So it’s really looking at it holistically, I think.
Leigh Balkom: So true. So back to you and, and the restaurants, which is like, yeah, super bold, ambitious, brave, daring to go into restaurants. How, how, and why did you first get into them?
Nico Doniele: Well, so I started off as, a young child with my parents in that industry, my father’s a certified executive chef, my mom and him met in the industry. Through the pandemic LA was really closed down and I was visiting Arizona coming back and forth quite a bit to see my mom who was ill with dementia and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, all the things that come together, unfortunately with mental decline. And I just noticed that there was really a lack of restaurants in Arizona. And, I’m a health and wellness coach and holistic and, integrative wellness person and coach. And I was doing one on one coaching and that kind of, as well as doing hair in LA, and both the practices really diminished with everybody being in this scarcity and lack of mindset of like, okay, what are we doing next?
LA was extremely, extremely strict and extremely shut down, so I was coming to Arizona, I was like, wow, this place is way more open and feels like a different, you know, country, yeah, like what the heck’s going on? So then I decided to meet with my partner that I, when I opened Sante, the organic restaurant, I was like, is there any like people that care about regenerative and organic?
He’s like, no, they just, they like good food. And I’m sure farm to table is kind of a thing, and so I was like, well, here’s my idea. And so that’s where the first location was born, in Arizona. So, yeah, it was cool, it was a big, big thing to take on. And I think I wouldn’t maybe have done it again at the end of COVID because I think it was really hard to hire people and nobody wanted to work. So that was like a major difficulty, making payroll really expensive, and things like that. But other than that, it was a great experience. And I have an amazing, repertoire of recipes and things and farms and all these great people that I’m going to bring into my next business.
Leigh Balkom: Yeah. Because the ethos and standards of Sante were just, I mean, that’s like the epitome of what we look for at Healthy Anywhere. So just Bravo and kudos to you for going there. Really remarkable.
Nico Doniele: Thank you. Nobody’s really doing regenerative meat at the restaurant, you know, some people have farms in their backyard, you know, like a lot of the restaurants in the middle of Midwest probably do, cause it’s right there, you know, but for us, it was like searching farms that actually had grassland that had animals that were ruminating that were, you know, doing the right practices and all that stuff, which was like, not easy to get over here and we shipped it, and even we had to go to New Zealand for some animal products too, but there’s just not enough regenerative farms in America, unfortunately. We’re working on it, though.
Leigh Balkom: I want to say we found some grass fed goat, in your area somewhere. Oh, maybe Crow’s Dairy? I think that might have been it. Yeah, we’ve done some preliminary work around phoenix and kind of surveyed. Yeah, I’m gonna have to ask you some questions on that offline.
Nico Doniele: There is some farms in northern Arizona, but they’re just not enough to buy a restaurant.
Leigh Balkom: Oh, yeah. So tell me about your new chapter So you’re opening Marche.
Leigh Balkom: Marche. Next year. Yeah, tell me about that.
Nico Doniele: So Marche is a fully organic regenerative market so if you’ve been to Erewhon in Los Angeles, it’s going to be similar to that, but with some differences. Hopefully price differences as well. We’re going to try to be a little less exuberant. You are going to be able to walk through a hot bar, but we’re going to have a cafe, most likely wood fired pizza, and vegan and regular organic soft serve ice cream. And then a place for you to sit and work and stuff like that too,
with a vibe, you know. All the little markets I’ve been to, even in Austin and Nashville, they’re kind of like farmhouse looking, and if you looked at Sante and you looked at kind of my vibe, I worked in fashion for 10 years and so big leather booths and wood and feathers and brass, like really gorgeous, like feeling rich about sitting there, working on your computer, having your latte, eating your organic food, you know, instead of like the down home farm granola feel, and that’s just kind of like what I think a lot of the restaurants get a bad rap for. I don’t want it to look like Sprouts. You want to be able to have a date or coffee there, you know what I mean?
Leigh Balkom: Yes.
Nico Doniele: But, have all the great things that Sprouts would have. That’s the new vibe that’s coming up and we’re looking into Nashville and Austin right now. Those are the two markets that are competing for my attention at the moment.
