Abby Taylor `11

As a typical teenager, Abby Taylor wasn’t sure what she wanted to do as a profession for the rest of her life. She didn’t love school, but she really enjoyed the arts where she could be creative and express herself as an artist. Continuing her education wasn’t a high priority, but when a friend was going to visit a school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that was close to the beach, she hopped in the car at the last minute to take a look. Once she saw the campus, its proximity to the beach to go surfing and met the people, she decided that Salisbury University was for her.

During her time at SU, Abby created friendships with folks across campus and really felt a connection with the art community. Abby also had faculty members in the Art Department who taught her design skills in a way that was matter of fact and not coddling, which she now appreciates.

After graduating from SU in 2011, Abby followed her passion and went on surfing trips around the world. She visited Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Hawaii and Nicaragua, to name a few locations. Everywhere she went she would see acai bowls. These are bowls made of frozen mashed up fruit, mainly acai palm fruit, with various fruit or granola toppings.

After a long day of surfing, it was the perfect healthy meal.

In 2014, Abby purchased some industrial kitchen equipment and set up her first cart on Ocean Avenue in Belmar, NJ, with her business partners. “We wanted to be the first to bring acai bowls to the East Coast. Looking back, I am pretty sure I had an illegal cart, but we were passionate about bringing this healthy food to the beach so we went for it.”

She would distribute flyers advertising her cart and what acai bowls actually were while talking about her surfing travels. It was a long summer full of hard work and the promise of an emerging business. Her company Playa Bowls got so successful that she moved into a building right behind where she started with her small cart. Now that they had a brick-and-mortar building, they decided to stay open through the winter to see what type of clientele they really had. Throughout that first winter, she noticed that most of her customers were college students, some of whom would drive an hour just to get an acai bowl.

Fast forward a decade and now with over 200 franchises across the United States, Playa Bowls has set the market as the go-to place for acai bowls.

When reflecting on what has contributed to the business’ remarkable growth, Abby remarked: “The main difference with Playa Bowls is that we live the brand. I am a very active and healthy person who loves to surf. In a way, Playa Bowls really is a representation of me as a person, and I think that authenticity is one of the reasons for our success.”