YouSaid · the spoken record

Tara Bosch

lines on the record: 90
first: 2024-08-05
most recent: 2024-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was all guesstimates, you know, of how much do you make and that sort of thing, making these forecasts that were just me throwing guesses at a wall of numbers and that sort of thing. And based on my estimates in my mind, the very first run I wanted to make $13,000 of each flavor.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really that like, wow, yeah, this actually satisfies the craving that I have for candy, which felt validating. There was a whole slew of, you know, the texture is like a little bit too chewy. The sweetness doesn't really come through after the first five seconds of me chewing the gummy. The sour coating is a little bit too tart or a little bit too bitter. But what I heard through that all was the baseline of yes, this actually is satisfying my craving for candy. And so all the other stuff I knew I could iterate on.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was at that point really just doing taste tests mainly with my peers in the accelerator program. I'd bring these little Bags with all the different gummy bears and like a be a little gummy dealer around the office and get everyone to be the guinea pigs and thankfully they were all happily willing.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it really wasn't until about three months after I started intensely recipe testing where I was like, okay, at a bench top level. I have verified and validated that this can exist and that this actually tastes good and has a two-week long shelf life. This validates that now I need to find a manufacturer that I can scale to launch this with.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I remember the very first day of the incubator, it was all tech and beauty companies. And then I was the girl respirate testing gummies in my kitchen. And I remember just walking in and just in the imposter syndrome just being like, who am I to be here? Like I don't belong in having to like go in the washroom and pull out my phone with the quotes on it. I'm just like, you are capable. You are deserving all the different quotes that cheesy ones that I had written down.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so like you got to, if you were accepted, you got to work out of their offices with all the different people in your cohort and they had different fireside chats and things like that.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was still just thinking product, but what I did know that I needed was I knew that I wanted to find people who had brought to life a product in the CPG world before and that I could talk to and get golden nuggets from. So I began Googling and LinkedIning people who I really admired and just being really clear and being like, hey, really admire your journey. This is what I'm doing. 10 minutes of your time. would be infinitely grateful. And I was actually shocked how many people responded. And shortly after that, I found an accelerator program for young entrepreneurs called the next big thing from Ryan Holmes at Hootsuit.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this becomes my life equally so I became so aware from different podcasts like Oprah's Super Soul Sunday on YouTube, how I built this, your podcast had just launched and became like Sarah Blakely's episode I listened to at least 30 times that summer. I just really immersed myself. There are certain books I would like rip out the page from and just read it over and over. So just as much time as I spent in my kitchen, I spent on like immersing myself with the mindset of people who had”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't have a timeline panned out of you know, this is when this is going to launch on shelves so much as I had clarity of vision. So from day one in my kitchen recipe testing I truly remember having such clarity in my mind that, you know, smart sweets was the global leader in revolutionizing candy. It's all happened and now I'm just reverse executing on it. Okay, step one, need to get a product.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at that point in my life, I had gotten pretty used, I think, to feeling underestimated or misunderstood. So I pretty easily discarded the thoughts and opinions of others that didn't serve me well. My grandmother's words I always took to heart though. I know I remember being like, you know, one day she's going to understand and she's going to get it and I'm going to do right by her and she's going to be proud.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few of my closest friends I shared at a high level the idea with really the only person other than my boyfriend at the time that I shared with on an in-depth level was my grandmother to which her response was, you know, you're crazy. Why are you throwing away university to be making candy in your kitchen? Have you gone nuts? Have you gone off the rail? What's wrong with you? You know, they're really just German direct because for her, she never had the opportunity to go to university. So for me to throw that away to her was just kind of unfathomable.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, the soft and hard boiling point, it's beyond a regular boil point of, let's say, you want to boil potatoes in water or something like that. It's very, very high. And then there's different boil points for soft candy versus if you want a hard candy boil. And then as soon as it reaches that point, you have to remove it right away. I would use my eyedropper, put it in the molds, and then let it set at room temperature over to kind of let it naturally cure. And then 72 hours later, I would see how it had set. I'd see, you know, is this even staying together? Is it coming out? Is it moldy? Sometimes it'd be like jell-o. Sometimes they'd be hard or they'd have a jello like inside, but they'd form this harder crust on the outside.