It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but Nicole Bernard Dawes loves going to the grocery store.
“I’d go every day if I could,” remarked Dawes. “I love seeing what’s new… you can go to the same store, every weekend it’ll be different.”
These days, she’s also keeping an eye on her latest creation: Nixie, a line of organically flavored sparkling water and organic zero-sugar sodas. She founded the company in 2019 and serves as its CEO. “It is the company that I dreamed of,” she said. “It’s like what I had hoped we would be doing.”
Raised In The Chip Business
Nicole Bernard Dawes grew up on Cape Cod with a unique perspective on the food business. Her mother, Lynn Bernard, ran a health food store, and her father, Steve Bernard, was co-founder of Cape Cod Potato Chips. Dawes recalls spending days with her dad at the company’s famous factory on Cape Cod.
“One of the things I loved about my dad was he didn’t really distinguish a lot between what an adult could do and what a kid should do,” she said.
That included teaching her how to read a P&L and having her tag along on customer calls. “I really appreciated that because he never treated me like I wasn’t capable of learning something,” Dawes recalled. The lessons paid off when, as an adult, Dawes joined her father’s company and launched the brand’s reduced-fat chips.
Creating Late July Snacks
At 29, Nicole Bernard Dawes was ready to build her own company, Late July Snacks. The goal: to create delicious organic and non-GMO snacks, including tortilla chips. Her father co-founded the company, but it was her mother’s influence that was clearly felt.
“I think my entire career has really been driven to give people who care about health and wellness access to the same products that are popular for conventional brands,” she said. “That is what was the driving force behind our R&D.”
When she launched Late July Snacks, she was pregnant with her first son and determined to make it all work. “I was going to be present in my kids’ lives and also be a hands-on businessperson,” she said. “And I was going to bring my baby to the office. Does that look like a leader? I don’t know. But that was the type of leader I was going to be.”
2009: The Hardest Year
“I think a defining feature of who I am is that I am an eternal optimist… I don’t think I’ve ever really faced a challenge that I didn’t think was solvable,” remarked Dawes. But she will admit, the closest she came was working through the curveballs thrown her way during the recession of 2008-2009.
Late July Snacks was growing, but slowly. In 2009, her father passed away after a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer. As if that trauma wasn’t enough, the bank sent a letter to Late July Snacks, invoking a “death of member” clause to put their loan in technical default.
“I was so mad that I threw the letter away,” Dawes recalled. Some of her investors, who were also friends of her father, wanted to call an investors’ meeting at his wake. It was, she said simply, “a tough year.”
Dawes, along with her husband Peter Dawes, Late July Snacks’ COO, worked to replace the debt. “I don’t think there was a part of me that felt I wasn’t going to solve it,” she said. Moving forward, the company launched new products and began to take off.
“That was the year that we really became, effectively, an overnight success,” she said, noting they came out of the situation stronger and more ready to fight. “I’m sure I’ve repressed some of the bad moments of that year, but we really never looked back.”
Why She Loves the Early Days Most
When Campbell’s acquired Late July Snacks in 2018, it was taking in $150 million a year, according to Dawes. People kept congratulating her on the sale, and she didn’t quite know how to receive it. “It was pretty devastating, honestly,” she admitted. “I was pretty sad about it.”
What she missed, it turned out, was the fast-paced, day-to-day work of running a new business. “Running an emerging brand is like my extreme sport,” she said. “When you’re running a bigger, more stable brand, every day is sort of the same… It’s a different type of leadership.” The need for daily problem-solving is where she thrives.
So, she did it again. Almost immediately after the sale of Late July Snacks, she founded Nixie in 2019. The soda and sparkling water brand is now in 11,000 retailers nationwide, and Dawes was just named to Inc. Magazine‘s 2026 Female Founders 500 list
Building Nixie: A Beverage Business
Nicole Bernard Dawes adores the Nixie products and is enjoying the sometimes bumpy ride in the extremely competitive beverage space. “Every day you wake up to a knife fight basically,” she says. As such, she makes a point of remaining accessible to her team whenever they need her.
It’s her team that makes working at Nixie all the sweeter, given that she was able to bring a good portion of the senior leadership over from Late July.
“We had this chance to kind of build a company with a bunch of people that we already really knew and loved working with, in a category that we felt really needed, kind of this special sauce that we bring to a category,” Dawes said. “And with Nixie, I’m feeling just so proud of where we are.”
And there’s no longer a need to bring her “babies” into the office. Her two sons are grown: the youngest is in film school, and the oldest is working as a musician. Throughout their lives, Dawes has encouraged them to follow their passions.
“I love what I do,” she told them. “I mean, I wake up every day, and I can’t even believe I get to do this as a job. And, that’s how you should feel about what you do for work.”
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