Mom and daughter entrepreneurs turn cancer and pandemic into opportunity

Winnipeg -

In the middle of a pandemic and while battling cancer, a Winnipeg woman helped her mom launch a business.

The duo created a healthy nut bar, marketed under the name ‘The Healthy Nut’ that Danica Marencil and her mother Michelle Gospic adapted from a family recipe. What had been a family favourite became something of a nutritional lifeline when Marencil was undergoing chemotherapy for a cancer detected just before the pandemic hit Winnipeg in March of 2020.

“Usually, when you’re diagnosed with cancer, there’s multiple tests that take a very long time for you to get through and because everyone was canceling their appointments due to COVID, I was able to slide in and start treatment two weeks later,” Marencil told CTV Morning Live.

Marencil recalls a nurse advising her that ordinarily, it would have taken three months before treatment could start and that it was a ‘miracle’ she was able to start so quickly. With the start of chemo though, came other challenges.

“When Danica was going through treatments, she had side effects from chemotherapy so it made it very difficult for her to stomach food,” recalled Gospic.

That’s what prompted Gospic to look to a nutrition bar she’d already been making for years.

“I just simply asked her, why don’t you try these and see because the ingredients will nourish you,” said Gospic.

As it turned out, Marencil was able to stomach the nut bars, and that success inspired her and her mom to start thinking about the bar’s commercial potential.

“When I was officially done treatment in the fall, my mom and I just kind of bounced the idea off from a business perspective—both of us come from business backgrounds—so we were both just like you know what, I think the market really needs this,” said Marencil.

“So we took a leap of faith January 1 as an online platform and it just kind of skyrocketed from there. We got the bars in the hands of influencers, we reached out to fitness facilities but at that point we weren’t able to hit retail just yet because we had to finish our packaging.”

Once packaging was finalized, the pair found they had to adapt marketing to the constraints of the pandemic. That meant conducting a lot of the marketing and promotion via Zoom meetings.

They caught the attention of the CancerCare Manitoba Foundation, and now have a new partnership in which a portion of the sales is donated to the foundation.

“We partnered with them because we saw first hand what donation dollars do for patients so we just wanted to take a negative experience and bring it to a positive light and giving back to CancerCare Manitoba was really important for us,” Marencil said.

-with files from CTV’s Nicole Dubé