How college dropout and SmartSweets founder Tara Bosch went from a McDonald's job to selling her company for $360 million

The 29-year-old Canadian grew up with two full-time jobs, a single mom, and a doting grandma; her fondest childhood memories were spent sharing candy with her grandmother, who had almost as big a sweet tooth as she did. As her grandma aged, she told Bosch how she wished she’d had a better, healthier option when indulging. 

Bosch took the idea and ran with it. She dug deep into research about excessive sugar consumption, and realized how much harmful ingredients proliferate every food on store shelves. But the problem: She didn’t want to give up candy. Shortly into college, she began recipe testing in her basement apartment kitchen, filling hundreds of gummy-bear molds with different flavor combinations. 

Between her second and third year of university, she knew she had something special, and reasoned that she didn’t want to live with any “what ifs.” So she dropped out and pursued low-sugar candy making full time. The leap paid off. 

With nothing to her name except her 2009 Honda Fit hatchback, she took out $105,000 of debt financing and brought SmartSweets to life. The fanfare rolled in almost instantly. In her first year, she sold $2 million in candy. Year two, $16 million. Year three, $60 million. And year four, $125 million. In 2020, SmartSweets was acquired by asset firm TPG Growth for $360 million, making Bosch, the majority owner, a millionaire. She told Fortune exactly how she pulled it off. 

The following transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. 

What’s your background?

I grew up in Surrey, British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada. During my teen years, I was raised by a single mom, so early on, I had a lot of drive to find my own path and financial independence after seeing what my mom had gone through and how that impacted her self-esteem and her confidence. 

I got my very first jobs at McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza when I was 13. I worked illegally for a year, because 14 is the age minimum in Canada. Having two part-time jobs always gave me the flexibility to sandwich school in between them. I was getting paid minimum wage back then, around $13 an hour. 

I was working two jobs while I was in school, really, because I had such a strong drive from what I saw my mom go through—having the financial security ripped out from under her when she became a single mom, and having to really start from the ground up. 

But I also saw what life would have looked like had she not been there, and that really instilled in me that I wanted to become financially independent. I figured out how to game school by knowing the minimum amount I needed to study to get the grades I needed to get into university. Then I shifted all my focus to working and making money, which I felt was a lot more valuable than just trying to get straight A’s. 

Around that time, I began watching Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den—which is Canada’s form of Shark Tank—religiously. I would write down so many ideas, but I wasn’t confident to act on them because of my unhealthy relationship with food. 

I loved candy—I would have candy all of the time—but all of the sugar made me feel really bad about myself. I got into an unhealthy cycle where I’d have too much sugar, so I’d restrict myself from having it. That really impacted my self-esteem and confidence. It wasn’t until much later in my teen years, when I began working at a supplement store, where my boss became my very first mentor. 

She really taught me that it’s all about finding smarter choices to the foods that you love. That helped me find my own healthy relationship with food. A couple of years after that, my grandmother, who was my best friend in the world growing up, told me she regretted having so much excess sugar—especially candy—which we had enjoyed so often together. 

I really paused and thought, wow, you can go through your whole life feeling bad about yourself because of what you’re putting in your body. That really was a moment for me where I asked myself, Why can’t you feel good about candy?

Where did you go to college?

In Canada, at a university called the University of British Columbia. When I got into UBC, I remember having a conversation with one of my high school teachers, and he was like, ‘I know you got in, but college isn’t for everyone.’ He was kind of suggesting that I take a different path and that I wasn’t meant to go the university route. 

I always felt very underestimated by my peers growing up. I think a lot of that had to do with having low self-esteem and confidence and belief in myself. But when I got into university, I really didn’t know what I was passionate about. I got into the art department, but really didn’t find anything that lit me up. So I decided I would just start taking German classes, if nothing else, to be able to speak German with my grandmother. 

But while I was in university, I had begun fostering a healthier relationship with food, which in turn led to me having more confidence in myself, and for the first time ever, really thinking that I was capable of acting on an idea and bringing something to life. 

