Wally Jacob understands the value of good food. His mother, Kathy Jacob, was born a Kerr and still works every day at Kerr’s Kornstand in Pennington.
She also gets up with her son at the crack of dawn two mornings a week to help him cook and assemble his Wabowls, the nutritious, balanced meals that he sells at Pennington Quality Market in Pennington and PEAC Health and Fitness on Lower Ferry Road just over the Ewing border. The Jacobs recently doubled production to about 300 meals a week, due to demand.
Jacob currently sells his three Wabowls—all natural, vegan, and gluten-free—for $7.99 retail at Pennington Quality Market and PEAC Health and Fitness in Trenton. He has plans to add one independent, higher-end grocery store each month over the next year.
Jacob grew up at 151 Bull Run Road and graduated from Hopewell Valley Central High School. His father is a retired manufacturer of compression and injection molding at Kuhn and Jacob Molding and Tool Company in Trenton.
After Jacob graduated from the College of New Jersey in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in accountancy, he traveled in Europe, where, he says, “all I did was sit on the beach and eat a lot.” As a result, he gained 30 pounds.
Back stateside, he took an accounting job with Vail Resorts, which manages ski resorts in Colorado, and decided he needed to lose that extra weight. Jacob noticed that a colleague, who was a body builder, brought a mix of tuna fish and macaroni for lunch every day. His reasoning was that this lunch, which balanced carbohydrates, proteins, and fats (called “macronutrients”), would help him lose weight. Jacob copied these lunches (doctored with onions, celery, and yellow mustard), continued to work out, and found himself losing weight.
That bland tuna-macaroni salad was the germ of what eventually evolved into the Wabowl. The theory behind this diet prescribes meals with a ratio of 2:2:1 for proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, but when Jacob originally tried to balance the macronutrients by weight rather than by calories, he came up, accidentally, with the 1:1:1 ratio he uses in his Wabowls.
When coming up with a name for his company, Jacob was looking for something with a “cool ring,” so he turned to his own name, or, in his case, names. Though he grew up answering to the name Andy — the name his parents wanted to give him — by friends and family, his legal name is Walter Joseph Jacob, IV, because his paternal great-grandmother put her foot down and said he had to be so named to maintain the family line.
Sick of having to correct teachers at every roll call, he decided to switch to his “real” name in college, where people called him Walter, Wally, or Wallace. So in his search for a product name he tried Wallybowl, then Andybowl, and stopped at Wabowl.
Jacob says he never really enjoyed accounting, but at the beginning, Vail Resorts did have its positive side. “It was a real job in a ski bum-type community,” he says. After a management change, the company became more corporate and moved its headquarters to the Denver area. That’s when Jacob decided it was time to move on.
He tried to get started as a residential real estate broker, but the real estate market crashed, and in 2007 Jacob moved back to New Jersey. While working part time for five years as an assistant at Curry Conduit Services, a business-to-business brokerage company in the multifamily housing industry, he wrote a book that his editor dubbed “a surreal, hallucinatory novel,” which is awaiting a rewrite with a more traditional story line.
An entrepreneurial spirit is not new to Jacob. His mother, Kathy, says he’s always been an idea person. “He’s tried new things, experimented with little invention-type things. I remember one time, it was a fastener that would hold his comforter down, because it kept falling off. He was going to market that,” she said.
She expresses pride in his current effort. “It’s a product he really believes in, and he has taken the steps to move it forward,” she said.
In creating his Wabowls, Jacob fell back on the eating habits he developed by cooking for himself through all his “employment journeys.” “I try to eat grains, greens, beans, and seeds in every meal, and those are the staples of the Wabowl,” he says. The idea was to maintain his balanced ratio while maximizing nutrition and fiber.
Back in New Jersey, he would cook relatively large quantities of each ingredient, then put them together to create a meal. In the process, he learned a lot, for example, that you don’t digest flax seeds unless you really chew them up. So now he buys milled flax seed, which is a powder. And why does he use spinach in all three Wabowls?
“When you look at the carb-to-protein ratio, relative to kale, collard greens, and turnip greens, spinach has the highest protein and lowest carb to protein ratio of green leafy vegetables,” he says.
Jacob portions his ingredients into plastic cups cut to size so that he will have the correct weight of each ingredient to create a balanced meal. So far this works well. “We spot-check every 10, weighing it to make sure are we within 5 percent, and we haven’t been off yet,” he says.
Initially, Jacob would mix all the ingredients in a bowl. “It was kind of gross to look at,” he says. He adjusted his technique, dividing the ingredients into four quadrants, and took his first Wabowl to John Biancamano, chairman of Princeton SCORE mentoring program for small business owners and entrepreneurs, in early June of 2015.
Biancamano told him, “This looks extremely healthy, but I don’t believe you’ll be able to sell a single one of these.” Jacob tried to justify his “super foods,” but his mentor responded, “Yeah, but how does it taste?” and advised Jacob to come up with some good sauces.
Although Jacob walked away heartbroken, he quickly put together a list of 10 sauce recipes with the 1:1:1 macronutrient caloric ratio. His favorite is his Seoul sauce, “a nonfat Greek yogurt base with Eastern and Southeast Asian flavors.”
At a seminar at the Rutgers Food Innovation Center seminar, Jacob met Janis Hertz Grover of Foodpreneur. At Foodpreneur, Grover and her co-president, Esther Luongo Psarakis, guide clients like Jacob “from concept to grocery store.”
Having finally homed in on an ingredient list to go with his Seoul sauce—spinach, garbanzos, barley, chicken, and grilled flax seed—he needed a good label for his 16-oz. deli container. On the web he found artist Ron Hansen, who, Jacob says, “took my vision and made it into the logo you see today.”
To learn how to prepare food safely during the cooking process, Jacob took the ServSafe online class from the Restaurant Association. He cooks his ingredients and sauces and assembles his Wabowls at the Something Special Sharing Kitchen, an incubator in Ewing.
Admitting that the evidence for his nutritional approach is all hearsay combined with self experimentation, Jacob is now looking for more scientific support for using particular macrobiotic caloric ratios.
To introduce Wabowls to the Pennington market, Jacob has done lots of in-store sampling, a technique that he says is very important in the food industry. As he expands, he has begun to explore companies and individuals who provide this service and, based on sales projections, he is figuring out when he needs to bring in additional cooking staff. As he is trying to expand his company in new locations, he says he will gradually phase out his mother, “because she works too much.”
He is already thinking of his next Wabowl, which will include some type of pulled pork with a Carolina vinegar-based sauce.
Wally Jacob sharing samples of his invention, Wabowls, prepared meals that he makes locally and sells at Pennington Quality Market. (Staff photo by Joe Emanski.),
