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

Fortune

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.

Transcript

00:00 (bag crinkling)

00:01 You can eat the whole bag

00:03 of any of our SmartSweets innovations.

00:06 This one is our sweet fish,

00:08 and you can feel good about it.

00:10 It's one bag, one serving.

00:12 Hi, my name is Tara Bosch.

00:14 I'm the founder of SmartSweets,

00:15 and this is how I made my first million.

00:17 I grew up with a single mom,

00:19 so early on I had a lot of drive

00:23 to find my own path and financial independence

00:28 after seeing what she had gone through

00:30 and how that impacted her self-esteem and her confidence.

00:33 So I got my very first job at McDonald's.

00:37 They put me on meats and bats,

00:40 which is cooking all the meats and that sort of stuff.

00:42 It's kind of the dirty job.

00:44 In the back, I would do some graveyard shifts,

00:47 and so that's 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.,

00:50 and then as I switched to different jobs,

00:53 one job, for example, was a coffee shop.

00:56 I'd open the coffee shop at 4 a.m.,

00:58 work before school,

00:59 and then go to my other job after school.

01:01 Having two part-time jobs always gave me the flexibility

01:05 to sandwich it in between school.

01:07 I viewed it as how much do I need to study,

01:09 the most minimal amount to get the grades I need to get

01:13 to get into university,

01:14 and then I'll shift all my focus to working

01:17 and making money.

01:19 I always felt very underestimated

01:21 in my teen years growing up by my peers,

01:24 and I think a lot of that had to do

01:25 with having low self-esteem and confidence

01:28 and belief in myself.

01:30 I had so many ideas that I would write down,

01:32 but I didn't have the confidence to act on them

01:36 because of my unhealthy relationship with food.

01:39 I loved candy and would have candy all of the time,

01:44 but all of the sugar made me feel really bad about myself,

01:47 so I got in an unhealthy cycle

01:49 where I'd restrict myself from having sugar,

01:51 have too much of it.

01:52 A couple years after that,

01:55 my grandmother, who was my best friend in the world

01:58 growing up, had a conversation with me

02:01 where she shared she regretted having so much excess sugar,

02:05 especially from candy,

02:07 and that sparked my exploration

02:08 into excess sugar consumption

02:11 and how it's really impacting us at a global level

02:15 as this silent epidemic.

02:16 I quickly formed the hypothesis that, you know,

02:20 if we can kick sugar out of the candy aisle,

02:23 which is the most sugar-packed aisle

02:26 in the entire grocery store,

02:28 then it's making a much larger statement

02:30 about why is so much added sugar

02:32 in our packaged foods today.

02:34 In the summer of 2015, I decided to drop out of college

02:40 to act on my idea for SmartSweets.

02:43 I had nothing to my name,

02:45 just this 2009 Honda Fit Hatchback,

02:49 and so to launch the company,

02:52 I took out $105,000 of debt financing

02:56 using my Honda Fit Hatchback as security against the loan

03:00 as well as taking out life insurance as security.

03:03 I went and got a gummy bear mold off of Amazon

03:06 and hunkered down in my basement sweet kitchen

03:10 with all of the ingredients that I had bought online

03:13 and my candy thermometer

03:15 and began recipe testing all day long

03:20 for the entire summer.

03:21 At different points, the steam would be so excessive,

03:26 I guess, that it would kind of seep outside the window

03:29 upstairs to my landlord,

03:31 and they thought at one point

03:32 that I was cooking weed gummies or something illegal

03:36 because of all the smoke that would just come out the window.

03:39 Hundreds and hundreds of recipes were just horrible.

03:43 They would look good at first,

03:45 and then I'd leave for five minutes

03:47 and it'd come back and be just a blob

03:49 instead of a gummy bear,

03:51 or it would get moldy in a day.

03:53 It took hundreds of iterations

03:55 before I got to the place of,

03:57 wow, this actually tastes like something

04:00 that would satisfy the feeling

04:02 that I get from eating candy.

04:04 I started selling SmartSweets just under a year

04:08 after I began recipe testing

04:10 from my little Honda Fit Hatchback,

04:13 and I really wanted to find national retail partners

04:18 from the get-go.

04:19 Bed Bath Beyond was actually the first

04:22 large national retailer that took us on

04:24 about a month after we launched on shelves.

04:27 In our first year, we sold two million.

04:34 In our second year, we sold 16.

04:36 In our third year, we sold 60 million,

04:39 and in our fourth year, we sold 125 million.

04:43 I always knew that at some point in our growth,

04:46 it would make sense to partner

04:48 with a larger global organization

04:51 who had the ability to expedite our distribution

04:55 and manufacturing channels

04:57 to achieve that overall overarching vision

05:00 of becoming the global leader

05:02 in revolutionizing candy faster,

05:04 and at the same time,

05:06 as we were approaching the 100 million

05:08 in annual revenue mark,

05:10 I really began to kind of lose that ability

05:13 of seeing around the bend

05:15 and really feeling like

05:17 I think I'm actually gonna begin to hold the company up

05:20 from the next chapter of growth,

05:22 and so the majority of SmartSweets

05:24 was acquired for 360 million,

05:27 and I was the majority owner of SmartSweets.

05:31 Today, SmartSweets is the number one selling

05:33 low-sugar candy across North America

05:36 in retailers like Costco and Target and Walmart,

05:41 and we've helped people kick over 5.6 billion grams of sugar

05:47 and are in over 130,000 stores.

05:49 Through my journey with SmartSweets

05:53 and also navigating through a lot of imposter syndrome

05:57 and self-doubt,

05:57 I began really passionate

06:00 about supporting other young women in their journeys

06:04 and really empowering them

06:05 to know that these feelings are normal,

06:08 to equip them with the golden nuggets of knowledge,

06:11 so I created something called Bold Beginnings,

06:14 which exists to do that.

06:16 Every single year,

06:17 we have a cohort of amazing women across North America.

06:22 There's a 25K strings-free grant involved, which is amazing,

06:26 but the real benefit is that those women leave

06:30 knowing just how needed their ideas are in the world,

06:34 that they're the exact person

06:36 that the universe has given this idea to for a reason,

06:40 and that they are really limitless

06:43 in what they can create.

06:45 (upbeat music)

06:48 [Music]

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