Tara Bosch had a serious sweet tooth.

So did her 86-year-old grandmother, who regretted a lifetime of eating too much sugar.

That conversation inspired Tara to drop out of college, bet her car on a candy business, and build SmartSweets into a brand that sold for $360 million.

In today's issue, I share Tara's candy land journey story, along with:

Enjoy this sweet success story, minus the sugar…LG

Tara Bosch grew up in British Columbia, outside Vancouver, and candy was her favorite thing in the world. She shared it with her Oma, her German grandmother and best friend.

But candy came with a cost. Tara would eat a whole bag, feel awful about herself, swear it off, and then start again. Even as a little girl, she was convinced that what she ate said something about who she was.

When Tara was 12, her father left, and she watched her mother struggle without money of her own. At 13, Tara got a job at McDonald’s, a year before it was legal for her to work. By high school she was opening a coffee shop at 4 a.m., going to class, then working at a bakery. She saved every dollar she could for her first car. Oma matched her savings, and together they bought a used Honda Fit.

SMARTER CHOICES

At the University of British Columbia, Tara studied the arts but never found a subject that captivated her.

She took a job at a supplement store. Her manager hired her because she saw McDonald’s on Tara’s resume, and she became Tara’s first mentor outside the family.

She showed Tara that eating well did not have to be all or nothing. It was about making smarter choices for the foods she loved. Tara started making her own gummies at home instead of eating regular candy.

Feeling better gave her the nerve to try a business. She put $800 into wall decals with inspirational quotes for students who could not paint their dorm rooms.

Nobody bought them. Oma's apartment filled up with boxes of unsold decals. Tara realized she had built a product for a problem only she had. She shut it down within a year.

OMA'S TABLE

Two months later, Tara was sitting down at her grandmother’s table. Oma was 86, and her weight had made it hard for her to get around. That day she told Tara she regretted eating so much sugar over the years, especially the candy they had loved together, and that she wished she had made peace with food.

Tara had always assumed that grown-ups eventually figured food out. Now she saw that you could go your whole life feeling bad about yourself because of what you put in your body. And she kept coming back to one question:

"Why can't you feel good about candy?"

She read everything she could find about sugar. Almost every aisle in the grocery store had a healthier option by then, but candy had barely changed. It was the most sugar-packed aisle in the store, and nobody was fixing it.

For the first time in her life, she felt like she had a purpose.

She had about $8,000 saved from years of working. A few weeks before her third year of school was due to start, she dropped out.

When she told her grandmother, who had saved a college fund for her since she was a baby, Oma did not hold back. Was she crazy? Why would she throw away university to make candy in her kitchen? But she knew her grandma would come around once she got it going.

200 FAILED BATCHES

Tara rented a dark basement suite near campus. Within a week of that talk at Oma’s table, she bought a $90 gummy bear mold from Amazon and a candy thermometer.

The problem was bigger than it looked. Candy is almost all sugar, and sugar gives it its shape and chew, not just its sweetness. Take the sugar out and you are starting from nothing. She studied food science journals, sometimes 16 hours a day, testing fibers and natural sweeteners like stevia.

She boiled each batch to candy temperature, filled the tiny bear shapes with an eyedropper, and waited 72 hours to see what happened. Some came out like Jell-O. Some grew a hard crust around a runny middle. Some grew mold. So much steam poured out of her basement window that her landlords started to suspect she was cooking weed gummies.

That fall, she got into a Vancouver accelerator called The Next Big Thing (TNBT) for young founders, started by the CEO of the social media company Hootsuite. Everyone else was building tech and beauty startups. On the first day she hid in the washroom and read the quotes on her phone to herself and saying:

“You are capable.”

After more than 200 failed recipes and about three months, she had a gummy bear that held its shape for two weeks. She carried little bags of it around the accelerator office and handed them out like a gummy dealer. The other founders said it was too chewy and the sweetness faded fast.

But … they also said it satisfied their craving for candy. That was the response she was hoping for. Tara knew she could fix everything else. Now she just needed a factory.

SMARTS > SWEETS

She called the company Stevi Sweets, after the stevia in it.

Finding a factory was harder than making the candy. Candy machines are built to run on sugar, and factories want huge orders. Most said no. Tara sold them on the future instead. Low-sugar candy was coming, she told them, whether or not they moved on it. One factory said yes, and they set a launch for December.

In the second week of December, the factory called. It would not make her recipe. It offered a different formula, one Tara believed would upset people's stomachs. Then it went on to launch a product of its own.

She went to Toronto to sit down with a factory that had already turned her down. This time, they agreed. But they wanted $105,000 up front, before she had sold a single bag.

On Christmas Eve, Tara messaged investors on LinkedIn. A few wrote back, but nobody wanted to try anything called Stevi Sweets. To them, stevia meant a bitter aftertaste.

So Tara started coming up with names. She thought back to her old boss at the supplement store and the idea that had changed how she ate: smarter choices. She wanted a name that told people the candy was better for them, without making it sound like health food.

Stevi Sweets became SmartSweets.

Even with a better name, no investor would back a candy company with no sales. Tara had to go after loans instead.

She applied to a government-backed lending program for young entrepreneurs and a local credit union at the same time, and promised both that if they took a chance on her, she would not waste it. Both said yes. Together, the loans added up to $105,000.

She had one thing to put up as security. The used Honda Fit she and Oma had bought together.

The loan was also tied to her personally, so she had to buy life insurance. The screening questions got so detailed that they asked whether her toes had ever had a disease.

SELLING THE SELLERS

Tara was sure candy would sell in stores, not online. Nobody plans a sweet tooth two weeks ahead. She cold-called and emailed a local natural grocery chain called Choices so often that the manager finally agreed to meet. Walking in, she felt like she was going to throw up.

In the room, she spoke like a different person. She did not pitch her candy. She pitched the store's take. A bag of SmartSweets rang up far higher than a bag of penny candy, so the store would make more on every sale. Choices agreed to carry her fruity gummy bears in three stores at $3.29 a bag.

She designed the bag to stand out. In a candy aisle full of rainbow colors, hers was plain white, with the grams of sugar right on the front.

The next summer, SmartSweets launched in stores across British Columbia and online across Canada, with fruity and sour gummy bears that had just a few grams of sugar per bag. Tara made the first deliveries herself, out of the Honda Fit. The car the bank was holding as security was now the delivery truck.

Her first hire, Beth Ritchie, joined around launch. Tara could not pay her for most of the first year. When she finally could, it was $30,000 and a piece of the company.

TWO WOMEN AND A PHONE

There was no marketing budget, so Tara borrowed an idea from Tim Ferriss. Instead of chasing everybody, find the one group your product helps the most and win them first.

For SmartSweets, that group was people who had given up candy completely, starting with the Weight Watchers community. She changed her Instagram name to SmartSweets Founder, searched the Weight Watchers hashtags for at least seven hours a day, and messaged people one at a time. Every note said something real about the person before it offered a free bag. Most of the people who got one became fans and posted about it on their own.

Within three months, SmartSweets looked like a big brand to that community. In reality it was two women and a phone. Then they moved to the next group, fitness fans, and did it again. Some of those early customers told her they had cried in the candy aisle, because it was the first candy they had eaten in years.

The fans pushed people into stores, and Tara made sure there were stores to push them into. She wanted SmartSweets available across the country from the start, so nobody would see it online and be unable to buy it. She landed two national chains, Bed Bath & Beyond Canada, which wrapped SmartSweets displays around its cash registers, and the supplement chain Popeye's.

THE $80,000 NAPKIN

The first year went better than Tara had planned for, and that became a problem. Every dollar went back into making more candy, and she had already borrowed all she could.

Then Beth, handing out samples at a Choices store, met a woman named Shelley who got it right away. Tara met her at a restaurant the next day. Shelley wrote on a napkin that she would invest $80,000. She signed it. Tara signed it. They agreed to work out the details later.

Around the same time, a producer for Dragons’ Den, Canada’s version of Shark Tank, tried the candy and asked if Tara could come to Toronto. Tara had watched the show religiously as a teenager. She walked in wearing a backwards baseball hat, jeans and a T-shirt, and asked for $100,000 for 10% of the company. All six Dragons made offers, at double the value she had asked for. She accepted one on the show and chose not to close it afterward.

When the episode aired, Oma finally understood. She got all of her friends to watch it, watched it over and over, and became the best SmartSweets salesperson in her building.

A couple of months after Toronto, a producer from FOX Business found Tara on Instagram and asked her to come to New York to film a segment. Minutes after it aired, an email arrived from the global candy buyer at Whole Foods, asking about a launch with the chain. Tara called Beth.

“I just got a spam email, but that would be amazing if that was real.”

It was real. She later learned the buyer did not watch FOX at all. He had been flipping through channels and saw her story and reached out.

