If you’re in the mood for something sweet but don’t want to compromise your diet, look no further than Balance Nutrition at 3743 Prairie Ave. in Brookfield.
The casual restaurant, which opened July 11, boasts a menu of healthy options packed with protein, vitamins and electrolytes that will satisfy your hunger and your sweet tooth, including tea-based refreshers, protein coffee and “healthy shakes” flavored with protein powders. Balance also serves protein waffles and oats with fruit and acai bowls.
Owners Sandra Rosales and Miribel Cordero told the Landmark they had each run their own similar shop previously.
“Unfortunately for reasons, we had to close down. She closed down hers after mine,” Rosales said. “After a while of us hanging out together a lot, we decided, ‘Well, why don’t we open one together?’”
Fitting the name of their store, Rosales said she and Cordero balance each other’s personalities, allowing them to work together as entrepreneurs.
“There’s a lot of stuff that, sometimes, I’m afraid to do by myself in a business world. Like, ‘OK, you’re by yourself, and you got to figure all this out.’ Mostly, being a woman, there’s not a lot of resources as you would think,” Rosales said. “She’s able to talk to people outside of here, so she’s very social inside. I’m very social inside, but once I go outside, I freeze, and I can’t talk, and she’s really good at that.”
Cordero said she was drawn to the world of making healthier snacks eight years ago while she was in college.
“I was gaining a lot of weight through a stressful college life, and I started getting kind of depressed, not figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Was college it, or not? All these questions,” she said.
She said that all changed when her sister took her to a similar business and she became a regular customer. She said she lost 37 pounds and felt naturally drawn to the shop environment before she was offered a job there.
“I gave myself the opportunity, and after that, I opened my shop in Stone Park,” she said. “I was there for seven years. My motivation is basically that I want to inspire people how they inspired me.”
Rosales said she had a similar journey after visiting Cordero’s store.
“She inspired me to do the business. I realized that everything I knew how to do, because I was an assistant manager [elsewhere], was kind of what my own business would require from me. I figured, instead of making somebody else money, I could make myself money,” she said.
She said she had never been outside of Illinois, and the desire to take herself and her 11-year-old on vacation pushed her to start her own business.
Rosales said the success of these kinds of stores is replicable to the point where she and Cordero help others who are interested in opening their own shops as sister locations to Balance.
“Each location has its own owner, so that’s why they’re different names, but we all have the same menu and the same system,” she said.
Rosales and Cordero said the small-town energy of Brookfield is what drew them to Balance’s location on Prairie Avenue.
“Everybody knows each other, and that’s how you impact people. If you know me, and I help you, you know somebody else that I could help,” Cordero said. “It seems like everybody’s kind of united.”
“We’re not just selling you a product. We like knowing about you. We like knowing about the community,” Rosales said.
They said the communities of customers and business owners alike have embraced them and welcomed them into town.
“When we came to look at the location, we actually went to every business. We wanted to know about the community and how it was, and, oh my God, everybody’s so friendly. We loved it,” Rosales said. “They’re very helping. They pass by, and they’ll be like, ‘How’s it going for you guys?’”
To celebrate the opening of the store, Balance is hosting a grand opening on Thursday, Aug. 7, complete with samples, raffles and a spin-the-wheel game to earn free menu items.
“People fall in love with the taste first, and then they see the whole result of how they feel differently,” Rosales said.
