The first Urban Remedy store occupied the front of a small production kitchen in San Rafael. It was not a flagship. It was barely a flag. Customers came to collect juice and food, while behind them Neka Lac and a small crew worked through the practical consequences of having made something people wanted faster than expected.
Visitors were not uniformly encouraging. The location had a history. Nothing lasted there, people told her, with the special cheerfulness reserved for predicting somebody else's commercial death. Lac was unbothered. The front room was only meant to be a pickup point. The serious business was in back: chopping, juicing, bottling and packing.
Then the pickup point got busy. Within six months, the operation had run out of space. Lac's plan for what she later called her "one sweet little location" had met the public, and the public had ordered seconds.
“Good food goes bad fast.”Neka Lac on the rule that complicates everything
That sentence is a product philosophy disguised as a warehouse complaint. Fresh salads have brief lives. Refrigerated juices are heavy. Overnight shipping is expensive. A shelf can be fully stocked on Monday and become an inventory problem by Friday. The ordinary industrial answer is to make food last longer. Lac chose instead to build a company capable of moving faster.
The garden before the spreadsheet
Long before San Rafael, there was a childhood that made an unusual education for a future packaged-food executive. Lac grew up partly in rural Mendocino County, in the Trinity Alps, where her family lived without electricity. Nature was the playground. She caught frogs, built little houses from sticks, gathered eggs and helped her mother make bread and ice cream. Her mother had worked as a street artist at Fisherman's Wharf; her father took her traveling and introduced her to other cultures.
She has recalled the setting with equal measures of affection and comic embarrassment. As a child, she wished for a Betty Crocker mother and a more conventional name, preferably Lauren. Instead she got what she has called "crazy hippie parents," plenty of curls and few boundaries. Time improved the joke. The upbringing she once found odd supplied an adult vocabulary of soil, season, making and taste.
Lac did not go directly from garden to grocery shelf. From 1996 to 2000 she studied at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, then spent more than a decade in private acupuncture practice. Food gradually moved from the edge of that work to its center. She began leading multi-day retreats in 2006 and saw an obvious practical gap: people might appreciate freshly prepared, plant-forward meals, but they did not always have the time, equipment or inclination to shop, wash, chop and juice all day.
Urban Remedy emerged in 2009 as her answer. It was less a thunderbolt than a succession of requests. She made food on the side, hired a few people, built a website for Marin County orders and began using a small commercial kitchen. An online shopping platform offered one of her juices and sold out in two minutes. Serendipity, in a startup, is usually just panic wearing better shoes.
The accidental chief executive
Lac knew recipes, clients and the discipline of running a practice. A fast-growing food company demanded additional dialects. In the early years she handled product, procurement, human resources and contractors. At the same time, she was writing a book. She has described the period as mayhem, which feels like the one management term no founder needs to Google.
Money arrived in similarly unruly fashion. Lac and a friend prepared a business plan to raise $100,000 for a kitchen. A connection led to Science Inc., the Los Angeles incubator, which offered $1 million. She initially thought that sum would solve everything. Capital, as founders discover, buys better problems.
A later $5 million round made it possible to hire Paul Coletta as chief executive. Their courtship began when an acquaintance suggested they meet. Lac visited Coletta's polished office at The Melt and wondered how grilled cheese had acquired such splendid furniture. Coletta then came to the modest Urban Remedy store, tasted the products, returned a few days later and asked her to tea. This continued for about a month until, over one of those teas, he proposed himself for the CEO job.
The timing was good. Lac disliked being CEO. She loved making products and talking about the ideas behind them; she did not love conducting board meetings in an argot of acronyms. She has admitted that she once sat in a meeting, heard the term KPI and quietly searched online for its meaning. It is a small confession with a large point. Expertise in the thing a business sells does not automatically confer fluency in the language investors use to measure it.
How a side project found the refrigerated aisle
Coletta brought the operating strengths Lac did not want to imitate. She described herself as quick and instinctive, him as considered and patient. They were, in her formulation, yin and yang. More remarkably, she said they had only three fights in eight years. The number matters less than the arrangement beneath it: she did not hire a professional manager to become a lesser version of him. She made room for each person to be useful in a different way.
Keeping the immutables
Relinquishing the CEO title did not end the founder's work. It clarified it. Lac retained product and creative authority, eventually carrying the title of chief product officer. She has said that she remains the person who holds the vision. That role can sound ceremonial until a company takes investment, adds retailers and encounters the daily temptation to make one harmless exception.
Her defense is a set of "immutables": the qualities that cannot be negotiated away without making Urban Remedy a different company. The food is certified organic. It is minimally processed. Product development begins with function, flavor, texture and color rather than an abstract trend report. The company became a Certified B Corporation in 2018, giving its environmental and social promises an external scorecard as well as an internal vocabulary.
“I still feel like I'm the person who holds that vision.”The founder's job after handing over the chief executive title
The awkwardness is useful. Investors reasonably want expansion. Retailers want reliable supply. Customers want freshness and convenience at once, two desires that have never shared a simple logistics plan. Lac's task is not to deny any side of the triangle. It is to stop the pressure among them from flattening the product.
Urban Remedy expanded from cold-pressed juice into salads, bowls, snacks and shakes. It opened stores, shipped orders and built branded refrigerated kiosks inside grocery locations. By 2024, Lac said the business had generated $46 million in the preceding year and had products in more than 300 Whole Foods Market stores. In 2026 interviews, the count had passed 400. Scale arrived, though not in the shape first imagined.
The company also carried her ideas into print. Urban Remedy: The 4-Day Home Cleanse Retreat, published by Weldon Owen in 2014 with a foreword by Cindy Crawford, translated the retreats into 176 pages and more than 75 recipes. The book caught Lac halfway between practitioner and industrialist, before the national kiosks but after the first improbable rush of demand.
Flexible about the route, stubborn about the destination
Lac speaks about the company as though it has a temperament of its own. Urban Remedy, she has said, took her on a journey. She did not begin with a plan for hundreds of retail locations, a substantial capital stack or a sophisticated omnichannel model. She began with a local service for people a little like her, then tried to stay awake to what demand was telling her.
Flexibility is not surrender in this account. She argues that holding too tightly can block a company's energy. Yet openness has a boundary: do not compromise the values that made adaptation worthwhile. It is a distinction founders often blur. A route can change without the destination changing. A CEO can be replaced without the founder's taste being outsourced. A tiny kitchen can become a national business without freshness becoming a quaint origin story.
Her bluntest advice to other founders has the brevity of lessons purchased at full price: get an excellent lawyer before signing anything; surround yourself with people who are smart where you are not; focus on one thing rather than distributing your attention like confetti. There is no romance in this counsel, which is precisely its charm.
The child who wanted to be called Lauren ended up putting her unusual name on an unusual company. The practitioner who had to look up KPI learned enough finance to see what finance could not decide. And the owner of one supposedly doomed storefront discovered that the constraint everyone wished away - food that behaved like food - was the most honest promise she could make.
The trick was never to stop spoilage. It was to build quickly enough, carefully enough and with enough conviction that freshness could survive success.