THE GOPRO CANDY HEIST

SmartSweets had two partners at the time. One factory made the candy, and a separate company packaged it.

As Whole Foods got closer, the factory started to slip. Metal turned up in some of the bags. None of them reached a store, but Tara learned the factory’s quality checks were not what it had promised.

Then the packaging company called. Someone had just walked in with a GoPro camera, filmed the whole operation, and run out to a getaway minivan. The person was from her own factory, gathering what it needed to do the packaging itself.

Tara could not trust that factory with her candy or with her business. She had seven months until the Whole Foods launch to replace it. So she showed up at a small-town candy maker run by the same family for generations. The father and the grandfather heard her out and decided to take a chance on her.

About eight months after the email, SmartSweets launched in about 450 Whole Foods stores, its first step into the United States. Its fans came with it. Whole Foods buyers complained that SmartSweets staff kept showing up in the back of their stores. Tara told them it was not her team. It was her fans.

HIRING FOR THE SUCK

As SmartSweets grew, Tara hired around her weak spots. Numbers were the first one. She had not known Excel had a sum function, so she hired a finance leader long before most startups do.

SHARING SWEET SUCCESS

Past $100 million, she ran the same test on herself. For the first time, she did not trust her gut on what came next. Getting from $100 million to $200 million, and then around the world, would take bigger factories, wider distribution and leaders who had done it before.

She found all three in TPG, a global private equity firm. TPG bought a majority stake in SmartSweets in a deal widely reported at $360 million, and brought in a new CEO who had already run a large cookie company. TPG backed the deal because SmartSweets had something hard to copy: fans who felt like friends.

Every employee owned a piece of the company, and when the deal closed, even the newest hire could afford a dream car or a down payment on a house.

Now Tara is at it again with Snackish, a potato chip brand inspired by the yellow bag her daughter carried everywhere.

She is also passing on what got her through. Through her program Bold Beginnings, she gives a young woman founder $25,000 each year, no strings attached, along with the message she once read to herself in an accelerator washroom. You are capable.

Tara Bosch didn't have a marketing budget, an established brand, or a track record in the candy business. But she knew how to make people care about what she was building.

She turned her personal struggle into a shared mission, persuaded partners to believe in her vision, and built a loyal community through personal connections. Here are three storytelling lessons worth borrowing.

#1. Turn Your Problem Into Their Mission

Tara transformed her personal struggle with candy into a message others could embrace: "Kick Sugar, Keep Candy!"

Rather than focusing on ingredients, she connected with customers through a frustration they shared. Her mission became their mission.

Action: Find the common struggle between your story and your customers' experiences. Make that connection central to your brand message so people feel they're part of something.

#2. Paint the Future Before You Have the Proof

Without sales or investors, Tara convinced manufacturers by describing where the candy industry was headed. She sold them on a future they could help create.

Her vision gave people something to believe in before the numbers existed.

Action: Show potential partners, investors, or customers what the future could look like. Explain why it matters and the role they can play in making it happen.

#3. Find Your People, Then Speak Their Language

Tara focused on people who already understood the problem SmartSweets solved. Her personalized outreach to the Weight Watchers community helped turn strangers into loyal advocates.

She made people feel understood before asking them to buy.

Action: Identify the people who feel your customers' problem most intensely. Learn how they talk about it, then use their language in your stories, posts, and outreach.

Americans love their candy. In 2025, the U.S. confectionery industry generated a staggering $55 billion in retail sales. Here's a taste of just how big the market is.

99.8%: U.S. households purchased candy, chocolate, gum, or mints in 2025.
$28.4 billion: Americans' annual spending on chocolate.
$22.5 billion: Spending on non-chocolate candy, including gummies, chewy candy, and mints.
#1: Gummies ranked first among consumers' five favorite types of candy in NCA's 2025 research.

And SmartSweets' contribution?

8.6 BILLION GRAMS: The amount of sugar SmartSweets says it has displaced from traditional candy and fruit snacks since launching in 2016.

Not bad for a company that started with a gummy bear mold from Amazon.

In Tara Bosch: Why I Chose to Sell SmartSweets, Tara shares the story of building SmartSweets from a basement experiment into a nine-figure candy brand. She opens up about overcoming self-doubt, failed manufacturing deals, breaking into national retail, and the media moment that changed everything. She also shares how her obsession with customer experience helped fuel the company's growth, along with the difficult decisions that came with building a business so quickly. Watch here:

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