Name: How Tara Bosch went from recipe testing in a basement kitchen to selling SmartSweets for $360 million
Uploaded: 2024-05-09
Duration: 6 min 51 s
Description: The 29-year-old founder of SmartSweets started her company by taking out $105,000 in debt financing and buying a 120-cavity gummy bear mold off of Amazon.

The 29-year-old founder of SmartSweets started her company by taking out $105,000 in debt financing and buying a 120-cavity gummy bear mold off of Amazon.

How Tara Bosch went from recipe testing in a basement kitchen to selling SmartSweets for $360 million

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Tara Bosch went from recipe testing in a basement kitchen to selling SmartSweets for $360 million

You can eat the whole bag of any of our Smart Sweets innovations. This one is our sweet fish and you can feel good about it. It's one bag, one serving. Hi. My name is Tara Bosch. I'm the founder of Smart Sweets and this is how I made my first million. I grew up with a single mom. So early on, I had a lot of drive to find my own path and financial independence after seeing what she had gone through and how that impacted her self esteem and her confidence. So I got my very first job at mcdonald's. They put me on meats and bats, which is cooking all the meats and that sort of stuff. It's kind of the dirty job in the back. I would do some graveyard shifts. And so that's 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. And then as I switch to different jobs, one job, for example, was a coffee shop. I'd open the coffee shop at 4 a.m. work before school and then go to my other job after school. Having two part time jobs always gave me the flexibility to sandwich it in between school. I viewed it as how much do I need to study the most minimal amount to get the grades? I need to get to get into university and then I'll shift all my focus to working, making money. I always felt very underestimated in my teen years growing up by my peers. And I think a lot of that had to do with having low self esteem and confidence and belief in myself. I had so many ideas that I would write down, but I didn't have the confidence to act on them because of my unhealthy relationship with food. I loved candy and would have candy all of the time. But all of the sugar made me feel really bad about myself. So I got in an unhealthy cycle where I'd restrict myself from having sugar. Have too much of it. A couple of years after that, my grandmother who was my best friend in the world growing up had a conversation with me where she shared, she regretted having so much excess sugar, especially from candy. And that sparked my exploration to excess sugar consumption and how it's really impacting us at a global level. As this silent epidemic, I quickly formed the hypothesis that, you know, if we can kick sugar out of the candy aisle, which is the most sugar packed aisle in the entire grocery store, then it's making a much larger statement about why is so much added sugar in our packaged foods today in the summer of 2015. I decided to drop out of college to act on my idea for smart suites. I had nothing to my name. Just this 2009 Honda Fit hatchback. And so to launch the company, I took out $105,000 of debt financing using my Honda Fit hatchback as security against the loan, as well as taking out life insurance as security. I went and a gummy bear mold off of Amazon and hunkered down in my basement suite kitchen with all of the ingredients that I had bought online and my candy thermometer and began recipe testing all day long for the entire summer at different points. The steam would be so excessive, I guess that it would kind of seep outside the window upstairs to my landlord and they thought at one point that I was cooking weed gummies or, or something illegal because of all this smoke that would just come out the window. Hundreds and hundreds of recipes were just horrible. They would look good at first and then I'd leave for five minutes and it'd come back and be just a blob instead of a gummy bear or it would get moldy in a day. It took hundreds of iterations before I got to the place of. Wow, this actually tastes like something that would satisfy the feeling that I get from eating candy. I started selling smart sweets just under a year after I began recipe testing from my little Honda Fit hatchback and I really wanted to find national retail partners from the Get Go bed bath. Beyond was actually the first large national retailer that took us on about a month after we launched on shelves. In our first year, we sold 2 million. In our second year, we sold 16. In our third year, we sold 60 million. And in our fourth year, we sold 100 and 25 million. I always knew that at some point in our growth, it would make sense partner with a larger global organization who had the ability to expedite our distribution and manufacturing channels to achieve that overall overarching vision of becoming the global leader in revolutionizing candy faster. And at the same time as we were approaching the 100 million in annual revenue mark, I really began to kind of lose that ability of seeing around the bend and really feeling like I think I'm actually going to begin to hold the company up from the next chapter of growth. And so the majority of Smart Suites was acquired for 360 million and I was the majority owner of Smart Sweets. Today. Smart Sweets is the number one selling low sugar candy across North America in retailers like Costco and Target and Walmart. And we've helped people kick over 5.6 billion g of sugar and are in over 100 and 30,000 stores through my journey with smart sweets and also navigating through a lot of impostor syndrome and self doubt. I began really passionate about supporting other young women in their journeys and really empowering them to know that these feelings are normal to equip them with the golden nuggets of knowledge. So I created something called bold beginnings, which exists to do that. Every single year, we have a cohort of amazing women across North America. There's a 25 K strings free grant involved, which is amazing. But the real benefit is that those women leave knowing just how needed their ideas are in the world that they're the exact person that the universe has given this idea to for a reason and that they are really limitless in what they can create.