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Had my candy thermometer because cook temp is really important for candy. Candy has a really high cook temperature. So at one point there would be steam going outside my basement unit and my landlords thought I was cooking weed gummies or something illegal.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was Stevia, there was monk fruit, Stevia worked really, really well in creating the mouthfeel and the sweetness without that aftertaste when it comes to Stevia. There's like hundreds of variations of Stevia. And so when you get into the rabbit hole of an ingredient and the variations of it and how that impacts all of all the things in the candy making process, that's where the raw material suppliers were really helpful.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when you think of corn syrup, corn syrup is really what makes up the viscosity of candy, what really makes up the bulk of what candy is.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the tricky thing about candy is really that it's 99% sugar and 1% everything else, flavoring and coloring. And so when you're looking at, okay, how do I take out 99% of what something is, you're really, really starting from zero. So I was looking at, you know, what are the alternatives to bulking ingredients that exist? What high potency sweeteners that we can we use that don't have an aftertaste? What exists for natural flavoring that is actually truly natural?”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was, you know, that show Extreme Makeover Home Edition I watched that as a kid, and I would always be like, My dream is to have a Willy Wonka candy room. Any projects I had at school, I'd be doing the, we had to make a map of the world map in something creative. I did Candyland world map. Candy was just my thing. I had so much joy in it. And so same with my OMA. And so Candy was the thing that I wanted to be able to feel good about.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had probably at that point around $8,000 from just saving since I was starting at McDonald's back when I was in my early teen years.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“twenty one, yes. I had the, you know, in the worst case scenario, could I go back to college? Sure. At the same time, I was on the brink of failing out anyways. And so if I hadn't dropped out, I may have failed out”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I declined the job because it was the first time in my life I felt like I had a purpose. I felt like I was being pulled viscerally by something larger than myself towards this idea. And just after going down that rabbit hole on sugar, I really, really felt that, wow, if I can bring to life this mission to kick sugar and keep candy, that at a larger scale on a global level, we can help move the needle in the sugar reduction movement. And to me, it was shocking that this didn't already exist in different verticals and the grocery store almost every vertical by then. There had been innovation in the ice cream aisle halo top creamery was blowing up at that time. In chips, there were all sorts of things, but nobody was innovating Kent. It was the same.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I remember specifically a phone call where they had called and asked if I wanted to come back and called my grandmother and I'm telling her about this and she's like, you should do it. That's such a stable and reliable source of income. It'd be a really great thing for you to do. And at the same time, I had just had this conversation with her where she had shared with me that she regretted having so much excess sugar and something was stirring in me. And the idea for smart sweets was really beginning to bubble up to feel like something I was viscerally pulled to. So I remember having the call with her and then sending the email and declining that job and feeling like I'm going to act on this thing.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So someone wants to import anything into Canada, I would be the person collecting the fees and validating the fees on what they wanted to import. So all sorts of things, whether they wanted to bring in kangaroos, dogs. Kangaroos.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was. And it was coming up on the summer. And one of the jobs I had as well, I worked at the border for Canadian customs on the commercial side. And so it was really, it was like $18 an hour, which was like an amazing wage.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was the biggest blessing because the failure of that, all of the little golden nuggets that I collected from why it didn't work were really the stepping stones that allowed me to have the confidence and insight for my next idea, which was about two months after I made the decision to shut that down. At this point, it's 2015. The summer's coming up, I would be going into my third year university in the fall. At this point, I'm practically failing out of university anyways because I had just started to take German classes. So I was like, at the very least, I'll speak German with my grandmother if nothing else works here with uni.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I really didn't pause to think, what is the real value here that I'm creating for the consumer? I was really creating a product for a problem that I wanted to solve for myself and made the assumption that it was the same problem other people were having.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was super scrappy. I just put 800 bucks into it and then just like what I made, reinvested margins were insane because Decals would cost me less than a dollar than I'd be selling them for like 30 to $50. Wow. I just put the money back in and just really kept us scrappy.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would do a fair at UBC, and then I'd reach out to all the different student groups and connect with them. But it really didn't resonate and really get traction. And so ended up, I was living with my grandmother at the time, ended up having her apartment filled with all these vinyl and chalkwood decays. And in spite.