Leigh Balkom: Interesting. So you’re in the Phoenix area, but you’re actually looking at, so I wasn’t clear if you were thinking about opening it there, but it sounds like you’re not sure which is going to come first.
Nico Doniele: Yeah, so it kind of just depends on my business partners, the money, those kinds of things as well as like finding an actual location that could be the square footage and things we need. Both those cities are more culinary forward cities much more than I think Phoenix is, unfortunately, I love Phoenix, it’s my old hometown, I grew up here. But I, I feel like it needs to go there first and then maybe in a couple of years. Yep. But it’s really sad to say because I have a big fan base from Sante, but I’m like, guys, give me a minute, I’ll bring one here eventually. But I’d like to start in Austin. It’s a very health forward city.
Austin has, you know, all the, all the big podcasters and health influencers, the Dave Aspreys, the Luke Storys, the Joe Rogan, the, you know, everybody’s there and there’s really nothing like this. So I think that’s a good place.
Leigh Balkom: Oh, yeah, I got chills thinking about just in the looks feel it’s gonna be beautiful, really beautiful.
So I yeah I can see it and picture it and I get it, yeah, Austin and Nashville really needs this as well. So that’s really exciting. So what inspired the idea for Marche for you?
Nico Doniele: I think going away from full service dining and going into people are loving that fast casual idea where they could sit and eat if, you know, if there’s space to sit down to do so, but the kind of like queuing and walking through and picking your food out and just making it easy if they just need to run home and grab something , I think that that’s like such an attractive thing to me as well now. I think COVID kind of did that to all of us. It made it easier to like spend time at home with your food and your family.
But I think there’s a really beautiful place for fine dining. I love going out and eating fine dining, but I would say I’ll choose to not go get dressed up eight out of ten times and just be able to grab something if I’m busy and I want to be able to grab something besides salad to go or, you know, something that I know that’s not really truly organic.
So I, I know if I want it, then there’s other people that want it too.
Leigh Balkom: Yes. And just, that feel of like the European all day cafe and, um, market. It’s perfect.
So what, I guess I was thinking about the complexities, any challenges or new learnings in opening, Marche that you’re coming up against?
Nico Doniele: I think the economy as we know it right now is like, everybody’s like buttoned up right now, as far as like lending and they’re being wary of their money. And so this is not like a cheap project to, to start off. It’s not like a little. Little hot 800 million project. It’s going to be a few million dollars.
So finding the right capital partners will be maybe, I don’t want to say a challenge because I think when you look at the numbers that things like Erewhon does, I think anybody with wherewithal will be like, okay, this is a good investment. So I have those people that already kind of have my back.
So I’m excited about that, but that would be the only kind of piece is that it can be hard to understand when we’re in a world right now where everybody’s looking at tech and AI, and especially in the Austin market, that’s like all people want to fund is AI right now.
They’re like, Oh, it’s gonna be 250 million tomorrow. You know, it’s very VC funded, those capital raises are going on and that’s their focus. So I’m walking into a world that’s very VC, AI, tech heavy going, Hi, I’m opening a organic market. And they’re like, What? And I’m like, it’s like 50 million a year, each one, you know, and they’re like, What?, you know, and they, they can’t wrap their head around it.
So just finding the right partners, which I believe that I have. It’s still not a hard yes. I’m still looking, but yeah, that’s the only real thing. And I think I’m able to hire people smarter in the room than I am for the other things that I don’t know. And I have a beautiful advisory team already that I’ve built through actually a regenerative product that I’m gonna be playing with too called?
Leigh Balkom: Interesting. No, never a dull moment, Nico.
Nico Doniele: No, I know. It’s a soil supplement. It’s five tangible products in the soil supplement that’s going to farmers to rebuild the nutrient density in soil, the microfungi, the rhizal, and creating nutritious topsoil for these farmers.
And there’s products like this on the market already, but the way they’re doing it is better, faster, and has the ability to actually send a soil scientist out to your farm, do an acre for free, and show you how it works, which I think is phenomenal to do for a farmer, and then, it’s kind of like the proof is in the pudding for that.
So I’m playing with them as their spokesperson as they build their brand and marketing.
