For most parents, a toddler’s obsession with potato chips is a minor household challenge. For Vancouver-based entrepreneur Tara Bosch, it became the foundation of her second act.
Bosch’s 5-year-old had become fixated on the familiar yellow chip bag, carrying it around wherever she went. Bosch understood the appeal. She loved chips too—but had largely stopped eating them herself. “They either taste like shit or make you feel like shit,” the mompreneur says. The 31-year-old channelled that frustration into Snackish, a new Vancouver-founded snack company launching across Canada and the United States this month.
Positioned as “the feel good chip,” Snackish is betting consumers no longer want to choose between indulgence and nutrition. Its potato-based chips contain eight grams of protein per serving, are cooked in 100% avocado oil and promise to deliver added fibre. Producing them required building a 66,000-square-foot factory—known internally as the “Snacktory”—in Georgia, United States, where Bosch says the company is pioneering an entirely new approach to chip manufacturing.
The brand’s playful identity extends well beyond its bright yellow packaging. At Snackish’s Vancouver headquarters, where Bosch and I meet on a sunny June morning, visitors are first greeted by a lavender-painted horse barn and stable that houses several pet horses. Inside, the company’s signature yellow palette takes over. Bright yellow couches, play areas, arcade machines and meeting rooms of various sizes create a workspace that feels tailor-made for a founder balancing the demands of motherhood and entrepreneurship.
Snackish’s debut marks Bosch’s return to consumer packaged goods after building low-sugar candy brand SmartSweets from a startup founded in her Vancouver apartment—when she was just 22 years old—into one of Canada’s most recognizable food brands. In 2020, SmartSweets was eventually acquired by private equity firm TPG Growth in a landmark deal reportedly valued at roughly $360 million.
This time, Bosch says she’s bringing some hard-earned lessons with her.
“With SmartSweets, one of the most powerful things was not building a product—but building a community around the brand,” she says.
That learning is woven throughout Snackish’s business model. Rather than relying on traditional influencer campaigns, the company is leaning heavily into what Bosch describes as a creator-equity model, bringing creators into the business as owners rather than paid spokespeople.
Among them is Kat Stickler, the social media creator whose audience of more than four million Instagram followers has followed her through marriage, divorce, single motherhood and entrepreneurship. Snackish has also enlisted creators including Mikayla Matthews of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Canadian creator Levi Coralynn as long-term creative advisors and equity partners.
For Bosch, the approach is also rooted in a larger belief about who should be building consumer products in the first place. Snackish is entirely women-owned and women-led, from its executive team to its creator partners. The leadership roster includes veterans from brands such as Unreal, Lesser Evil, Elf and DoorDash. While women make the vast majority of grocery purchasing decisions in North America, Bosch argues that many consumer brands are still designed by people who don’t closely resemble their target customer.
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“Most of the brands in her cart weren’t built by her, they were built for her, which is a completely different thing,” says Bosch. “When the entire team is also the customer, you’re not running focus groups to figure out what she wants. You know, because you’re her.”
The conviction stems in part from Bosch’s own entrepreneurial journey. Before SmartSweets became one of Canada’s biggest startup success stories, a 21-year-old Bosch was a finalist in the 2017 pitch competition hosted by The Forum—which strives to provide women entrepreneurs with essential capital—receiving funding and mentorship at a pivotal moment for the business.
Today, Bosch says she’s trying to pay that support forward through Snackish’s ownership structure. Rather than raising venture capital, she self-funded the company and structured ownership so that every employee—even “the most junior CX person on the Snack Pack”—holds equity in the business.
Bosch says the cap table was intentionally designed to be simple and equitable, without the layers of investor preferences and ownership complexity that often accompany venture-backed startups. The goal is to ensure that if Snackish eventually reaches the scale of SmartSweets, the people who helped build it share directly in the outcome.
Snackish will hit Whole Foods Canada shelves on June 17, followed by a nationwide rollout through Loblaw stores in July and London Drugs in August.