I acted on my very first idea, which was called Decaled Out, when I was 17. It was a startup for students and renters who wanted to decorate their walls but couldn’t leave permanent damage with vinyl and chalkboard wall decals. That was my first experience with manufacturing, sales, and distribution. About six months after I launched it, it failed. But it was the biggest blessing because it gave me the stepping stones of golden nuggets that I needed to act on my next idea.

Which semester did you end up leaving college? How did you come to that decision? 

In summer 2015, between my second and third year of university, I still had really not found anything I was passionate about. That was when I got my second idea after my first failed one, which was for SmartSweets. I dove all-in into that idea, and by the end of that summer, the decision to drop out was very easy and clear to me. 

I viewed it as if I were 90 years old looking back. I didn’t want to live with any what ifs, and I knew that if this idea failed, I could go back to university and finish my degree. But I didn’t want to live with the what if: What if I had not tried and followed the feeling inside of me calling me towards this idea?

The conversation with my grandmother was really the lightbulb moment for SmartSweets. I was like, wow, how does this not exist in the world? At the same time, it took me down the rabbit hole of excess sugar consumption and how it’s impacting us at a global level; it’s this silent epidemic. I quickly formed the hypothesis that if we can kick sugar out of the candy aisle, which is the most sugar-packed aisle in the entire grocery store, that can make a much larger statement asking why so much added sugar is in our packaged foods today. 

After that a-ha moment, I went down the rabbit hole and educated myself on excess sugar consumption right away. I got a gummy bear mold off of Amazon, and hunkered down in my basement suite kitchen with all of the ingredients I had bought online, including a candy thermometer, and I recipe-tested all day long for the entire summer.

The candy mold had about 120 gummy bear-shaped cavities, so the gummy bear was the very first innovation I worked to bring to life that summer. I chose gummy bears as the very first candy because I figured they’re something everyone has known and loved at some point in their lives. I wanted to start with a fruity SKU and a sour SKU, but I was also recipe testing marshmallows in my kitchen. That was less about the mass consumer, and more that I love marshmallows so much and wanted a low-sugar version. But I ultimately axed that one and just focused on the gummy bears.

When you decided to quit college, how did your family and friends react?

Everyone around me thought that I was crazy. My grandmother, who had worked from the time I was a baby to create a college fund for me—which she never had—she was just beside herself. She thought, how could I throw away this opportunity to go to university to go make some candy in my kitchen? Her opinion was really the one that mattered the most to me. All my friends and family thought I’d gone off the deep end as well. But by that point in my life, feeling underestimated and misunderstood felt so normal to me that I was able to easily discard the opinions of others. 

It really wasn’t until SmartSweets was on Dragon’s Den, which is Canada’s version of Shark Tank, that my grandmother was like, oh, wow, entrepreneurship is a thing. She became our most passionate salesperson to everyone in her building.

Were you looking up any tutorials on how to make candy?

Yes, I was looking at all the food-science journals of these amazing candy scientists who had made candies for generations. And I looked at what ingredients they used to innovate on things like ice cream.

Before starting SmartSweets, I had zero experience with candy making, or really much in the kitchen at all. It was all completely new to me, starting from scratch and learning as I went.

Candy has a very high cooking temperature. So when I was in my basement, cooking my candy recipes, the steam would occasionally be so excessive, it would seep outside the window upstairs to my landlord. And they thought at one point that I was cooking weed gummies or something illegal because of all the smoke.

Hundreds and hundreds of my first recipes were just horrible. They would look good at first, and then I’d leave for five minutes and come back to find just a blob instead of a gummy bear. Or it would get moldy in a day. It took hundreds of iterations before I got to the place of, wow, this actually tastes like something that would satisfy the feeling of joy I get from eating candy.

How old were you when you first started to experiment?

When I first started to experiment in my kitchen with the gummy bear mold, I was 21. 

Where were you living at the time?

I was living in Vancouver, renting a little basement just off of campus. I started selling SmartSweets just under a year after I began recipe testing. I made the very first deliveries from my little Honda Fit hatchback. 