Leigh Balkom: Interesting. That’s so cool. Oh, I love it. I love it. Champion for soil. Are they, are they going after the ones that are already organic? Or are they trying to convert, or…
Nico Doniele: Trying to convert and, they’re, you know, trying to teach as well. It’s like, okay guys, you can’t be doing these inputs if we are going to give you this. So like, let us have this acre. Let us show you how much less water this uses, how much sweeter your fruit is, how much more nutrients in your blueberries. So we’ve got testing out on alfalfa and blueberries right now. There’s some beer companies that are on the DL that are taking it on to create organic beer. It’d be really, really neat. And all these products come from Salt Lake City, a family office, and the company is called Thryv, THRYV.LOVE.
And it’s going to be, you know, a whole movement with a certification for this produce too. So it’ll be Thryv certified. So you’ll know, you’ll go in to Marche, and say, Oh, it’s not only organic, but it’s Thryv certified, so it means it has the proper nutrients. Apples had 30 percent of the nutrients they had five years ago, now this apple has the proper nutrients, the proper salts, minerals.
What they’re doing, their movement in the next year or two is going to be pretty immense for us as humans for the right kind of produce.
Leigh Balkom: Yeah. I mean, if you think about the even organic monoculture, right?
Okay. Sure. It’s organic, but yeah, the soil isn’t going to be optimized and as healthy as if you’re doing more of a diverse rotation or whatnot. Oh, wow.
Nico Doniele: So those guys are cool and a few of those guys are on my advisory team on my board. They’re champions. With all things funding and crops, they’re all into that stuff. So they’re really great guys to have on my board too for Marche.
Leigh Balkom: Are they servicing restaurants?
Nico Doniele: Not yet. Yeah, the produce that’s the initial soil to spoon movement that they want to do from the soil to the spoon.
So that’s kind of like part of the movement and just getting it out to enough farmers. Right now it’s getting into some organic farms in Peru. A bunch of people we’ve been talking to over in that area in Central America, that’s going to be really helpful because we get a lot of our produce from there. It’s beautiful produce because of the way they can grow all year long.
Leigh Balkom: So hopping from the farms to your favorite spots to eat, maybe around in your home area or even anywhere in the world.
Nico Doniele: Yeah. So, I’m going to skip Arizona because I don’t love the restaurants here unfortunately. But I would go to Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, California, that whole group. They do an amazing job at their produce, their veg, how they treat. And they have a beautiful cookbook on veg that’s insane. I have it. My chefs read it, it’s fantastic. I love Hatchet Hall in West side of LA too. It’s also one of my favorites. I love the Rose Cafe in Venice. I lived in the west side of LA so I have a lot of favorites over there. For eight, nine years. So those are some of my really kind of go to… I do love what Josiah Citrine’s doing at Charcoal. He doesn’t do regenerative meat, but he does a great job doing everything on charcoal and he’s a fantastic Michelin star chef that I love what he’s doing too. Those are my kind of top guys over there.
Leigh Balkom: All right. I took some notes. Cause as you know, we have our Healthy Anywhere app. All the food discovery apps out there based on like ratings, reviews, recommendations. We’re doing standards, so it’s all based on healthy, sustainable, delicious. We’ve got a scoring system. We really look in detail at like how healthy, how sustainable, and then how delicious from all kinds of information. What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your line of business? And I guess I should qualify that because you have a million different lines of business.
Maybe we’ll start with restaurants.
Nico Doniele: That seed oils are toxic. The seed oil thing has just got to be a more recognized understanding that they’re just so inflammatory to our cellular structure and they cause autoimmune illness. That’s it. Chefs need to know. I had my chefs cooking with only olive oil and avocado oil and it’s possible. Olive oil has a really high heat point. That’s a fallacy. It can be very high heated. Italians have been doing it for hundreds of years. They talk about oxidation and all this stuff and, I just think you’d have to scorch it at 500 degrees..
Leigh Balkom: I mean, it burns through the nutrients, right? If you’re heating it, but it’s not like degrading it, is the point. So it’s not getting toxic, I guess.
Nico Doniele: Yeah. The molecular structure of it is what people worry about in the oxidation part of it. And I mean, I think use tallow, use butter. I mean, go back to the way we used to cook. Like, please. For gosh sakes, like, quit frying stuff in that and you know, we didn’t even have a fryer at my restaurant.
