Farewell, Rollin' n Bowlin'.

Today is Rollin’ n Bowlin’s last day open. Our baby, our first business, our a?aí bowl cafes, will not be reopening after summer break this time around.

This past year for us has been quite a whirlwind, to say the least. We have made more monumental business decisions than we have in all 6 years of our partnership, and we have only recently been able to take a breath and feel at peace with all of the changes. And we feel really good too, which is the biggest feat of all.?

A year ago we found ourselves running 3 entirely separate businesses at once.?

1. Our food service business – Rollin’ n Bowlin’ health food cafes on college campuses with 8 locations in 5 different states.?
2. Our first CPG (consumer packaged goods) business created and launched within 6 weeks during Covid - Rollin’ n Bowlin’ frozen packaged smoothie line with national distribution.?
3. And our newest CPG brand - realsy, a nutritious snacking brand with our line of nut butter-filled medjool dates with national distribution.

We made it through Covid stronger than ever, with our campus stores just temporarily closing and zero time wasted as we launched our first CPG product line - the frozen smoothie line, an extension of our acai bowl cafes.

Then, in 2022, the repercussions hit us. Insane rising food costs, rising labor, all of it happening and changing at once in real time. We found ourselves going through what some people may think of when they picture the stereotypical startup founders - 0 free time, working sun-up to sun-down, perpetually stressed out, and isolating ourselves from life outside of business. We were at our busiest point, managing over 150 RnB team members at once and a rapidly-growing CPG company. We buckled down for months on end to dig in, combat all these obstacles head-on, and come out on top. We were fully committed to growing all three businesses at once.?

Come October, something unexpected happened that would change our lives. We were we were approached by our now good friend, Kevin Gelfand, and after a few months of conversations, his company Shakesmart made us an offer and bought us out of our contract at our highest-volume store on campus at TCU and enlisted us to consult on a frozen CPG line of protein shakes.?

We were then given the opportunity to decide what we wanted our future to look like and how we wanted to continue making a difference in the health and wellness space. With CPG, we could reach more people at a faster pace, and with realsy’s instant success upon launch, we knew we had something so many people wanted, that we could scale efficiently and sustainably. We also really enjoy the CPG space and culture, as there are so many like-minded people and founders to connect with and learn from. Innovative people trying to make a real difference in the way our country eats. The community within CPG is tremendous, and definitely a little less isolating than that of the niche contract food service space that we were in.?

So, the sale of our TCU RnB location alone gave us the opportunity to have our first successful exit! We can’t say the sale was enough for us to retire and move to Malibu and crush a?aí bowls all day, but it was enough to comfortably provide us with some stability for the next few years while we focus and grow our next big thing.?

Rollin' n Bowlin' was an amazing business. When we force ourselves to take a step back to look at where we are today, we’re truly so proud of how far we made it in such a short amount of time. From ideation our senior year (P.S. Debunking this myth - We were actually starting RnB already, and then decided to do it for a class project since we were spending so much time on it anyways. It wasn’t a project to start off!), to a single food truck straight after graduation, to 10 college campus locations within 5 years. We’ve fed tens of thousands of college students healthy and satisfying meals to fuel their busy days, and it’s incredible to think of the impact we made on their daily lives.?

We’ve also employed over 400 students, providing them with a convenient, accessible, and flexible job where they could work towards employee of the month, a supervisor position, meet new people, and maybe make some new friends, too. These are some of my favorite memories to look back on: blendista instagram takeovers.

We had some of the most fun times with our team, and loved talking with them, getting to know them, doing taste tests together. They were the backbone of our business, and when the lines wrapped around the building, they would focus on the task in front of them and sling acai bowls, smoothies, and toast so fast. Making fresh food like we were, for hundreds of students hoping to pick up on their 15-min passing period wasn’t easy, and we were always brainstorming on ways to do it quicker without sacrificing quality. It was awesome having a diverse team where many people brought different practices/operational techniques they had learned at a prior food service job. We had a team that really cared about our success as a whole, and they would work on creating operational efficiencies everyday, on making RnB better. It’s heartwarming to think about how much some of our employees cared, and we will never ever forget how it feels to create something you’re so deeply passionate about that brings out passion in others, too.?

