Pierce County health bar with shakes and dessert bowls closes
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- Serve Nutrition, a nutrition bar on the Key Peninsula, will close after this Saturday.
- The nutrition bar sold protein shakes, smoothies, acai bowls and healthy treats.
- Owners cited costs, nearby construction and family priorities to explain the closure.
A cozy nutrition bar that served up protein shakes, acai bowls and smoothies, and called itself the Key Peninsula’s “healthy hangout,” opened its doors for the last time Saturday.
Serve Nutrition owners Elli and Blake Lechner, both in their 30s, signed a lease to move into a small building in Key Center two years ago, The News Tribune reported. The nutrition bar replaced a gift shop called Cozy Country Keepsakes at 8912 Key Peninsula Highway NW.
With a menu of various fruity and dessert-ish flavors like vanilla birthday cake, rocky road and banana cream pie, Serve packed their concoctions with protein and essential vitamins and minerals. They also sold iced coffee, mega teas and seasonal specials like a caramel apple streusel shake for September, according to their menu and Instagram.
Elli Lechner told The News Tribune in a phone call Dec. 3 that she and her husband decided it was time to close the shop for several reasons. One was the cost of running it, particularly compared to what it cost them to operate a similar nutrition bar when they lived in Arizona.
“Everything is very expensive, not necessarily our rent there, but the products that we use as far as all the add-ins, and cups are expensive, electricity is expensive,” she said. “Everything is so much more expensive than when I ran it in Arizona.”
She said she also anticipates a large construction project in the area and thinks it could hinder customer parking and visits to Serve.
A third reason is that the couple recently welcomed their first baby, Elli said. Both she and her husband work jobs outside of Serve — Elli in the fire service and Blake in law enforcement — and decided they needed to focus on their family, she said.
“We’re just so grateful that we had the opportunity to be there and all the folks that we met,” Elli said. “And we just feel very blessed, and I think we definitely are making the right choice for our family at this time.”
Lechner said that she took pride in the drinks they offered to the community, making them appetizing to folks who might not particularly enjoy eating healthy and ensuring that “everything that we added in to the protein base was organic and just as clean as you could make it.”
They borrowed recipes from similar shops and gave two creative employees free rein to come up with new flavors, she said. The News Tribune reported that Serve’s menu was simliar to Grand Nutrition, another nutrition bar in Gig Harbor.
Serve received support from Grand Nutrition owners Brian and Cari Treat, who founded a business called Pacific Northwest Nutrition Concepts to mentor nutrition bar entrepreneurs across the country.
Elli said her personal favorite on the menu at Serve was their chocolate peanut butter acai bowl, loaded with both almond butter and peanut butter. Their energy-drink mega teas were popular with customers, she said.
She also spoke fondly about the community that passed through Serve. They opened the nutrition bar with the hopes of meeting more people after their move from Arizona, and met some of their best friends and neighbors there, she told The News Tribune.
This story was originally published December 4, 2025 at 11:02 AM.
