Katherine Harvey, ’08, said the last thing she ever wanted to do was own a business. But now, she said she can’t imagine doing anything else.
Husband and wife duo Ryan and Katherine Harvey ’08 own Bare Bones Broth, a company that makes and sells healthful broths and stocks. What started as Ryan’s side project at work became a national business that manufactures and sells chicken and beef-based broth products as well as drink mixes.
“Bone broth is the original multivitamin, what people were using and making to get the most out of the little food they had,” Katherine said. “You get bones and simmer them and you extract all the nutrients of life out of them.” Bare b
Katherine graduated from Hillsdale in 2008 with a degree in English. After graduating, she moved back to her home state of Alabama to write at the Talladega Daily Home and later the Gadsden Times. She moved to Honolulu in 2010 to write for the Honolulu Civil Beat, a newspaper started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. A year later, Katherine met Ryan remotely and then in person at a friend’s wedding in San Diego, where he lived after spending five years in the United States Navy.
After completing a nine-month culinary school program and working in restaurants, Ryan said he grew tired of the unhealthy foods and wanted to change course.
He then worked for an online meal delivery business that prepared meals from locally-grown ingredients in southern California. Ryan began using the company’s kitchen in the evening for a “scrappy” side project — tinkering with a recipe for bone broth.
“I love the process of it. It’s the base of all cooking,” Ryan said. “It’s the first thing you make in culinary school, and they teach you the process first so you can then go on to make soup, sauces, and braises.”
Katherine moved to San Diego in 2012 and began writing for the Union Tribune. She and Ryan married in 2014. In the same year, Ryan upgraded his side project to a business, Bare Bones Broth.
That year, Katherine said, drinking bone broth became a national health phenomenon. A paleo, nutrient-dense food, bone broth was sold in some cities like cups of coffee.
Bare Bones Broth was, at the time, one of the only companies selling the product nationally online.
Katherine joined Bare Bones Broth full time in 2015. As the couple began to deal with more USDA and FDA regulations, costs of starting their business began to rise. Katherine’s brother suggested the couple move to Oregon, where renting a building would cost much less than in southern California.
There, Katherine and Ryan rented a cheap building — a former sushi restaurant — and renovated it into a factory. The couple cooked in the kitchen area, installing large vats for the broths and stocks, and used the former dining room area for packaging and shipping their product.
In two years, the business went from selling a few shipments of product each week to contracting out the work to manufacturers across the country, which allowed the couple to move back to San Diego in 2017.
“We grew and grew those two years,” Katherine said.
In that same year, they published “The Bare Bones Broth Cookbook” with Harper Collins.
After five years of sending in applications and samples to Whole Foods, Bare Bones Broth began selling their organic chicken and grass-fed beef broths in stores this May.
“It’s easy to forget in day-to-day work, but Whole Foods was our big goal for years and years,” Katherine said.
In June, the company began selling their powdered beef broth drink mixes launched at Costco, where the company has already sold 150% more product than the incumbent broth drink mix it replaced. The couple plans to launch a nutrient-dense, sugar-free powdered coffee creamer in December that contains prebiotics — nutrients that help feed the good bacteria that inhabit the human digestive system — and an instant chicken bone broth beverage mix in January. Currently, their best seller is the instant beef bone broth beverage mix, which launched in June.
One challenge for the company, Ryan said, is abiding by USDA and FDA regulations. While the FDA has strict guidelines for chicken products, Ryan said the USDA guidelines on product labeling were particularly “daunting” at first.
But Katherine said the government agencies know growing companies frequently violate regulations, knowingly or unknowingly.
“You have to be comfortable with the fact that you’re going to break a law,” Katherine said. “You’re not going to do everything right perfectly the whole time. You’re going to mess up. But the thing that sets a successful business apart from one that will last is being willing to do that. You have to be resilient.”
But Katherine said being one’s own boss isn’t always easy — especially while raising a young son.
“A lot of people like to glamorize the entrepreneurial lifestyle. You’re in total control of your time, that’s true, but every entrepreneur wants their business to thrive, and that involves making the best choices for your business,” Katherine said.
Katherine said she and her husband set specific boundaries on work place and time: they run their company out of 500-square foot office in San Diego, and they have a set work time from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., to work with their son’s daycare program. They only work into the evenings if company emergencies arise.
“We aren’t heart surgeons,” Katherine said. “We’re just making food.”