However, we learned the scalability of a food service concept on college campuses was not quite as fast as we felt we could grow our exciting new CPG brand, realsy. Opening a store and hiring a full team takes a LOT of work, as you can all imagine. We had a positive trajectory forward with RnB, and if we wanted to grow any one of our businesses to its max capacity, we absolutely could have. But we needed to focus on ONE. 2022 came entirely down to focus for us, and we learned how valuable and crucial to success it truly is.?

And when it comes to the two CPG companies we were running, we saw the many exciting doors and channels that could be opened by having a shelf-stable product vs a frozen product (which we started with our single-serve smoothies). Frozen foods is a great industry if you can do it right, and we respect that this is still one of the best ways to preserve nutrient-dense foods, but the supply chain is tough and expensive. We looked at realsy and saw our small, shelf-stable, light-weight and novel product as the clear winner. Plus, we started learning even more about the nutritional benefits of dates, and we seriously LOVE the product itself. Everything about it. We were personally eating a lot more realsy dates than RnB smoothies, and we were (+are!) pumped about the potential.?

(P.S. our smoothies will be available on our website for less than 2 more months if you’re a fan and want to grab some before they’re gone!)

This past year has been the most pivotal year in our business, therein personal, journey to date. We have been able to grasp the fact that focus is so key in business and entrepreneurship while you are just getting started. We like to move fast, no doubt about that, and we can make things happen quickly when our passion is behind it. But we’ve learned an incredible lesson in 2022, that narrowing in on one thing and growing it until there’s nowhere left to grow, can set the stage for a really successful business. Saturate and THEN expand/launch new things. And, it’ll be a lot more fun to focus on one thing, rather than running around like Spongebob losing the secret formula - LOL. We can tell you that from experience.?

Writing out all the ins and outs and highs and lows we faced this past year would probably result in a story the size of a book, so here we just wanted to share a snapshot into our decisions and some of the reasons behind them. The decisions we’ve been faced with this past year were the most difficult ones we’ve ever made, and it was far from easy. It was really really hard. We had the most incredible team members we could have asked for over the past 6 years, and we feel so fortunate to have learned so much from them and in turn learn more about ourselves as managers. From start to finish, Rollin’ n Bowlin’s 6-year run was nothing less of amazing (and crazy and stressful and so so fun). We met so many incredible people and could never have dreamt of the support we were flooded with throughout the entirety of it. If we didn’t get so much hype from friends, classmates, and professors from selling fresh acai bowls and smoothies out of Sophia’s college house senior year, our lives may have looked very different right now.?

Rollin’ n Bowlin’ paved our path for a lifetime of entrepreneurship. A lifetime of doing what we can to improve the current status of real health and wellness for people.?We are both lucky and proud to say we are stepping out of this pivotal moment stronger and more confident than ever in our abilities to make genuinely nutritious food options more accessible.

Our brand realsy is a snacking company with a mission to make real snacks that take it a step past better-for-you, but genuinely GOOD-for-you snacking. Think: ingredients as simple as fresh produce – but exciting, novel, and uber easy to take with you wherever you might be headed.? Consumers are increasingly placing a higher value on knowing where their food comes from, with good reason. We personally do too now. So we work directly with farmers to ensure the highest quality, naturally organic, and freshest ingredients for our realsy products. Each of our farmers is family-owned with a purpose, like our medjool date farm partners who employ over 80% working mothers. You can learn more about our farmers and their processes on our website here.

Ingredient sourcing/farming/quality is something we have learned so much over the past year, and when looking at the big picture, it seems everything has really fallen into place, our evolving business matching up with our evolving passions. We feel energized with where we’re at today, and the decisions we’ve made this past year. The trajectory for realsy is genuinely awesome, and there are endless opportunities ahead of us. We have so many exciting launches in the pipeline, and we are ready to grow realsy at full force, with ALL of our attention focused on one business that we are incredibly passionate about.?

Thank you all for your unwavering support of Rollin’ n Bowlin’. We hope you’ll continue to support and keep it realsy with us!

With healthy vibes forever,?Austin + Sophia

We’d love for you to follow our realsy journey on instagram @eatrealsy, and you can keep up with us personally @austindanielpatry and @skarbo.?We also send monthly realsy newsletters with new launches, behind-the-scenes updates, and lots of fun things. You can get on the list by entering your email on our website home page HERE.

We added a few fun snapshots of RnB's 6 years below. To see more pics, you can scroll through our page HERE and reminisce (cry) with us.

To see more pics of our journey over the years, you can scroll through our page HERE and reminisce (cry) with us.