With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1313659
TANYA GOEHRING NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 57 O riginally, rock climbing was a way for Denis Mikhailov to procras- tinate during his international relations degree at UVic. But it quickly became an obses- sion and, through a chance encounter, led to the start of a full-fledged business. Although Mikhailov's pas- sion for rock climbing and mountaineering has taken him all over the world, it was on a weeklong 2016 trip through the Bugaboos mountain range in southeastern B.C. that he had an awakening of sorts. "I don't want to draw any comparisons to biblical times, but like Moses, I came off the mountain and had an idea for a company," he remembers with a laugh. Battling indigestion from the freeze-dried meals he'd bought at his local MEC outlet, Mikhailov ran into a mountain guide who gave the North Van- couver resident his homemade dehydrated food. "It changed my perception that it could be done better and more naturally using whole- food ingredients," Mikhailov says. "Nothing else could com- pare to what he made, and the question I had was, why wasn't anyone using whole-food, natu- ral ingredients without preser- vatives, without chemicals?" Mikhailov, who previously earned an MBA from SFU and worked as a financial analyst for the City of Vancouver, launched Nomad Nutrition in early 2017 to help out like-mind- ed individuals who were fed up (pun intended) with the lack of choices in dehydrated meals. "I started it from my home kitchen and grew the company to where I built my own fac- tory in Burnaby," he recalls. "We source fresh ingredients locally, cook them in-house, dehydrate them in-house and distribute and sell from the same location." It seems that Mikhailov, like so many other entrepreneurs, identified a market need at ex- actly the right time. "In terms of mountaineering, you need a lot of carbs, a lot of protein and food that's going to sustain you for long periods of time," he maintains. "What was on the Nomad Nutrition founder and rock climbing enthusiast Denis Mikhailov has been to hell and back—a bunch of times by Nathan Caddell W E E K E N D WA R R IOR WARRIOR SPOTLIGHT Denis Mikhailov is founder and CEO of Nomad Nutrition, which makes a variety of dehydrated meals, like Irish Shep- herd's Pie, Kathmandu Curry and Indian Red Lentil Stew, and distributes them across North America to hundreds of stores through retailers such as Atmosphere, MEC and Valhalla Pure Outfitters. "It's important for us to be in every location where people go outdoors," says Mikhailov. He notes that Nomad, which has a heavy B.C. presence, is in communities like Kelowna, Nanaimo, Nelson, Prince George, Smithers and Vernon. Mikhailov, who was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and raised in Vancouver's Kitsilano, works with his 15 employees to produce the plant-based, organic, ready-to-eat meals in a Burnaby factory. –N.C. ROCK ON Denis Mikhailov turned a lifelong hobby into a successful business High and Dry O FF T H E C LO C K ( quality time )