Lizi Heaps grew up thinking everyone had a mother like hers.
Liz Edmunds spent her adult life planning, preparing and providing family dinners for Heaps and her six siblings nearly every night. The food was always secondary to the family connection, she said — one that continues today in their shared company, The Food Nanny.
Together, they’ve built Edmunds’ original product — a meal-planning cookbook — into a “distinctly Utah brand” spanning digital platforms and physical products, said presenter Brandon Fugal, who introduced the pair at Utah Business Forward, a statewide conference held Tuesday in downtown Salt Lake City.
“There truly is not a better representation I know of what Utah believes — what it values,” said Catherine Bennett, executive editor of Utah Business.
The idea to turn those values into a venture was a long time coming for Edmunds and Heaps. But the two have been working together for a very long time. Edmunds launched The Food Nanny as a simple cookbook based on her day-to-day life. She wrote down everything she’d already been doing, with a goal of helping other families do the same. Edmunds found a publisher and, she said, made $1 for every book sold. As a kid, Heaps helped her mother sell the books out of the trunk of their family car. Edmunds would put her personal phone number in the back of each copy; if you’re not 100% happy, she’d tell them, call for a full refund.
Edmunds parlayed the book into a short-lived cooking show on BYUtv, but eventually the brand fizzled out, Heaps said.
Nine years ago, Heaps brought it back “by necessity,” Edmunds said. Heaps needed a job, and noticed the same need her mother did years prior. Families weren’t gathering like they used to, she told her mom.
“She said, “Mom, your message never dies,’” Edmunds remembered.
But the medium Edmunds had chosen to spread it — print — was showing its age.
Heaps took The Food Nanny digital, rebooting the brand on Instagram in 2017. When it started, she answered every direct message she received from followers. Those messages helped give the company its shape, she said.
“People will tell you what they want,” Heaps said.
What they wanted was what Heaps grew up with, evolved and accelerated for a time-poor digital era. So she worked hard to give it to them.
The Food Nanny still publishes recipes, but it also launched products ranging from bread mixes and branded beef to clothing and decor. They learned from the low margins of the original cookbook, and took over the supply chain themselves, Heaps said. Recently, they’ve opened three brick-and-mortar stores — two in Utah and one in Arizona. And their Instagram is bigger than ever, with more than 500,000 followers.
Social media is “a beast,” Heaps said. “You’re working 24/7, basically,” she said. “It just becomes your whole life.”
In important ways, though, The Food Nanny was their lives all along.
“Follow your passion,” Edmunds said. “That was my passion — to put dinner on the table, that was the greatest thing I ever did. Get your family around the table. The conversations are more important than the food.”
