• Nancy Mueller is receiving a Lifetimes of Achievement award on May 20. Read about the all the 2018 honorees.
Nancy Mueller achieved entrepreneurial celebrity in the early 1980s when her frozen appetizer business took off and Nancy’s Quiche established itself as an enduring grocery brand.
After selling the business in 1999, Mueller shifted her sights to another challenge and a longtime personal dream — overseeing the design and construction of a 140-foot yacht, hiring a crew and setting sail.
As she explains it, “I converted quiche into a yacht.” In 2003, Mueller christened her new vessel the Andiamo — or “let’s go” — and spent the next 10 years sailing, scuba diving and photographing the wonders of the world, under water and above. She covered more than 130,000 nautical miles.
One might think that with her exhaustive travel schedule — including more than six months a year on board her yacht for the better part of a decade — Mueller wouldn’t have time to make many contributions to Palo Alto, the place she raised her two children and considers her home base. Not so. Since 1966, Mueller has offered her business acumen and support to many local nonprofits, including Avenidas, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Bay Window Restaurant, which benefits the Family Service Association. She’s also expanded her volunteer reach, serving on a variety of regional and national boards, including San Francisco Opera, American Prairie Reserve, RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and the Waimea Ocean Film Festival in Hawaii.
“You can sleep when you’re dead,” Mueller said with a grin, while maintaining that she actually does squeeze in eight hours a night. Another “life principle” Mueller offers came from her father, Jackson L. Sothern, who taught her to “Never put off ’til tomorrow what you can do today, and always do the hardest thing first.”
Mueller arrived in Palo Alto in 1965, fresh out of college and following her soon-to-be husband, Glenn, who was studying at Stanford Business School. She put her college chemistry degree to use with a job at Syntex pharmaceuticals.
“I also typed Glenn’s papers, so I got an inadvertent MBA,” she said.
Mueller’s food business originated from the countless tiny quiche appetizers she would make and freeze in preparation for the holiday parties the couple threw for their growing circle of friends and colleagues in Glenn’s venture-capital business. “I’m a good cook but more of a mass-production cook,” she said. “My interest was not in being a caterer — I wanted a business.”
Before Christmas in 1976, Mueller made 8,000 appetizer-size quiche, mushroom turnovers and cheese puffs, selling them at $3 a dozen to friends in the Junior League. People liked them, and she began searching for a commercial kitchen.
“You learn as you go,” she said of her early years in business. “In running a business like that you have to be so passionate that failure can’t be in the equation. You just continue to figure out a better way and a better way to make it work.”
A major break came two weeks before Christmas in 1983 when she showed her quiche appetizer to Price Club (now Costco).
“They took 25 cases each in four stores and by noon they were gone,” Mueller recalled. Nancy’s Specialty Foods grew into the world’s largest processer and marketer of frozen quiche products.
Mueller was tragically widowed at age 50, in 1994. Five years later she sold her business, which by then had 350 employees. Mueller decided to pursue her dream of owning a yacht and traveling the world, something she and Glenn had talked about.
“After Glenn passed away that dream (of a yacht) was still in my heart, so when I sold Nancy’s, I executed on the dream,” she said.
Over the next decade — and typically with friends and her current husband, Robert Fox (Mueller remarried in 2001), aboard — she visited the Mediterranean countries, Caribbean Islands, Galapagos, French Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi, Malaysian Borneo, East Timor, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and more. Some of her extraordinary underwater photographs now can be seen on the walls at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
Reflecting on what might be her next stage, she said, “My strategy has been to pack in as much as I can. … Now I’m going to work a bit more on savoring things. When you’re booked, booked, booked, time disappears before your eyes.”