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A little more than ten years ago, Nadja Piatka and her then twelve-year-old daughter hid under the dining room table for twenty minutes while a bill collector walked around their dilapidated rental house in Calgary, Alberta, knocking on the doors and peering in the windows to see if she was there. Today she is a successful businesswoman whose company has distributed her fat-free muffins through McDonald’s in Canada, and is about to launch its low-cal brownies in Subway stores in New York.
“It was the typical story, I had put my husband through dental school and we had a great lifestyle—I didn’t work outside the home. Then he left the marriage, taking most of the assets and leaving me with a lot of debt,” she says.
After Piatka had sent off a number of resumes with no response, she decided that the only person who was going to hire her, was her. Since, as her mother had always told her, “food was her life,” she decided what the world needed was a healthy muffin that tasted good.
“I had been raised living over a restaurant so it was natural I would turn to food. I began to develop a low-fat, low-cal muffin—testing my results on my kids, at least until it got to the point they wouldn’t even come for a taste test when I called them.”
Finally, Piatka found the combination that even her children liked, and she began to market it through local coffee shops.
“They were walking out the door. But eventually I decided that I wasn’t working smart. I was getting up at 4:30 a.m. every day to bake,” she says. “So I found a little bakery that I could outsource to, and had them sign a confidentiality agreement on the recipe.”
Even the confidentiality agreement was by-the-seat-of-her-pants. Unable to afford an attorney, Piatka took a release form she had used when she was an aerobics instructor during her marriage and modified it. Fortunately she never had to find out if it would stand up in court.
“They sold to their customers and to my customers. The growth was open-ended.”
Her next strategy was to get more name recognition, which she decided she could do by writing a food column for an Alberta newspaper, the Edmonton Journal.
“One of my teachers had told me never to try to make a living by writing,” she says. “But I called the editor and eventually we came to the agreement that I would write the columns and if she liked them she’d print them and pay me. Soon, Nadja-approved desserts and I were getting more notoriety.”
Piatka then began doing healthy weekends for women at resorts in Alberta and got on a local morning show hosted by a former Miss Canada. Before long, the two were working together and looking for a bank loan to grow the muffin business. The bank manager, a financially savvy woman, turned them down for the loan and quit her job to join their business.
“Your biggest asset is yourself—your energy, your enthusiasm, your passion and your sincerity. Belief in something is more credible than cash,” Piatka says.
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“That was another of my ‘aha’ points,” Piatka says. “I realized, I’m not a loser—we tend to define ourselves by money—but I knew I could grow the business even without the help of the bank.”
Eventually she was writing best-selling cookbooks (in Canada) and cross marketing by promoting the books. She had gotten McDonald’s, which is known to have a “slam-door policy,” to distribute her brownies, and was giving the proceeds from the books to the Ronald McDonald House. Everyone loves a rags-to-riches story so the media ate up Piatka’s story—along with more than a few of her delicious brownies.
“A year ago the Three Blondes broke up. It was just time for us to part,” she says. “Partners don’t share your vision—not that they are wrong and you are right—it’s just a personal thing.”
As we all know, timing is everything and if there’s one thing Piatka has, it’s timing. She introduced her muffins to McDonald’s just when they were looking for a healthy product. Then, about three years ago, when she was helping the Canadian government promote exporting for small businesses, she met a man at a trade mission at the Albright-Knox. At the time, he was in a marriage that didn’t have much life left in it.
“We clicked right away. So I told him, well, if you are ever available, look me up,” she says. “I didn’t hear anything for two years so I had pretty much given up, when all of a sudden he phones and he’s single. He came to visit me in Calgary and ‘it’ was still there.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The two were married on Valentines Day of this year, and Nadja moved, with her business, to Buffalo, where she is beginning to distribute her brownies through Subway outlets. Her two children are now adults, her son is working in Ontario, and the daughter who hid with her under the dining room table is attending university in Vancouver.
“I could have stayed in Canada and there would have been growth within limits. There’s more opportunity in the U.S.,” she says. “Buffalo is a hub. The geography is great for a business that exports—it’s great for growth.”
Stay tuned to see Jared adding Piatka’s brownies to his low-fat, low-cal, Subway diet. Nadja’s delicious brownies (yes, we tested them and they really are delicious) will soon be available at all Subway stores in upper New York State. They’ll be baked at a Western New York bakery, (at press time was still to be determined) and distributed from Allied Storage in Buffalo. The headquarters for administration and marketing will also be handled in Buffalo.
No more hiding under the dining room table.
Donna I. Evans is a writer and public relations specialist based in Western New York.
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