Here's A Twist: Reston Pretzel Maker Finalist In Barclays' Small Business Promotion

RESTON, VA — Over the last two years, many small businesses have had to twist, turn and pivot, in order to keep their heads above water due the pandemic. Fortunately, twisting and turning is something that's familiar to Melissa Romano, co-owner of the Nordic-Knot, a Reston-based, traditional Scandinavian pretzel bakery.

When state mandates in March 2020 forced the closure of many food businesses across Virginia, not only did the Lake Anne Brew House, which Romano and her husband Jason own and operate, have to close, but the pretzel business was also negatively impacted.

"The bakery had very, very different problems arise," Romano said. "We are primarily a wholesale distribution bakery and that's how we built the business. ... We built the bakery to support other small businesses through wholesale distribution of our product."

Since all the small breweries in Virginia were closed, they weren't buying Nordic-Knot pretzels. Even when the Lake Anne Brew House and other breweries we able to reopen on a limited basis for carryout and curbside service, most weren't serving food.

That's when pretzel makers Romano and co-owner Eric Lundberg decided to pivot their business and begin providing take-home packs of pretzels for retail customers.

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"We were experimenting with all sorts of things like that, but it was a very small margin compared to the wholesale distribution that we had prior to that, so we did a few other things," she said.

When many grocery stores where unable to keep flour and yeast in stock during the early days of the pandemic, Nordic-Knot began packaging and selling its bulk flour and yeast to its customers. This pushed them more toward becoming a direct to customer retail outlet.

"We started a new online store and we started baking pretzels just for the people instead of baking them for wholesale distribution," Romano said. "We don't have a storefront, so my partner built us a beautiful wooden cabinet that sits out in front of the bakery and we set up hands-free pickup."

Thanks to all this pivoting and twisting, the little-pretzel-bakery-that-could and the Lake Anne Brew House have been able to successfully weather the last two years. They even have found a possible pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Out of nearly 5,000 entrants, Nordic-Knot was chosen recently as one of the 10 finalists in Barclays Bank's Small Business Big Wins promotion, which Romano had entered in February.

"What came across my feed looked like a grant application and they were asking for the stories of how our companies were founded and the judging criteria was to be based on your community involvement and what you did to give back during the pandemic," she said.

On Wednesday, Barclays posted the 10 finalists online and invited people to read the entries and vote for the business that best demonstrated adaption during adverse times. Voting runs through April 22 and each person can cast one vote per day per email address. A total of $225,000 in prize money will be given away, with the grand prize winner taking home $60,000.

"It's more money than we used to start the company," Romano said. "We bootstrapped this company. It's a small company, grassroots. We started it from very humble beginning and we've grown it over the past five years, with an enormous amount of support from our community. But we've also given back a large amount as much as we can."