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know one of them was like a Steve Jobs quote, it was like have the courage to follow your heart and intuition for it already knows what you want to become, things like that”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or like Alibaba. Alibaba, yeah. Yes. So there were more kind of generalized things available there. I was doing really specific ones with different quotes and things like that. So I would design them and then I found a manufacturer in China and then just started selling them directly to students and had a little site.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, really, the gift, I think, of university for me was really just finding out more things that I wasn't passionate about. However, I began to have this confidence that I could act in an idea. And it was called the caled out. It was vinyl and chalkboard walled the cows for students and home renters.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 100%. I think that the key word for me is excess, sugar consumption, and just really going down that rabbit hole after that conversation with her to exactly what you're saying, where I was really became aware of like, wow, excess sugar consumption is this silent epidemic happening. And it was shocking to me just how intentionally it's happening. And so that really ignited the passion within me to think, hmm, this silent epidemic is happening. And why can't you feel good about candy?”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was shocking to me at the time because I thought magically you grow up and all of a sudden just have a harmonious relationship with food and yourself and all the things.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she was related to her whole life really felt like to her, I think, a fight between her body and food and herself and just the weight that she had that impacted her because she wasn't able to walk very well anymore. But I really think it just kept her in this place of feeling poorly about herself. And so we're sitting down at her table one day and she knew how much I loved candy. We enjoyed it so much together. It was just such an emotional thing for us. And she, yeah, I had shared with me like, you know, over the years, I regret having so much sugar because now at my age, I feel so limited in what I can do mobility-wise. I still feel poorly about myself. And I just wish I had done things differently and had. Developed a relationship that was a peaceful one with food.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think, especially as a kid, I think I had pretty severe body dysmorphia. So I remember when I was eight years old standing in the junior Jacobs change room trying on pants. And the salesperson was like, come on out, let's see the pants. And I remember thinking, I can't come out. I don't want her to see how big I am, which I wasn't big at all. But I grew up in a family where my grandmother was always pretty overweight and people would make comments in public that I'd hear. And we loved enjoying all sorts of amazing foods together. She's German, so very hearty foods, a lot of carbs. And so at a young age, I think I really adopted. The thought that, like, oh, food means something that isn't just food that you feed your body with. It means something about your identity, your weight, all these kind of complex things around it.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Yes, so my boss hired me because she saw I had McDonald's on my resume and she became really aside from my grandmother, the first figure in my life that helped me to see that food is not something that you have to have a tumultuous relationship with. It can be something that can really nourish your body and your soul and just finding those smarter choices. So for me, I began making gummy bears at home. Then I was eating those every day and I felt good about it. And so that replaced the candy.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt in my teenage years so trapped by such negative energy in the situation I was living in. And so for me, I think it was just seeing like, wow, these people have such a deep sense of purpose and did it. They had this courage that was so mystical and inspiring to me because I was so insecure and had such low self-esteem. And just seeing people do that was so wildly inspiring to me.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, fast food places first and then a coffee shop. I'd go open the coffee shop at 4 a.m. before school, go to school, and then go at that time work at a bakery afterwards.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. It was illegal for a year. And then also shortly thereafter, got a job at Domino. So work really became my life. I really wasn't athletic. I wasn't academic. I felt lonely a lot of the time. And at the same time, I became obsessed with the idea of entrepreneurship through watching Shark Tank and Dragon's den”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was 12 is when my dad left the picture and my mom really kind of having her security and self-worth that was so tied to that marriage swept under from her. Unfortunately, she got into an abusive relationship. So it's me, mom, and this abusive person living in this home. When I was 13, I went and got a job at McDonald's. I was like an illegal worker at the time for a year because I saw really how her having dependence on someone else impacted her so greatly.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We put a launch date for December of 2015. Come second week into December. They call me and they say, hey, we are not going to let you use this recipe, this formula. You can use another formula with chicory root fiber as the bulking agent. And immediately I knew what they were telling me was we're going to give you a recipe that's actually not digestible that's going to blow up people's stomachs. That manufacturer took the recipe and ended up going on to launch a product themselves.”
2024-08-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SmartSweets: Tara Bosch · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT