All it took was a shower to put Josh Philbrick on the road to entrepreneurship. It wasn’t even his own. Sure, he and his wife Sonya had those offhand conversations every couple has when they are out. They were living in Florida where smoothie shops are plentiful and would occasionally say to each other, “we should open one of these.”

But Sonya was pursuing a career in therapy and social work and Josh was working construction and they never pursued the thought until they moved back to NH in 2015 to be closer to family after the birth of their second child.

In 2017, Sonya launched her own therapy practice, CARE Counseling in Manchester (which now has four locations). One morning in 2018, Sonya emerged from the shower and proclaimed Josh should pursue a smoothie business. That’s all it took. He bought a used ice cream truck in Pennsylvania and retrofitted it into what was the beginning of his new business – Smoothie Bus. The couple developed 10 flavors of smoothies and then Josh hit the road for the first time, parking at a car dealership.

Originally, the plan was the business would be a weekend endeavor – a side hustle. But business that first day was enough to inspire Josh to quit his construction job the following Monday.

The couple spent the summer selling smoothies at farmers markets and quickly bought two more buses for the next summer. “It was crazy. We were staying up to midnight, one o’clock to prep. It was a mad house,” Josh says.

Knowing winter was coming and selling smoothies from a food truck was not the best plan, Josh opened a smoothie shop inside an office building on Elm Street in Manchester. Josh admits it wasn’t a great location as it had no street visibility.

However, the business grew rapidly and by 2020, he opened a second location in Concord. Josh kept experimenting with flavors, developing 50 of them, including rotating seasonal flavors such as a Watermelon Strawberry summer smoothie, Pumpkin Spice in the fall, and Peppermint Bark in winter. Smoothie Bus also offers smoothie bowls, which are thicker and topped with fruit and granola.

Then COVID hit and put the business into a temporary freeze. Smoothie Bus survived through online and DoorDash orders until it could reopen to the public. Since then, Josh has reorganized the business. The buses no longer go to farmers markets but are used strictly for corporate and private events. (Josh says corporate clients book the buses for employee and client appreciation events and business is so brisk the three buses visit up to 30 locations in one day).

He says the buses, in their six months of use, generate the equivalent revenue of what the shop makes in a year. 

Josh had plans to franchise the business. Staffing shortages forced him to close the Concord store and he relocated the Manchester store to a more visible location along South Willow Street. With the bus business taking off, prepping at the smoothie store kitchen became cumbersome, so he opened a 6,000-square-foot commissary in Manchester in 2022.

Josh had excess space in the commercial kitchen and opened it up to other startup food businesses. “I didn’t realize how much need there was for a commissary kitchen,” he says. “We get tons of inquiries.” There are now a dozen businesses using the commissary.

While rising labor costs forced him to dramatically cut back staffing from a high of 30 to four, in October he opened another smoothie shop at the Merrimack Premium Outlets, which he expects to do brisk business this summer.