Adam Torres and Jana Goodbaum discuss Happy Wolf.
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Show Notes:
Happy Wolf is a new brand of wildly simple snacks for kids. They make nut-free fridge-fresh bars with the simplest possible whole-food ingredients. In this episode, Adam Torres and Jana Goodbaum, Co-Founder of Happy Wolf, explore the Happy Wolf story and what it’s like to start a business with young kids at home.
About Jana Goodbaum
Jana Goodbaum is the proud mom of two very hungry toddlers and the co-founder of Happy Wolf Snacks. Previously, she led Integrated Marketing Communications at Tim Hortons, Canada’s leading coffee brand and largest restaurant chain.
Jana has always been passionate about health and nutrition—and when she had kids, this passion only intensified. But as a busy working mom, Jana was seriously struggling with snacktime. Despite a wide grocery store selection, she found that all the school-safe kids’ snacks – even the “clean ones” – were ultra-processed, containing ingredients she would never use in her own kitchen.
Jana traded in coffee and donuts for kids’ snacks—and after hundreds of trial recipes and countless hours spent in her kitchen, she decided to officially leave her longtime role at Tim Hortons to create the brand she wished existed for her own kids. Alongside longtime friend and fellow health-conscious parent Derek Beigleman, Jana is now excited to be building Happy Wolf: a new brand of wildly simple snacks for kids.
About Happy Wolf
Happy Wolf is a new brand of wildly simple snacks for kids. They make their nut-free fridge-fresh bars with the simplest possible whole-food ingredients, sweetened with only dates and honey. There are no weird powders, preservatives, additives, artificial or “natural” flavors… So yes, you can literally make their products with ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. . All right, today I have Jenna Goodbaum on the line, and she’s co founder over at Happy Wolf.
Jenna, welcome to the show. Thank you. All right, Janice. So we got a lot to talk about today. So I definitely want to get into Happy Wolf the brand, why you started it, how you started it, of course, but I guess just to get us kicked off here, what inspired you to get this brand going?
Like, where did that start? Great question. So, I’ll start with what Happy Wolf is. So, we are a new line of wildly simple snack bars for toddlers and kids, and they really are a product of, you know, inspiration from my own life as a mom two very hungry toddlers. I was always on the hunt for snacks for my kids that were nutritious and made from,, simple, whole, minimally processed ingredients.
And I would walk in the aisles of the grocery store just sort of astonished at the option. , it’s 2021 at this point. point. And the options were still so sugary, filled with weird, , ultra persist ingredients that I never use at home in my own kitchen. And yet I had to send my kids nut free snacks that were packaged for their nursery schools in their daycare.
And I was sort of at this loss. Like, why is there Nothing for me. I have a,, a high willingness to pay. I’m willing to go out of my way to find the very best products available for my kids. And there was really nothing that checked my boxes and sort of fit the bill. So, I started talking to Parents and this started with friends and then it led to friends and friends.
I ended up talking to over 700 parents about their kids. How do you know 700 parents? I don’t. I don’t. I went into like the Facebook group and started,, the group. Crunchy mom, Facebook group, and really infiltrated. And I did this over the span of a year. , I come from a market research background and I’ve had, okay.
That makes more sense right there. Okay. People don’t randomly get to 700. Like that’s a great number. Go ahead. No, I knew it. This couldn’t, if it was just a problem in my life. Like I can just, but it really, I started to uncover that this was a problem for so many young parents or parents of young children, I should say.
But yeah, as new parents are sort of coming into the fold, I think we’re used to having the very. Best quality product created for us. And kids have sort of been left behind. Like babies have gotten a lot of attention of the kids are sort of stuck in the 90s. I like to say stuck in the 90s.
And maybe some of that corn syrup has been replaced with brown rice syrup, but there hasn’t been a major revolution. Let’s call it in kids next. Where’d you come up with the name? Happy Wolf, by the way. It’s a great name. The packaging is amazing. Happy wolf.com. I love it. When I saw it, I was like, Ooh, can I eat these?
Like they looks amazing. The name. Where’d you come up with Happy Wolf. It’s such a great name. Thank you. So I call my kids. My kids are named Joey and Harry. I call them The Hungry Wol and I called them, oh stop that. You know, for a long time you had to be, had to be something amazing like that.
I love You’re Hungry Wolf. And our snacks turn them into happy wolves, but you know, it sort of has a deeper meaning because I think a lot of the snacks out there, you know, parents just want their kids to sort of shut up at the end of the day when they’re begging for a snack, when they’re hungry, and so parents give their kids These packaged snacks to sort of turn them happy, but when it’s just sugar and carbs, they tend to have like a quick blood sugar spike and then a crash and then like every parent knows it’s adults, right?
