BY KADIE TAYLOR
THE OBSERVER
AUBURN — Fizz N Fork is working to bring healthy and tasty food and drinks to downtown Auburn. With a passion for the healing qualities of food, Owner and Operator Danielle Shaw said she works to ensure all her creations are made from minimal and “clean” ingredients.
From dirty sodas to lattes, Fizz N Fork offers many choices to caffeinate long days. Shaw said she carries her passion for health into the syrups, coffee and creams used in each drink. With the ability to choose specialty drinks with exciting combinations of flavor or to create your own custom blend, Shaw said at Fizz N Fork, there are a variety of drink options to crush a sweet tooth and support a health goal through things like adding protein to a drink.
“I love the concept of coffee and dirty sodas [where you can try new things and combine flavorful syrups and creams to sodas], but I didn’t love 200 grams of sugar,” she said. “So I started doing a ton of research, and realized that a lot of the sugars came from the creams going into them. With the traditional syrup, coffee creamers and a lot of people do whip on top and all those things — that is where you get 200 grams of sugar… I started to play around, and I knew that we didn’t have the room to make our own syrups, so I found Amoretti, and they focus on the clean ingredients, and I was blown away by the fact they have six grams of sugar per pump, versus some of the other options which have up to 30 grams of sugar.”
Along with custom drinks, Shaw said Fizz N Fork customers can also enjoy tasty treats — from savory bowls to sweet cheesecake, all while enjoying food created with an emphasis on healthy ingredients.
“Our cheesecakes are amazing; we make them in-house with whole ingredients,” she said. “Sometimes we do use a cookie base, but we’re pretty particular about which cookies we use; if we do use cookies, we make sure that they’re not full of yucky stuff… The cool thing about [our menu items] is that they can be personalized. You can walk in and fully customize [your meal] and build your own bowl, so it just gives flexibility to be able to eat here often and not get bored with it. We plan to do meal prep it might not be until fall before we can push that out… [We are] trying to give modern conveniences to students. I know so many [young adults] meal prep — there’s a huge calling for healthy [options]. I see many students who are trying to be aware of what they put in their body.”
Shaw said her passion for clean ingredients and healthy options for food and drinks comes from her experiences living with an autoimmune condition and the health that she was able to find through focusing on wholesome nutrition. Originally from Arkansas, after spending time in Auburn with her daughter Shaw said she found healing and a new home — combining her passion for health through nutrition and her dream of owning a restaurant to make Fizz N Fork.
“I moved my daughter in, and then ended up having to have surgery in Atlanta,” she said. “Well, that turned into four months down here. It was wild — I had surgery, after surgery, after surgery. But while I was down here, all of my autoimmune symptoms went away, fully went away, and then I would drive into Arkansas and end up in the ER. So we kind of started to figure out what’s going on, and I think it was chicken dander [from large companies] like Simmons and Tyson [in Arkansas]. But my daughter has the same disorder, and she was really on a journey of healing her body with food, and so I kind of jumped on her same bandwagon. I’m a lot more progressed in the disease, so obviously it takes a little bit more routine, but it’s an allergen-based disorder, and slowly but surely, I was like, ‘Wow, I haven’t had symptoms in like three and a half months.’”
Shaw said that when her daughter moved to Auburn two years ago, she hoped the community would be safe and welcoming. After relocating to Auburn herself, Shaw said she knew she wanted to bring her love of hosting from Arkansas to Auburn by creating a space at Fizz N Fork that feels like home for both students and the community. In turn, she said she has felt that same sense of support from the community as she launched her new business.
“I knew that when I was 10 hours away from my daughter, I just wanted her to have a place that felt like home, where she could go and study, feel relaxed and enjoy herself,” she said. “So when we started Fizz N Fork, our goal was to host as we’ve always done. [In our kitchen] right now are four kids that are not my kids, but they’re from Arkansas, and that’s just our family. When we hire someone here, we say, ‘Welcome to the family’… I wanted people to feel welcomed, I wanted when customers walk in to hear, ‘How was your test yesterday? When are you heading home?’ Those sorts of things. But I found that Auburn hosted us — we weren’t even fully opened — we were in this soft opening phase, and we [had customers who] were wrapped around the building. I was waking up to 15 to 20 TikToks a day, and they were just like, ‘This is so amazing.’ We already have so many regulars.”
Fizz N Fork is open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. from Monday through Wednesday and 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. from Thursday through Saturday and is located at 234 W Magnolia Ave., Unit C, in Auburn, with parking for customers. For more information, visit Fizz N Fork on Instagram @fizz_n_fork and TikTok @fizznfork.