I really wanted to find national retail partners from the get-go. Social media was just starting to pick up in a really big way, and I thought it would be more frustrating to consumers if they saw us on social, but couldn’t find us in a store near them. Bed Bath & Beyond was actually the first large national retailer to take us on, about a month after we launched. 

Nabbing Bed Bath & Beyond really came down to sharing our vision of low-sugar candy. We told them the category is here to stay, and if you take a chance on us now—I was speaking with conviction—I promise you it will be worth your while. I was really painting the vision for them of what the candy aisle of the future will look like, and making sure what’s in it for them was big. 

We had a higher till ring per penny for them than any other candy product on the shelf. So we were making them a lot more money at the end of the day, which is super important for retailers.

The very first customers in the month before we launched with our first national partner were smaller chains in and around Vancouver: Choices Markets, Nature’s Fare, small natural-food chains.

How did you finance your company?

When I started SmartSweets, I had nothing to my name except my 2009 Honda Fit hatchback. To launch the company, I took out $105,000 of debt financing that I was able to leverage my Honda Fit for. I also took out life insurance to secure against the loan. 

How did you come up with the name SmartSweets?

The original name was Stevi Sweets based off of the sweetener stevia. Before launching, our manufacturing partner—it was around Christmas time—decided that they needed to raise the minimums in order to go to production. So I spent the few days before Christmas cold calling investors to see if they were interested. Thankfully, some of them replied, but nobody was interested in trying the product because of the connotation of a stevia aftertaste. That was the biggest blessing and opportunity hidden in disguise because it caused me to pause and shift the company’s name to SmartSweets. 

SmartSweets really sounded nice, and it captured that ethos of SmartSweets being a smarter choice than traditional candy.

What was your packaging like at the time?

When we first launched on shelves, I had gone to the candy aisle and stared for hours and hours at what the shelf set looked like. I quickly realized that it kind of looked like a unicorn threw up all over the shelf. And so our initial packaging was a pretty simple white; I did that to stand out against all the colors on the shelf.

How did you get the word about your product out there in the beginning?

When I dropped out of college, I had the fortune of being accepted into an accelerator program called The Next Big Thing, which gave me a workspace with all of these other amazing young people that were acting on ideas in tech and beauty. I was the only one in food, so very quickly, I was able to learn things like the emphasis around building a community around a product, not just a brand around a product, and apply it to SmartSweets. 

I was really focused on creating a community around SmartSweets from day one, and I really leaned into social media to do that. I had read a blog post from Tim Ferriss about launching The Four Hour Workweek and how he marketed it. He talked about how he didn’t have the money to market to everyone, so he started with the niche that he thought the book was creating the most radical value for, and he scaled from there. 

That was the strategy I applied to SmartSweets. In the very beginning, we used social to target the Weight Watchers community. Within three months, it seemed like SmartSweets was everywhere, and that this brand had just blown up, when in reality, we were a very small company that just targeted this niche. 

Through those niches, we were able to very quickly grow a community of people that were passionate about kicking sugar. They really became the seeds that allowed us to grow into a flower pretty quickly. But it was really the passion from our friends that allowed us to scale, and we leveraged social media to build that community.

When did you realize that this business was really taking off and that you could find success with it?

From day one, when I was recipe-testing in my kitchen, I worked really hard at embedding Smart Sweet’s larger vision into my subconscious. That larger vision was for SmartSweets to be the global leader, revolutionizing candy. Then I reverse-executed back from that and took steps to think, okay, for my kitchen today, what do I need to get to that end vision of SmartSweets being a global leader? The vision felt so real to me. 

When did you get your first big paycheck? 

Building SmartSweets, I was always very scrappy. For the first two years, I didn’t take a salary. Then, we were able to get into the Peter Thiel Fellowship Program, which gave me $100,000 no strings—free money for the company. That let me begin paying myself. I split that over a two-year period to have a $50,000 salary. And then I really, really kept it scrappy. I wanted to keep the cash flow in the company. It really wasn’t until the majority of SmartSweets was acquired that I had my first big paycheck—and that was a big paycheck. The majority of SmartSweets was acquired for $360 million, and I was the majority owner. 

In our first year, we sold $2 million in candy. In our second year, we sold $16 million. In our third year, we sold $60 million. And in our fourth year, we sold $125 million. 

Why did you apply to the Peter Thiel Fellowship?

It gives kids under 23 $100,000 to drop out of college—if they haven’t already—and act on their big idea. It receives something crazy, like over 10,000 applications a year. I applied thinking there was absolutely no way I’d get in. I totally felt impostor syndrome about even being considered for it. But I like to always have the approach that you don’t know unless you try. So I tried. 

I submitted the online application and made it through to the first round of interviews. They flew everyone out to San Francisco. Then I was like, I’m definitely not getting in, because all of these people are amazing. But I made it to the next one, and then impostor syndrome grew. I thought, Okay, I’m definitely getting cut now, but it was really awesome to meet all these amazing people. Then I made it into the cohort.

What’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever purchased for yourself?

Definitely my very first home. That felt surreal. It was during COVID, right after our acquisition, and I wanted to be able to get out of this city and just go live in the forest. I found this amazing plot of land and a city called Whistler, which is kind of a ski town about two hours north. I got a home there that I remember, for the first month, I was walking in the house feeling like it was someone else’s, because it felt too good to be true. Growing up, I didn’t even think homes like that existed.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

It’s a mantra that now I share with my toddler every single day: You are infinitely capable and divinely blessed, and you’re limitless in what you can create. I think I really realized throughout my journey that everything normalizes. When you’re starting out, and five stores seem really big, then you hit five stores, and then 10 stores seem big. And then 1,000, and then 10,000, and then 100,000 stores. When you hit those milestones, they no longer seem out of reach, or something that can’t be achievable. It really allows you to think even bigger in terms of what’s possible, and you slowly begin to realize that truly anything in the world is possible. And the only limit really exists in your mind and what you limit yourself to. 

The other thing that I’ve learned is that when I was recipe-testing in my kitchen, I would wake up with almost paralyzing fear, discomfort, insecurity, and self-doubt. I always thought that, at some point, that feeling would go away. In the beginning, I would read cheesy quotes, I would listen to cheesy motivational tracks, and listen to Oprah Super Soul Sunday and rip pages out of books and put them on my doors. I’d put mantras like ‘you are capable’ on my mirror and on my fridge. 

As I grew the company, those feelings never went away, but I had to continually let myself feel capable every day. Whether I was doing deliveries from my Honda hatchback to our very first retailers or on a Zoom call with 80 team members, I had that same underlying feeling of being an imposter. 

I knew from day one that everyone has those feelings throughout their journey, especially women. I think I would have felt less insecure about having those feelings and allowing them to magnify the self-doubt.

When did you hire employees?

When I started recipe testing in my kitchen, it was just me. Just under a year later, when we launched on shelves, I hired our very first employee, and I paid her $30,000 in the first year. She was gracious enough, and such an amazing human, to really see the vision. She was willing to take more equity to be able to live off of basically nothing for that first year. By our fourth year, we had just over 80 employees, and we’re doing $125 million in annual revenue.

Why did you decide to sell?

I always knew that at some point in SmartSweets’ growth, it would make sense to partner with a larger global organization who had the ability to expedite our distribution and manufacturing channels to achieve that overarching vision of becoming the global leader in revolutionizing candy faster. 

At the same time, as we were approaching the $100-million mark in annual revenue, I really began to kind of lose that ability of seeing around the bend, and really feeling like I was the best person to be in the CEO role. I always thought of myself, from day one, through the lens of: how do I best serve the mission? How may I be holding the company up? 

In the beginning, I was sweeping the floors, packing the boxes. By that fourth year, I really saw that, oh, by not being able to see around the bend, I think I’m actually going to begin to hold the company up from the next chapter of growth. I knew I was going to bring on a CEO regardless; it just felt like the right timing to do both those things at once. Today, I’m still the largest individual shareholder, and I’m on the board.

