Like many other entrepreneurs, Julie Bombacino started her company because the product she needed didn’t exist. In 2011, her son AJ, six months old at the time, had a 45-minute seizure. Within a few weeks, a feeding tube was placed into his stomach to deliver all of his nutrition.
Suddenly, Bombacino and her family were thrust into the unfamiliar world of special needs. “To say we were shell-shocked by all of this would be a massive understatement,” she recalls. Like many other new special needs parents, Bombacino and her husband simply followed the doctor’s orders, but after months of their son’s daily vomiting and constipation, they finally reached out to others who were going through the same thing to see if there was a better way.
As it turns out, there was. Bombacino discovered that many of her fellow special needs parents, along with tube-fed adults, were having great results with blended real food rather than the prescribed formulas. After giving it a try with AJ, they quickly tossed the commercial formulas, and Bombacino started spending her time planning, prepping, cooking, and blending real food meals for her son. Soon after, she again found herself wondering if there was a better way.
“As you can imagine, it’s a lot of work to make every single morsel of food that goes into someone’s body, so very quickly we went looking for something that was pre-packaged, 100 percent real food that could go through a feeding tube,” she says. “It didn’t exist. Lightbulb moment.”
With her husband’s encouragement, Bombacino began to take advantage of nap times and other free moments during the day to start working on a business plan for the company that would soon become Real Food Blends.
“I had no idea how many people were on feeding tubes (by some estimates, up to one million in the US) or how big this market was (right around $6 billion by 2020),” she recalls. “I learned that most people on feeding tubes still have working digestive systems, and so everything that we know about good nutrition was still applicable (i.e. fruits and vegetables are good things), and I also learned that the number of people on feeding tubes was expected to grow exponentially as medical advances keep people alive longer and longer with conditions that need tubes.”
“Once I got the business plan together and saw the size of the market, I knew this could be done—and needed to be,” she continues. “I also think I needed something positive to channel my angst about my son’s extensive special needs.”
After tackling the food science part of the equation—making sure to avoid corn syrup, preservatives, additives, synthetics, or anything else she wouldn’t feed her own child—Bombacino went on to raise funds from angel investors and a crowd-funding campaign. In January 2014, Real Food Blends was officially launched with the delivery of its first three meals.
It’s never simple to start a company, and being a special needs parent comes with its own unique obstacles. For others in a similar situation, Bombacino offers some advice for how to turn a life challenge into a thriving business.
1. Trust your gut and do your research.
“Quite frankly, if some version of Real Food Blends had existed back then, we would have just bought a bunch and went on with our lives. But it didn’t. We were not sitting around trying to come up with a business idea, but I knew we would use meals like this multiple times every day. I knew from my Facebook tube-feeding friends that there was this huge hole in the formula market.
My advice to other women would be to trust their gut and do their research. Market size is important. Cost to get to market is very important. If you believe in it, see an unmet need in the market, and have some runway to get started (my husband was working a ‘regular’ job during those first few years to keep us afloat and working on RFB with me on nights and weekends), then go for it. My only wish was that I would have trusted my gut earlier and moved faster.”
2. Find your new normal.
“I learned early on to at least attempt to take care of myself and fell in love with barre workouts back then. Entrepreneurship can be lonely, and some days it was the only time I would see other adults. As Tony joined the business full time in 2014, we had to learn boundaries within our marriage for when it was okay to talk about work—and when not to!
We are very lucky in that we enjoy a freedom with our business that few working parents have, which can mean we can go on a field trip with our daughter or get AJ to an important doctor's appointment. But that comes with many early mornings, late nights, long flights, travel days, and working weekends. Such is the new normal for most working parents I would imagine, but as Tony likes to say ‘we’re not digging ditching.’ We both feel this is a privilege to be able to take our family’s tragedy and be able to help tens of thousands of other people to not have to go through the issues AJ did when the answer could be as simple as real food.”
3. Remember the power of perspective.
“AJ will always have special needs and will always be dependent on us to take care of him. He has a wheelchair, doesn’t talk, and doesn’t eat with his mouth. I’m sure people see our family and take pity on us. And we can go down that hole still to this day, but Real Food Blends has given us an amazing perspective that we never would have had. AJ is here with us, his smile and laugh lights up a room, he’s not in pain and is relatively healthy. So many of our customers would be happy to have any of these things or have their loved one still at home with them.
It’s also the emails and pictures we receive each and every day with stories very similar to ours—both with kids and from the adults who are the ones that really talk about the psychological impact of having a real food meal, and how much they miss being around the family dinner table or having a dinner date with their spouse. We can’t make them 100 percent better or able to eat orally again, but we can enable them to ‘break bread’ with their family and enjoy the benefits of real, whole food again. That’s rewarding.”
