GoKawiilKey Takeaways Abby Taylor turned years of surf travel and a lack of post‑beach lunch options into Playa Bowls, an acai smoothie bowl business.
She started with a scrappy, $5,000 roadside acai cart in Belmar, New Jersey, in 2014.
Playa Bowls has now grown into a 400-location franchise with $332 million in systemwide sales in 2025.
On a hot Jersey Shore afternoon in the summer of 2014, Abby Taylor dragged a borrowed patio table and a small refrigeration unit to the side of a road in Belmar, New Jersey, and started making acai bowls.
Surfers and beachgoers walked past, confused and curious. At the time, almost no one on the Shore knew what acai was, let alone why they should trade their usual post-beach pizza or subs for a purple smoothie bowl piled with fruit.
Taylor, a lifelong beach kid and surfer, had seen something different on her travels to Puerto Rico, California, Hawaii and Nicaragua: vibrant bowls that tasted good, made her feel better and offered a more healthful way to refuel after surfing.
“I loved the way it tasted; I loved the way it made me feel; I loved the health benefits of the acai,” she tells Entrepreneur in a new interview.
Abby Taylor. Credit: Playa Bowls
On that sidewalk, with recipes inspired by those trips, she tried to bring that feeling home — laying the foundation for Playa Bowls, an acai bowl and smoothie franchise that did $332 million in systemwide sales in 2025.
Building from grit, not a plan
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