I don't say this often, but Jenny Cyr's episode got me a little choked up. She came in talking about French macarons and left me thinking about her mom's MS and a cancer treatment center two hours north of here.

That's the thing about this show -- you never know which conversation is going to turn into one of those. Jenny's did.

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From Dishwasher to Pastry Chef

Jenny Cyr started washing dishes at a small bakery when she was 14 years old. By 16, she'd talked her parents into letting her graduate high school a year early so she could start at Johnson & Wales, chasing a Pastry Arts degree. From there the path went international -- staging in England, backpacking Europe with two friends, and, after a night at a small cafe in Madrid, deciding on the spot to move to New York City to cook instead of finishing school in Colorado.

New York meant staging -- working full unpaid shifts just to earn a shot at a job -- at kitchens including Bobby Flay's and Daniel Boulud's DB Bistro Moderne, before she landed at Todd English's Olives, which became her main kitchen home in the city.

Staging, for anyone outside restaurant kitchens, isn't an interview -- you hand over your resume, and if a chef likes it, you work a full unpaid shift like you already belong there. Jenny was so nervous at her DB Bistro Moderne stage that she literally bumped into the executive chef mid-shift. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. He offered her a job at the end of the day. She asked for 24 hours to think it over. “People have never asked me that,” he told her -- and gave her the day anyway. She ended up choosing Olives, under Todd English, instead.

It didn't last. “I'm only like 20 years old. I'm burnt out. I'm working all these hours. I don't know if I can do this forever,” she remembers telling her parents. They told her she could go back to school if she wanted -- so she did, training to become an art teacher instead. She landed teaching art in Hampton, NH, and, missing the food industry, picked up a job as a waitress at 900° in Manchester. She stayed on as a bartender there for nine years.

Macarons Out of a Car Trunk

During COVID, Jenny started making French macarons again, almost as a favor -- a gift basket for her sister in Vermont turned into a business her sister insisted she start selling. She did.

"For a period of time I was selling macarons out of the trunk of my car to people and anyone who would buy them."

Her first December, she did $1,200 in sales and felt like she was on top of the world. Then COVID made home-baked goods a harder sell, and the whole thing got shelved -- until Jenny married her husband Mitch and moved to Buxton, Maine, into a house with a kitchen big enough to bake in again.

Jenny and Mitch soft-launched Lemon + Lavender Pastries at the Kittery Farmers Market in June 2023. NH friends and regulars showed up in force. A flower shop became their first retail wholesale partner and an early mentor through the challenges of running a small business; the Canopy Portland Waterfront Hotel became their second, after discovering Jenny's macarons at Thompson Point, a juried maker's market in Portland.

From Nine Bags to 550 a Week

Jenny and Mitch are both active, outdoorsy people -- hiking, running -- and they noticed they were eating a lot of bread and cookies with very little time to exercise it off. So they built something different: a protein bite, made with real spices and vanilla, not the plain date balls they saw everywhere else. The first batch, an OG peanut butter chocolate chip flavor, debuted at Thompson Point in what Jenny calls “a very ghetto bag.” Nine bags. They sold out in five minutes.

In 2024, Jenny and Mitch officially launched Live Life Protein Bites, and the growth has been fast. Cafe Luna (Scarborough & Falmouth, ME) and Foley's Fitness (Scarborough, ME) became their first two big wholesale accounts. Today, Live Life Bites is in nearly 40 locations across Maine and New Hampshire -- including Exeter, Manchester, Bedford, Portsmouth, Rye, and North Hampton on the NH side.

"We went from the nine bags at the original Thompson Point that we launched these to -- we're selling just about 550 bags a week."

Jenny describes the growth as a constant tug between two feelings. “It's like this fine line between impostor syndrome and proud all the time, and humbled,” she says. The moment it became real for her wasn't even at a market -- it was a Saturday when Mitch covered the farmers market alone and Jenny took the delivery route instead, planning to grab lunch at Cafe Luna, one of their accounts. She walked in and the shelf was sold out. Cafe Luna and Foley's Fitness, both in Scarborough, became their first two big protein bite wholesale accounts, and Jenny still credits both owners as the kind of small business people who go out of their way to lift other small businesses up.

Two weeks before this episode recorded, Jenny and Mitch retired the French macarons for good, closing the book on Lemon + Lavender's original pastry business to focus fully on the bites. They've since added Protein Bite Mixes -- take-home kits so customers can make their own at home -- to the lineup alongside the original bars.

Food Is Medicine

The newest chapter is the one that got Carol -- and probably will get you too. New England Cancer Specialists, which runs treatment centers affiliated with Dana-Farber in Portsmouth, Kennebunk, Topsham, and Westbrook, reached out to Jenny about their “Food Is Medicine” Passion Project after one of the program's leaders tried Live Life Bites at Foley's Fitness and couldn't stop talking about them. Jenny pitched the idea to a small board of nutritionists and program staff -- nervous the whole time, by her own admission -- about building a bite for patients going through treatment.

"So food is medicine, and I like that -- it speaks to me. My brother went through cancer. My mom has MS."

Jenny and Mitch developed a dairy-free, vegan-friendly version using a plant-based protein and vegan chocolate chips, built around their original recipe. Two hundred of the bites went out to the Topsham location as a trial, meant to last patients a month to six weeks. They were gone in under two weeks. Jenny is hoping the program finds the funding to continue -- and if it doesn't, she's already thinking about how to keep it going another way.

The Beyond the Plate Angle

Every episode closes the same way: Carol asks for a hospitality story. Jenny's was about a friend, caterer Mel Harrington of Sunday Supper in Kittery, and the plated double-macaron dessert Jenny designed for Mel's five-year anniversary dinner -- her first plated dessert since her Olives days in New York.

"It was this beautiful moment where you got to pay witness to what someone else has built and what they've grown."

That's the thread running through Jenny's whole story, from a dishwasher job at 14 to a wholesale deal with a cancer center: food as connection, not just fuel.

"Our favorite thing about food is the conversation it starts and the story it tells."

Jenny still shows up to farmers markets herself, and when Carol asked who her favorite fellow vendor was, she didn't hesitate: her friend Caitlyn of Milk Bottle, who makes mocktail and drink mixers out of a hibiscus lavender blend Jenny says she reaches for on both her best days and her hardest ones. It's a small detail, but it says a lot about how Jenny talks about her whole community -- never just about her own bites, always about who's standing next to her at the table.

Have you tried Live Life Bites yet? Drop a comment and let us know your flavor pick -- and if you're in Maine or the NH Seacoast, keep an eye out for them at your local gym, cafe, or farmers market.

Beyond the Plate with Carol | @beyondtheplatenh | linktr.ee/BeyondtheplateNH

This episode is sponsored by:
Belmont Hall & Restaurant, Manchester, NH -- belmonthall.net
AND
603 PERKS- 603perks.com

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