So the chefs didn’t like that, I, I did.
Leigh Balkom: What do you think about non-GMO or organic canola oil? If it’s expeller pressed? I’m just curious.
Nico Doniele: YI think it’s the lesser of the evils, right. I think we get so much Omega six in general, we can’t control it. It’s like, if you can make a choice, let’s not. Our Omega six Omega three ratios should be, you know, three to one and they’re 36 to one for most people. I’ve tested people at my health coaching clinic. Wow. And it’s pretty gnarly. A good fish oil helps that balance a lot. We were just bombarded and everything is preserved, you know, with canola oil. I would just say, try to stay away from it.
Leigh Balkom: So these are all the things that we look at, right, because we have a healthy oils filter, we’re looking for the extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, you know, even like the grass-fed butter, like everything you mentioned, but okay, when someone’s doing organic cold press canola oil, you know, where does that stand? So we kind of looking at making some decisions about that.
Nico Doniele: Yeah, no, and I understand that from a restaurant perspective, because it is very difficult to, inexpensive for restaurants to use organic olive oil and organic avocado oil. And so if they are doing an organic oil, I’m going to say, okay, I will eat there before I would eat somewhere else that didn’t, you know? So, it would be a yes to me on an occasion, right?
Leigh Balkom: Yep. That makes sense.
Nico Doniele: I’m the girl that’s like, Hey, can you cook my stuff in butter? When I go to like the breakfast places, they look at me, I’m like, yeah, just please no corn oil or vegetable oil? Can you cook that? Yeah. They’re like, let me find out. And they, they’re like, okay, this chef said yes. I’m like, nice. I hope,
Leigh Balkom: That is a good hack. Because a canola is like two to one, whereas the sunflower, that’s like really high and safflower, I think is way higher than even canola.
Leigh Balkom: So you’ve got, you’ve got the health coaching, the hot yoga, travel advisor, hair, fast cars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, what am I missing? Uh, well, the restaurant.
Nico Doniele: The market. I’m in a women’s car club, uh, here in Phoenix, which I’ll probably start a chapter wherever I go. It’s empowering women and we all drive, kind of like supercars or luxury cars. Just fun. I mean, we just had a really fun party last night. We do stuff for charity and drives for charity and all kinds of fun stuff. That’s kind of how I got to meet a lot of the women that I know.
Cause I mean, if you’re in your forties and you don’t have kids, like, how do you meet women? Right. So it’s really cool to have that group of people, you know, to get, to get to know people back here in Arizona. So, and yeah, travel advising and then yoga part time. And then I will health coach private clients, but this Marche is going to be taking a lot of my time.
Leigh Balkom: I guess if there were a poster child for the multi-passionate entrepreneur.
You got it.
Nico Doniele: Thank you.
Leigh Balkom: Yeah, it’s really amazing. How would you want people to reach you, interact with you? Like, where can people find, find out more?
Nico Doniele: Yeah, so I’m Health Coach Nico, A Health, health coach nico.com. Or Love Marche, L-O-V-E-M-A-R-C-H E.co. Not com. Dot co. Or my Instagram’s Round the World. So R-O-U-N-D the world.
Leigh Balkom: So any timeline on Marche? Or what you’re thinking, I guess we have some dependencies.
Nico Doniele: We have dependencies on the finance part of it and finding locations more what we’re, you know, do and decide where the first one goes. Probably before summer, you know, probably around the time there’ll be something like either going or I might be doing a ghost kitchen first with selling stuff online and getting things out to the public that way to build brand awareness in the city that I choose. And then, you know, as we’re building, maybe working, developing things with chefs, I have a billion recipes already, which is great,
An organic bread program and all that stuff from Sante’s. So that’s all good.
Leigh Balkom: And all gluten free, of course.
Nico Doniele: Yeah, I have great stuff coming with me. Our cornbread, all of our fun stuff. So yeah, I’m going to be selling that, probably doing Ghost Kitchen online first. And then, um, being able to send it out, and who knows, we might be able to do something like an online market that things can go to different cities too.
So that might be really cool.
Leigh Balkom:So nice. I really appreciate your time. We are pulling for you. Good luck with everything.
Nico Doniele: Thank you.
