Ep.03 / One Cookie at a Time: Denise Woodard's Vision for a Better Tomorrow

0:06Hello, today I'm incredibly lucky to be chatting with Denise Woodard, founder and CEO of Partake Foods, which is just an amazing natural food company inspired by her daughter's experience with food allergies. Partake launched in 2017 with cookies and now makes a selection of delicious allergy-friendly foods for those with and without food restrictions. It's now carried in over I think 17 ,000 stores, including Target, Kroger and Whole Foods. And, you know, having done a little bit of, you know, digging into the history and the experience of this company, I'm just blown away with Denise's grit, resourcefulness, the amount of bootstrapping to create this company into today's success.

1:03Just an amazing, so much to learn. So hello, Denise. Hi, Natasha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation today. Amazing. I have so many things I could ask you. I'm going to try and keep on point. Why don't you, obviously I've dug into it. For those who might not know Partake Foods, Can you start by telling me a little bit about the brand and that aha moment that led you to create the company? Sure. So I'd spent my previous life in corporate America, was working at Coca-Cola, and then my daughter was born, Vivian. And right around her first birthday, we learned that she had several food allergies kind of through some scary instances.

1:48So she's allergic to tree nuts, eggs, corn, and bananas. and we were living in New York City at the time. And as I went out to grocery stores to try to find things that she could safely enjoy, I was coming up empty handed much more often than I wanted to. In the places where I felt like there were some gaps where from a taste perspective, a lot of the allergy friendly products tasted allergy friendly, which wasn't so great. Then I thought, well, if something's gluten free or vegan, surely that must mean it's healthy. It didn't. And then when I thought about the brands, while I was really grateful that there were some solutions I didn't think any of the brands really appealed to a consumer beyond those with a medical necessity for eating it.

2:28I wanted a cool brand that people with and without food allergies could enjoy and feel good about putting into their bodies. And I didn't feel like I could find it. So I decided to do something about it. And I had the idea for the business in the summer of 2016, spent a year moonlighting, and then left my job in corporate America in August of 2017 to start building Partake. Amazing. um what about you know what what actually nudged you to you know take the jump you know you had a a safe uh I used to work with VB like an interesting safe corporate job with a great you know well-known company like what was it that that nudged you to become a founder I loved my career so much and I never thought I would leave um my job at Coca-Cola it was a story that was kind of like out of a movie.

3:18And I've had a few of those throughout this journey that have made me believe that I'm on the path that I'm meant to be on. We were at the zoo on a Saturday afternoon and I was telling my husband, Jeremy, you won't believe the idea that our nanny Martha has. She was like, you, not Martha had gotten tired of hearing me complain about all the things I couldn't find for my daughter. And was like, you must do something about this. You need to start a company. And I was telling my husband and then the person who was in line in front of us at the zoo turned around and said, sounds like you have a great idea.

3:49You should enter this pitch competition. That was on a Saturday afternoon. The applications closed that Monday. I went home, incorporated an LLC that I called Vivi's Life. I called my daughter Vivian Vivi. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do other than make Vivi's life easier. So incorporated this LLC, entered the pitch competition, won the pitch competition. And the thing that I didn't count on was the pitch competition came with a$10 ,000 cash prize. But more importantly, it came with some local press. And the last thing that I needed was for my employer to see me talking about starting a company without them having any knowledge.

4:29And so I had to tell them. And that is the thing that gave me the kick in the butt and the courage to leave my corporate job. They were so understanding, but they said, once you have an actual product, there's a conflict of interest and you got to hit the road. And so that gave me a year to moonlight before I left, but it was Martha, our nanny, who has some equity in the business. It was that pitch competition that gave me confidence and kind of like put me on the spot in a way that I really needed to be put on the spot that made me actually take the leap. Yeah, amazing. I mean, you're right. It does sound like someone could make a movie of this easily.

5:04Who would play you just out of interest? Oh, that's a really good question. She's not an actress. The person who comes to mind who I just like fangirl over is Emma Greed who runs Skims and Safely. She's not an actress. I don't know who I would want to play me. That's a great question. I'm going to have to put some thought into it. Amazing. Yeah. All right. So in this cinematic journey, I love the crazy kind of what led you to actually create it. You also, you know, you really did start small. Like everything that people say, you can't start a food business without money. You can't, you know, create a company.