Where is the company today?

Today, SmartSweets is the number one-selling low sugar candy across North America. We’re in 130,000 stores in Canada and the U.S., and to date, we’ve helped people kick over 5.6 billion grams of sugar. 

Can you share your revenue before you sold? 

In our fourth year, we made $125 million in annual revenue. I was 25 years old when I made my first million dollars after the majority acquisition of my company.

Do you remember the emotions behind that?

One of the the undercurrents of SmartSweets was that I always wanted to honor everyone that was part of the journey with me. Every single person on our team had equity. I’d tell them that my hope for them was that SmartSweets could be a lilypad for their journey, whether that’s being able to buy a dream car, or put a down payment and deposit on a dream home. 

After the acquisition, I saw everyone was able to have those lilypad moments, and it was the biggest emotional thing for me. My biggest emotional moment was being able to, in a full circle moment, take care of my grandmother and my mom. That was the greatest gift.

What’s your estimated net worth?

$200 million.

Why is it important for you to help other female leaders?

When I was starting out, I read so many books, podcasts and YouTube videos, and was fortunate to be able to learn from a lot of amazing humans’ journeys. However, most of those stories were from men, so I didn’t necessarily identify with or see myself in them. So now, it’s really important for me to share my journey and show up for other women in hopes that they can identify with me and have the confidence to act on their own idea and know they’re so infinitely capable.

Do you have any mentees or work with any specific organizations to accomplish this?

I’m really passionate about supporting other young women on their journeys. and really empowering them to know that their feelings of impostor syndrome are normal. I want to equip them and their peer group with golden nuggets of knowledge and emotional support as they’re bringing their ideas to life. 

So I created something called Bold Beginnings. Every single year, we have a cohort of amazing women across North America. It includes a $25,000 strings-free grant, which is amazing. But the real benefit is really the knowledge that their ideas are needed in the world, and that they’re the exact person that the universe has given this idea to for a reason, and that they are really limitless and what they can create.

What would you say is the secret to your success?

I think really there’s no secret, in the sense that I think the people who become successful at the end of the day are the people that feel the same fear and feelings like insecurity and self-doubt that everyone does—but still having the wherewithal to take a step forward each and every day, despite that. 

It’s really just about having the bull-like mentality of beating the door down and knowing that everything is possible. If somebody doesn’t respond to your email, it’s not because they don’t like you. It just means you have to find a different way to bang the door down. Being absolutely relentless in the pursuit of what you’re creating, and having a really strong ‘why’ that’s much larger than yourself is key. 

The journey is so hard that I think if you’re not working to create a positive impact in the world that is going to serve a purpose much larger than you, I think it becomes too heavy. 

Have you ever had to deal with haters?

My version of haters was probably just people who underestimated me throughout my journey. I would keep a little list in my phone of people who underestimated me. It was motivating to really channel that into my work. It fuels me. 

One example: Super early on, I was invited to an accelerator program for this really successful person who I really admired. It was very clear that my company wasn’t one of the ones that that person thought was going to be successful, so they really didn’t put much time or energy into saying hi, or stopping by and trying the product. They say never meet your idols, and that was my moment. I was just crushed. But then, with the gift of time, years later, that person actually reached out and was like, I’ve been seeing the journey from afar, and congratulations. 

In supporting other women and the next generation of female entrepreneurs, one anecdote that summarizes it really well is: I want to support other women in taking the whole platter. 

The story behind that is: Me and a friend I met in my very first accelerator program were at a launch event together. At the very end of the event, there was a platter left of sandwiches on the table. We were deep in startup life, living off of $2 muffins for lunch; having some of those sandwiches would be amazing. 

We stood there debating whether or not we should take some sandwiches home, or whether that would be rude, and we didn’t want to come across as entitled. And as we were standing there debating and hesitating, one of the guys went and took the whole platter of sandwiches. 

That was the moment that we looked at each other and promised to always take the whole platter. I want to encourage other women to lean into taking up space in the world and taking the platter in their own way.