Every bottle of She's The Sauce contains four grams of protein and two grams of fibre. It costs nothing in advertising spend to sell. The woman behind it, Nicole Glabman, still clocks in full-time at Uber five days a week.
Glabman, 30, bootstrapped the condiment brand with $20,000 (£15,800) of personal savings after a polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis forced her to rethink what she ate. Doctors told her to increase protein and cut sauces. She chose to combine the two. The brand now generates around $10,000 (£7,900) a month in revenue from a single product, Honey Mustard, sold direct to consumers,Entrepreneurconfirmed.
'That pissed me off,' Glabman toldNewsweek, recalling her reaction to the medical advice. 'I'm not going to eat my meals without all the flavour.'
PCOS affects between 6% and 13% of women of reproductive age worldwide. Managing it typically means upping protein intake and monitoring blood sugar. For Glabman, that created a conflict she turned into a business plan.
She began testing formulations in her kitchen in late 2023, trying to force protein and prebiotic fibre into sauces without ruining the taste. The $20,000 (£15,800) came from wages she had banked during stints as a buyer at Jet.com (later Walmart), in marketing at Gopuff and in advertising at Uber. She hired an R&D consultant to move the recipe beyond a kitchen prototype and brought in CPG strategist Kelly Bennett to sharpen brand positioning. No venture capital. No angel investors.
The finished product - sauces formulated without gums, fillers or artificial ingredients - entered a market that barely knew it wanted functional condiments.
'It was never about chasing a trend,' Glabman told Entrepreneur. 'It was about rethinking what sauce could be.' She launched pre-orders in September 2025 with two flavours, Honey Mustard and Ranch, through herdirect-to-consumer site.
Four hundred bottles moved in 48 hours, totalling $10,000 (£7,900) before she had to shut the page down.
That first sales rush exposed a problem money alone could not fix. Her manufacturer could not produce at the volume customers wanted. Glabman had to halt sales, find a new co-manufacturer and rebuild the entire supply chain. It took three months.
'I turned off preorders because I was like, holy s---, I don't know if my manufacturer is ready for this,' she said in a separate profile. The lesson, she added, was expensive but clear. What works in a test kitchen does not always survive the jump to factory production. If she could start over, she would involve manufacturing partners from the outset rather than perfecting formulations in isolation.
Source: International Business Times UK