5:48You know, the amount of times I've heard people talk about, you can't, you know, Steve Jobs didn't stay working at his job or creating Apple, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you did start small and really kind of grew this business, you know, self-distribution, selling cookies out of your car, self-funding. I mean, I read about you selling your engagement ring, emptying your 401k. Tell me a little bit about the journey and your kind of approach to funding and what you've learned along the way. Sure. So I think that us starting small, while it was really painful, was probably the smartest thing that we ever did for the business because it made me a better and smarter leader because I had to learn every facet of the business.

6:38I had to do every job in the business. And it gave me a bit of a safe space because I think the mistakes were easy enough and cheap enough to fix on my own without a tremendous amount of funding when you're in one or two stores versus if you go into, like, I think it's so glamorous to, I launched into Whole Foods or I launched into Target nationally. Like you make a mistake and you could be out of business if that's the beginning of your company. And so I think starting small was so, so helpful to our business. And from a funding perspective, it was honestly out of necessity that we started small.

7:14We tried every method of funding possible, I think. So we did a Kickstarter campaign. So we've done crowdfunding. that was less about funding, more about a challenge that we had in getting our co-packer to agree to work with us. There's not very much allergy-friendly co-packing in the United States. I called up the group that I wanted to work with. They nicely hung up the phone on me and I thought, well, I'll have to prove to them that they need to work with me. And so I ran a Kickstarter campaign. We finished in the top 1 % of food Kickstarters at the time. And it was really a way for me to go back to them and say, I told you so.

7:52Other people want this to exist. Thankfully, it worked and they gave us a shot and we've been working with them ever since. So we did crowd funding. We did pitch competition. So I raised over six figures doing pitch competitions. And I think oftentimes people overcomplicate things or like I, and I don't know for what reason. And I get asked about my pitch competition strategy a lot. Literally every single Monday morning, I had a routine to Google like New York pitch competitions, food pitch competitions, woman owned company pitch competitions. Like it wasn't that complicated. It was consistency and it was a lot of work, but it wasn't necessarily like some like fancy program or anything that I was using.

8:31So we did pitch. Also helps you kind of hone your brand idea, what the company is about, the pitch. A hundred percent. And so we did the pitch competitions, which were so helpful because they provided non-dilutive capital and also because they helped me refine the story and understand what appealed to people and what didn't. We bootstrapped, to your point, I sold my engagement ring and emptied my 401k and maxed out our credit cards to fund the business. We tried to raise friends and family funding. I come from a pretty humble beginning, so there were no family investors, but thankfully my husband and I both had a ton of supportive colleagues and former classmates.

9:12And so all of that lasted us until the summer of 2019, when we raised our first round of institutional capital, a million dollar seed round of funding. Amazing. And, you know, you talked about being, you know, one of the, I've got it written down here some somewhere somewhere um yeah you've talked about being the first black woman to raise more than a million publicly for a cpg food startup i mean that's pretty incredible you also experience a lot of no's um like any advice to other female founders um you know you you did you managed to get to a pretty good place. I mean, Marcy Ventures, I look at like some of the people that have invested in you.

10:04It's pretty impressive. But talk about that journey. What helped you actually secure funding in the end? I think the thing that helped me secure funding was something that I wasn't expecting. So I was getting a lot of no's. And then we got introduced to Marcy. And the conversation started a bit differently. It wasn't what's your TAM and what's your CAC. It was where are you from? Why are you building this? Who are you? And I felt like their desire to learn more about me and my mission and my why was a really positive sign and also something that kind of led to us getting the investment. And so moving forward, like as we've chosen who we work with from an investment perspective, really me being authentic and honest about who I am, why I'm building this company, how I intend to build the company is something either that makes people exit stage left, right, very quickly, or it gets people interested.

11:01And then my feedback to women founders is like, we all know what the dismal stats are, like that doesn't have to be your story. And know that like, those are the statistics that exist. So like, be prepared to be told no, be prepared to grow a tough skin, and know your business inside and out, know all of financial metrics, know, be able to speak about those intelligently and coherently and know that you're going to have to work harder. And like, it's just like, it unfortunately is the fact that like, it is harder for women and for people of color to raise capital. And I'm a proof point that it is definitely possible.

