Nicole Centeno founded Splendid Spoon in 2013 with a clear and simple premise: eating well should not require sacrificing your time or your sanity to do it. She came to the problem with an unusual set of credentials. A French Culinary Institute-trained chef and a former research biologist with published work in Nutrition and Metabolism, she was not approaching food entrepreneurship from a purely commercial angle. She was approaching it from a place of genuine scientific conviction about what the body needs and what the food industry was failing to provide.
What started as a soup operation out of a Brooklyn pizza kitchen has since grown into one of the leading plant-forward platforms in the United States, delivering ready-to-eat smoothies, soups, grain bowls, and noodle bowls nationwide across two brands, Splendid Spoon and Mosaic Foods. The product line is built around clean ingredients, no preservatives, and the kind of nutritional integrity that traces directly back to Centeno’s research background. She has been named one of Observer‘s 10 Wellness Entrepreneurs to Watch, authored the Soup Cleanse Cookbook published by Rodale, and built a business that has scaled to serve customers across the country while maintaining the same foundational commitment to accessible, plant-forward eating that she started with in that Brooklyn kitchen over a decade ago. The business Centeno runs today is a significant distance from where it started, and the thinking behind how she built it is worth understanding.
A Candid Conversation with Nicole at Ugly Talk
I had the opportunity to speak with Nicole at Ugly Talk: What Breaks on the Way to Building an Eight-Figure Brand, held at Shopify New York in April 2026. The evening brought together three eight-figure DTC founders, Nicole alongside Ryan Beltran of Original Grain and Michael Chernow of Kreatures of Habit, for an unfiltered panel conversation about the real challenges of scaling a consumer brand past seven figures. Moderated by Brandon Blum, Managing Partner
of New Edition, the discussion covered everything from the first operational breakdowns each founder experienced to the unglamorous realities of inventory financing. It was the kind of evening that draws founders who are done with theory and want to hear from people who have actually been through it. After the panel wrapped, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nicole directly, and she was warm and generous with her time.
Releasing Control to Build Something Bigger
The first thing she addressed when I asked about the early days of Splendid Spoon was something that landed clearly. When you are just starting something, she explained, it is incredibly dear to you. Your brand, your idea, your vision for what it should be. The instinct is to hold onto all of it as tightly as possible. But the most important shift she had to make as a leader was learning to ship, to put something in front of customers, absorb their feedback, and release what was not working. For a founder whose product is rooted in scientific rigor and personal conviction, that kind of openness to iteration is not a small thing. It requires separating your identity from your output, which is something most early-stage founders find genuinely difficult.
Signal Over Noise in a Booming Industry
The wellness industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and growing, which means it is also increasingly full of noise. Trends move fast, consumer behavior shifts faster, and the pressure on founders in the food and wellness space to respond to every new development is constant. I asked Centeno how she filters signal from noise in a category she helped shape.
Her answer was grounded and, coming from a research biologist, entirely consistent with how she approaches everything else. She sticks to peer-reviewed science. When the data supports something, she pays attention. When it does not, she does not chase it. Her north star remains
what it has always been: healthy eating that is genuinely accessible to people. She made the point simply and memorably: we know ginger is good for you, and we know that the soup recipe your grandmother made for you was good for your health. Some things do not need a wellness rebrand to be true.
When I asked her what she knows now about consumer behavior that she wishes she had understood at the start, she responded short and clear: “Product integrity.”
The Most Important Skill
When I asked Centeno for one final piece of advice for founders, she did not reach for a framework or a tactical recommendation. She said one word, then repeated it for emphasis: “Listening.” To your customers, to the market, to what the business is telling you at every stage of its growth. It was a fitting note to end on from a founder who built something lasting by staying curious enough to keep hearing what the business needed from her, even when what it needed required her to change direction.
In an industry that rewards the loudest voices, Nicole Centeno is proof that the most durable brands are often built by the ones paying the most careful attention.
