Renata Heringer | Grief, Immigration, and Açaí: The Story of Starting Over and Building Something Beautiful

Start Anyway: Grief, Immigration, and Açaí: The Story of Starting Over and Building Something Beautiful

Renata Heringer arrived in Canada with two suitcases and a quiet conviction that she could figure it out.

She had no friends in Edmonton. No family. No roadmap for what a Brazilian physician builds in a country that doesn't automatically recognize her degree. Just a master's program, a silent dream of living somewhere new, and the kind of determination that doesn't announce itself — it just keeps moving.

What happened next is not the story she planned. The grief that came. The baby born in the middle of a pandemic. The tragedy that arrived when her son was four months old, while she was standing in Montreal on her first family trip, far from every resource she knew. The business she built anyway — from her kitchen, during maternity leave, while still learning how to be a mother and how to grieve at the same time.

What she built is Tupi Açaí. And what Tupi is, for the community that has gathered around it, is something close to home.

From Vila Velha to Edmonton

Renata grew up in Vila Velha, a city by the ocean in Brazil. Her father was both a physician and a pastor. Her family was close — cousins, community, the kind of childhood surrounded by people she loved. She followed her father into medicine, graduated as a physician at almost 23, and worked as a family doctor for five years.

And then something shifted. A desire to see life from a different angle. An application to master's programs in Canada. An acceptance to the University of Alberta. And in 2018, she packed two suitcases and flew to Edmonton — a city she had never seen, in a country where she knew no one.

The first years were the student years. International peers, a ready-made community of people all starting over simultaneously. And then she met her husband. And then she got pregnant. And then a pandemic arrived.

The Tragedy

Renata's son Nico was born in March. She was four months postpartum when she and her husband took their first family trip as a family of three — Montreal, a trial run, a week to see how travel worked with a baby.

Three days in, she got the news.

Her mother, her father, and her brother had all passed away. In one moment, the family she had grown up inside — the one she was longing for with every new-mom ache, the one she had hoped would meet Nico later that year — was gone.

What followed was the kind of shock that rearranges everything. Her breast milk dried immediately. She couldn't hold her son. She couldn't think clearly enough to manage logistics — passports, flights, funerals, the bureaucracy of being the only child left. Her husband stepped in. Community stepped in. People from Brazil organized things she couldn't think to organize. Someone in Canada helped her find a therapist. Someone else called just to talk.

She made it through those first days. And then she had to make it through the months that followed — four months postpartum, in a new country, navigating a grief she had no personal map for.

What Grief Actually Is

Renata came to grief as a medical professional. She knew the seven phases. She kept asking herself which phase she was in, when she would get through them, when it would be over.

And then she learned, from the inside, that grief doesn't work that way.

It isn't linear. It doesn't have a finish line. It walks with you — for a long time, maybe forever — changing shape and weight as your life changes around it. And within it, she discovered something that surprised her: joy can coexist with grief. Not replacing it. Not minimizing it. But existing alongside it, in moments and in seasons, if you allow yourself to look for it.

As a new mom, she also discovered that she was shaping how her children would understand loss — how they would see her, how they would learn from watching her move through something impossible. That awareness became its own kind of compass.

Building Community in a New Country

One thing that people who have never immigrated often underestimate: community does not come automatically. It requires active, vulnerable, repeated effort.

There is no neighbor you've known since childhood. No friend group that formed without trying. You have to knock on the door. Approach the mom at the playground. Show up to the Facebook group. Put yourself out there, again and again, in a new place where no one knows you yet.

Renata did this. First through her university — a natural community of international students all in the same position, all open to connection. And then, when she became a mom, she found her people again: a group of Brazilian moms in Edmonton, navigating motherhood and immigration simultaneously. They weren't just new-mom friends. They understood her culture, her background, the particular ache of raising a baby far from the family that would have surrounded you at home.

That group — those friendships formed five years ago — are still her closest friends today.

The Kitchen, the Farmers Market, the Four Storefronts

It was her husband who planted the seed. She was still on maternity leave, approaching the one-year anniversary of her loss, starting to feel ready to work again but knowing she wasn't ready to go back to medicine. He suggested a business. Maybe a franchise. Maybe something from Brazil that didn't exist in Edmonton.

The answer came to her immediately: açaí.

She had grown up eating açaí. Her mother loved it. It was a shared part of her family culture — going out for bowls by the ocean, bringing it home. She had looked for real açaí in Edmonton and found nothing but smoothies with açaí added. That, she decided, was the gap.

She bought all the açaí pulp at a local Latin store. She bought a blender. She went home and made bowls until the recipe was right. She posted to the Brazilian community online. People ordered. People came to her house to pick up. They started asking why she wasn't selling more days, why she was only doing weekends.

She signed with a local farmers market. She opened a booth — while pregnant with her second child. Then a Brazilian entrepreneur who had owned açaí shops in Brazil found her on Instagram and reached out to partner. Their families met. Something clicked. They formed a corporation and opened two storefronts in under six months — one in Calgary, one in Sherwood Park near Edmonton.

That was two years ago. Today, Tupi Açaí has four storefronts and a team of more than 20 people. Many of them are immigrants who needed their first job in a new country. Renata hires them intentionally — people who haven't been seen as valuable yet by the Canadian job market, who need someone to open the door.

And the customers? They show up in minus 40 weather. In rain. In snow. Because for the Brazilian community, Tupi is a taste of home. And for the Edmonton and Calgary communities who have found it, it's become theirs too.

On Failure

Renata also launched a Brazilian specialty grocery from her basement — online orders, delivery, shelves full of products from home.

It didn't work. She lost money. The logistics were unwieldy. She shut it down.

She does not call this a failure. She calls it education. It taught her what kind of business she didn't want to run. It made the açaí decision clearer. It proved that not everything works — and that trying is still worth it.

The Advice She'd Give

If a mom or an immigrant came to her with an idea and said I don't know if I should try — Renata's answer is consistent:

You don't know until you do. Not doing anything is also a choice, with its own risks. Start small. Test your idea with your neighbors, your community, the people closest to you. Listen to feedback. Notice how it makes you feel. If something is growing — if you feel it moving — take the bigger step.

And then: your identity is not what you do. She was a physician. She became a mom. She became an entrepreneur. She was, and is, always Renata. Her values, her principles, her faith, her love for her community — those have not changed through any of it. The work changes. The person doesn't have to.

What Community Means Now

Ask Renata what community means to her now, five years after arriving in Edmonton with two suitcases, and she doesn't hesitate.

Everything. Community is everything.

It is the team that shows up every day and makes Tupi run. It is the customers who remember the staff by name and cross the city for their order. It is the Brazilian families who line up at every new store opening. It is the moms she still talks to from five years ago.

We were not meant to walk alone, she says. We go further together. We find more purpose together. That is her most deeply held belief — and the one that has carried her through every phase of a life that has asked more of her than most of us can imagine.

She is still here. Still building. Still showing up.

Still saying: you won't know if you don't try.

How to Connect with Renata Heringer

• Tupi Açaí Bowls Website: https://www.tupibowls.ca/

• Tupi Açaí Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tupibowlsca/?hl=en