11:35And I think we've been able to be successful and work with investors that we really like that our mission and values aligned. And I think it was a testament to us being really authentic about who we were, knowing the business really well with a smidge of luck thrown in there. Yeah. Again, I guess. Yeah. Amazing. And when, when did you become, decide to become a B Corps? And like, can you talk a little bit about, you know, you definitely seem to have a why and a mission and talk to me about that. Sure. So we were actually coming up on our three year anniversary of being a B Corps. So we need to do our recertification.

12:17So it's top of mind right now. So gosh, this is 2024. That means in 2021, we became a B Corp. The reason that I did it was because I wanted to institutionalize as much of the good as possible so that when new investors came along, so that in the future, if there was an ever an acquirer, like for lack of better words, somebody can't come in and mess up like the goodness that we have instilled in the brand. And so that people know that it's something that our consumers want, that it's something that has become an integral part of the company and the brand. And that like from the earliest of days so that it hopefully stays consistent and is cemented in.

12:52And I think about companies like Ben and Jerry's and companies like Patagonia that I feel like live and breathe their mission and are building great businesses that are profitable and like wonderful run businesses that are also doing good in the world. And that's my dream for partake yeah amazing um and talking of ben and jerry's um yeah how did you manage to get these partnerships like as you're building like you have a partnership with ben and jerry's hilton like talk to me about how you managed to to to you know create this partnership strategy as a small brand starting out? You know, Natasha, when you say that out loud, it's just like, it's still unbelievable to me that we have those partnerships.

13:42And kind of like the pitch competition searching, it wasn't, I don't want to oversimplify it. And at the same time, like we cold emailed Ben and Jerry's and said, hey, we want to do something with you. And this is what we stand for. And this is who we are. And we were prepared. We wanted to make sure we were prepared from a food safety, quality, capacity standpoint. Like if we go out and put ourselves out there, I want to make sure that we can over deliver for any partner that we're bringing on board. And once we felt like we could do that, we reached out, like we shot our shot and we reached out to the folks that we that most people would be like never in a million years would they work with a small startup.

14:18And, you know, it takes time. We met Ben and Jerry's in the summer of 2020 and that product launched in the early 2023. So it took many years to actually get something over the finish line. And so I think that's the other lesson that I've learned is just how much of a marathon so much of this is versus a sprint. Hilton, the Doubletree Hilton was like a dream for us. I think any place where like a cookie is an iconic part of the ethos of a company and there's an opportunity to bring a more inclusive option to the table so that everyone can participate are places where we want to show up. And so we had a chance to collaborate with Hilton.

14:58And on the opposite end, like that was we met them in maybe August or September, and we were announcing the project like a few months later. And so, you know, sometimes they go quickly, sometimes they take a bit longer. And the way that like our lens has been like, does this brand stand for things that we believe in from a mission and values perspective? And are we able to provide more inclusivity by bringing our product to partnership with them? Yeah, pretty amazing. Talk to me about your marketing approach. You started off very demo-based. Obviously, that was something that was probably pretty hard during the pandemic.

15:32But what is your thought on marketing? What is your marketing spend and how do you think about how to allocate it? Sure. So our marketing spend is less than 10 % of our net revenue. So I think we don't spend a tremendous amount. It's one of the reasons we lean into some of the partnerships that you mentioned, because by partnering with larger organizations, a small business like ours is able to get more brand awareness. It's a reason that I'm spending so much time on the road out evangelizing our story and meeting with partners and telling folks. Because I think at the end of the day, consumers want to know who's behind a business and why it exists and like what better person to tell that story than the founder.

16:14So I spend a lot of time doing that. And then we spend a lot, the bulk of our marketing budget on the least sexy, most ROI driven digital advertising, paying for keywords on retailers' websites and things like that. You know, I really do think marketing has to, there's so many different pieces. Like I don't think you can just do one of those things. I don't think you can do PR really well and then hope that the product will fly off the shelf. I don't think you can just do digital marketing and think that and then believe that people will find out about your brand and that it'll have a halo. I feel like you have to do a little bit of everything.

