Sweet Startup

Tara Bosch stopped eating sugar in 2015 in an attempt to improve her health. It worked, but she missed eating sweets so she made her own no sugar sweets in her kitchen at home in Vancouver, Canada. The results were so good she realised there was a business opportunity for low sugar sweets and dropped out of university to start Smart Sweets.

The sweets are made using plant based fibres and a natural sweetener stevia so that they taste like traditional sweets and are manufactured in the US. Her success is largely due to her persistance at calling and emailing buyers to set up meetings for her to pitch her sweets. At her first meeting, she was so nervous when she arrived she had to drive away. Luckily she decided to come back, had the meeting and the retailer signed her up.

“Like I said, it’s about persistence,” Bosch says. “I would email and show up until a business would say yes to a conversation, and from there I leveraged the success.”

Smart Sweets products are now market leaders in US and Canada and revenues this year are set to exceed £30million.