16:51And as a small business, you have to get really creative and scrappy about how you go to market with that and how you do that. Yeah, I love how scrappy, but also practical, your story and a lot of the things you've done, like, you know, fundamentals, fiscally responsible. Do you think, do you think, what do you think you've got from kind of rising up in the kind of corporate world? Like, what do jobs like Coca-Cola give you? I think my job at Coke, it gave me a much deeper understanding of brand. I think sometimes I meet with new founders and they think my brand is just my packaging. My brand is my logo.

17:37Your brand is how your customer service representative responds to an email, how a teammate shows out at a demo, the swag that you decide to create for the company. Like it's the emotional reaction that your company creates. And that comes from so many different touch points and every single interaction, not just a logo, not just packaging. And so I think Coca-Cola, although I didn't work in marketing, I worked in sales, gave me a much deeper appreciation for the value of a brand and the sacred nature by which you must treat your brand. And I think it also like really helped me be more creative about revenue channels and streams for our business.

18:20My last role at Coke was in their venturing and emerging brands division where I led sales for everything that wasn't brick and mortar retail. And so then I started to realize that through airlines, through restaurants, through schools and universities and hospitals, there's ways to grow brand awareness, to have margin accretive revenue that isn't necessarily retail, which can be, you know, a decently long sales cycle, which can be a pretty expensive channel to go into where you're competing with massive brands. And so it's made me be much more creative about the revenue streams I explore for our business.

18:54Yeah, I love the way that you've approached distribution, like the alternative distribution that acts also, I mean, even some of the kind of natural stores, they kind of act as distribution, but also communication channels, really. for sure i think um you can signal so much through the distribution you have i think about you know erwan and the cachet of that account i think of walmart and the accessibility of that account and so there's so much you can signal to that point about like your brand really lives in so many different ways in terms of even like the accounts you choose to go into and how you time um now obviously so background co-cola sales marketing brand all good i have a really really silly question which is you know one of the worst things that i remember working uh on with with a type brand is like you know the brand house like the incredibly complicated framework to put your brand and with the essence and the values and rtbs do you use something like that we just this is 2024 this year we just started using something like that it's much much less complicated than what i saw exist at coca-cola and maybe one day we'll grow into like needing a tool like that and so i think to your previous question like i learned about tools like that through my experience at coca-cola and now i feel like it's my responsibility to think about like how to how to make that work for a small business because I don't want to over process or over strategize or over complicate for our stage of business.

20:31And at the same time, I think there's a tremendous amount of value in the tools that companies like Coca-Cola and other large CPG companies utilize. Yeah. So still codifying, but simpler. That makes me feel better. You know, what was the most surprising about making the jump? Like, what are the skills that you're like, oh my Lord, I need to, you know, catch up here? Honestly, I didn't realize how siloed I was in my role. When you're in a large company with so many resources, even in the entrepreneurial arm of that company, you have so many resources. So one, I think I took for granted how much things cost and how many other people were there, like elves making magic happen.

21:18And then I think I really just didn't understand how much I didn't know about ingredient procurement, about working with a co-packer, about accounting, about different aspects of marketing. I feel like I knew sales really well. And as I started to have to run every part of the business, I realized how much more about the business I didn't know. And I think my learning from that was that if I were to go back and do it again, I spent so much time trying to climb the corporate ladder and really hopping side to side on rungs instead of just going straight up, I feel like would have been a better practice to make me a stronger business leader.

21:52Cause I feel like I ended up drinking out of the fire hose a bit and having a really steep learning curve on many facets of the business. Cause I had focused so heavily on sales through my career. So what were your ways of learning fast? I just had to do it, get thrown into the fire. I literally was like delivering cookies that like, I had to figure out how to order the ingredients for it. So it was cold. I had to really strengthen the muscle of asking for help and going to people who were established founders and asking for them to spend 15, 20, 30 minutes with me. And that really created a virtuous cycle because I talked to one person and they'd be like, you should talk to my friend.

22:32And so what seems like a, I use air quotes, like waste of time and networking, I think is like tremendously valuable because that's what helps me know what landmines to avoid and how to like tactically just do some of the things and what resources I should be using as a very small emerging business. Yeah. I think, I think people don't realize how much the, the world can help if you actually. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Um, what about, so when you started, so a lot of self-funding, you used contractors. When you actually started getting some money, what were the first roles that you started to hire?

23:16We raised our seed round of funding in June of 2019. And we brought on an operations consultant who worked part-time starting that fall. And I was terrible at operations, am terrible at operations, and don't enjoy it at all. And so that was helpful because it allowed me to kind of operate more in my zone of genius and also get a professional in. That was also the first full-time hire that we made, which was in January of 2020. So six months after the bringing in the funding is when we had our first full-time employee besides myself. The next employee was a sales hire. And throughout that, we worked with fractional marketing until we brought in a marketing hire in the fall of 2020.

24:00Amazing. And you're still pretty lean, I think. We're 11 people right now. And so, yeah, I think given the size of the business and distribution, we're still pretty lean. You know, I think a lesson learned for me was we raised our series A at the end of 2020 and a series B in 2022 during a time where the market was much more heavily focused on growth and burn and profitability weren't as big of conversations. And I think because I was used to operating from such scarcity, I probably overcorrected, hired too many people, spent too much money. And so I'm a little gun shy now because I think you can always add more people and add like more full time resources and spend more.

24:47it's hard to like claw back the money once you've spent it and I think you know people's livelihoods are at stake and like I don't want to be frivolous about like bringing on team members or letting team members go and so I think we're acting with a bit of cautiousness and trying to be get back to the earliest days of our business from a frugality perspective which I think is a you know a hard lesson learned, but also a really important one. Yeah. Any other obstacles slash challenges, things that, you know, kind of didn't quite go as planned, but have been good lessons? I think on the leadership front.

25:27So in my roles in my previous life in corporate America, I was always an individual contributor. So it's been a pretty steep learning curve managing a team and people and a company. And I think the thing that I've learned there, a lot of the things are common themes though. It's around asking for help and building a peer mentor group of folks who are going through or have been through some of the similar things. And then also supplementing with professional support, whether that be organizations that I've joined or investing in a coach and knowing that there's a spectrum of like in the earliest of days, we couldn't necessarily afford a coach, but there were great leadership podcasts or books that I could read.

26:05And so making sure that I'm spending time developing myself because I know that will make me a better leader, which will in turn make for a better company. And I think sometimes we get so focused on actually doing the work and thinking that we're not heads down. If we're not heads down in a spreadsheet, we're not doing something. And like actually going on a walk to strategize about your innovation plans or reading a book about leadership are all equally valuable things for you, for yourself and for your business. Yeah. Any particular resources or organizations you'd recommend? Podcasts? I think my first one that I always listened to was how I built this.

26:43So I'm still such a geek on like just learning about how other people have built their business and the commonality seems to be. It's not all roses and sunshine, even though that's what LinkedIn will sometimes tell you. I like masters of scale. I'm also doing a lot of like self-introspection right now. So I'm listening to a lot of like Brene Brown and, um, Oh my God, I can see Mel Robbins. I can see your face. I can't think of her name. Brene Brown, Mel Robbins. Um, from a book perspective, there's a book that McKenzie put out called CEO excellence, which I think is a phenomenal read for, um, CEOs of both small and large companies.

27:18And from an organization perspective, you know, I've built some of my own communities that are just like group chats and WhatsApp groups. And I found those to be super valuable as well as professional organizations like YPO. Amazing. Amazing. And do you have mentors? Oh my gosh. Yes. So I think the peer mentors are valuable, super valuable. And so people that come to mind are Shizu Okosa, who's the founder of Apothecary or Ashwarya Iyer, who's the founder of Brightland. John Forker, who led Annie's and then led the General Mills natural and organic business and is currently running Once Upon a Farm, has been so generous and gracious with his time and his team's time.

28:01And so he and I meet on a monthly basis. So he's the person who comes to mind as a kind of like I look up to and go to as a sounding board. And it's also a safe space to share when I'm like, I don't know what the heck to do. And I think it's so important to be able to have those places where it's okay to be vulnerable about what you're scared about and what you don't know. And it's particularly helpful when the person is going through it or has been through it in the past. Yeah. Amazing. Um, I, my, I do a lot of my work is like innovation. I'd love to kind of go back to how you, did you work with, uh, uh, an agency or design firm?