Like you stabilize it and you’re like, yeah. Yeah, ten minutes later, they’re like hungry again and tanky again and they’re having a, And you’re like, what? I thought the snack was supposed to solve this. And so our snacks are This sounds like me. This does sound like I need You just described me. Go ahead.
It sounds like you. Yeah. You need a happy wolf bar. But yes, our snacks are naturally high in fiber and healthy fats and protein. And so they’re actually satiating. They keep kids full and they keep kids happy. And so we really love them. We really do love our neighbors. , now you mentioned coming from a market research background.
Did you have any, like, CPG or , any kind of background in starting a brand like this? No, I led marketing. Wow. Congratulations. So that means when you’ve told your friends, your family, everybody else, you’re going to do this. They’re like, what? Like, welcome to be the entrepreneurial attorney, unless you’re going to do what?
I work in food. So I led advertising for a little brand called Tim Hortons here in Canada. I love Tim Hortons. I’m a fan. I’m from the Midwest and we have them in the Midwest. You know it. Okay. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So I definitely have a background in food. And a lot of experience like nurturing a brand and sort of standing brand love around a food brand.
But when it came to happy wolf, like, no, I didn’t have direct experience in building a new CVG brand from scratch. I knew exactly what type of brand I wanted to build, what kind of product they wanted to make, but I had no idea how to make them. And so that’s why I do have a co founder. His name is Derek.
He is very behind the scenes. And He doesn’t come on the podcast, but he really does have all of that experience that I was lacking. So managers, co packers, ingredient suppliers, logistics, operations, like he, she’s a second time founder. And he was a co founder of like a premium pet food company, which doesn’t sound Related, but it actually really sounds super related.
It’s a there’s from pets to wolves. That’s what we’re talking about here, right? The bar for millennial pet parents like that was Forget and now those pet parents are and including himself are Human parents and they really want the best for their kids He is sort of doing the same thing that he did before in, of course, a totally different way for a totally different audience.
But he, I mean, I could have done it without him. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to. No, completely get that. And I think , as you’re saying this, I’m thinking about the other co founder here. His name is Chirag Sagar, and he has a background in media. I did not have a background in media.
Could I have done this without him? I’m going with, no, I’m like, I didn’t like he had, he had the other side of a lot, all this, like I could talk, but I wasn’t hard enough to do it with somebody, even just for those moments where you’re like, what am I doing here? It’s kind of like, , nothing’s ever easy.
So obviously,, that’s part of it. So for me, I’ll throw that out there , and I get it. And I think it’s amazing always to have another co founder if possible. What is that? I think I would have given up. I think I would have given up without him, you know, it’s, it’s so hard. And having that person to just sort of support and bounce and.
And cry to the day to day, it’s really what’s it like getting this into, like , getting this product out and then growing it, like, tell me a little bit more about just kind of like the high level go to market. I, by the way, I looked at your Instagram. I see it’s in some stores. I mean, like, what’s that like , getting some space, so to speak.
Yeah. Okay. So I forgot where we landed in the story. I talked to all the parents. I knew there was a problem. Ended up working through, I don’t know, something like a hundred and fifty something recipes to get the perfect recipe and commercialize it for, yeah, for retail because was the goal all along, right?
To make this more accessible for parents like me who are looking for that perfect snack for their kids. So, we did come up with that perfect recipe. It is Exactly what I was looking for and what all the experience I spoke to were looking for using the same ingredients that we use at home. And that’s really exciting.
The differentiator here is like we don’t use any strange additives or emulsifiers or natural flavors. There’s just like nothing you wouldn’t use in your own kitchen for your own kids when you’re making them like a homemade energy ball, but here’s a convenient option for the days where you don’t have time.
So, you know, we nailed the product. The difficult part about the product. Is that we learned that if we didn’t want to make those compromises or sacrifices on ingredients, we had to use the fridge as a preservative, like as a natural preservative, right? The fridge helps things last longer. And so, , most bars are self stable in the center of the store for like, 3 years.
Our bar is. Good in the fridge for six months, which is short from a grocery store buyer’s perspective, right? Like , that’s very different. And to your point on retailers, the fridge is like the most competitive part of the store. It’s high velocity. They’re turning on like dozens and dozens of eggs a day and yogurt and things that just like really move.
And so, and it’s expensive to get. So we knew that our. Journey into retail was going to be harder than it was would be otherwise, but of course We didn’t think there was a product if we didn’t do this. We didn’t think there was a need, , that we were solving that need if we went ahead and added Yeah, a ton more sugar to make it last longer or something like that.
So the challenge That’s a hard part. That’s a hard part to stick to your guns, by the way. Obviously, as you go further and further in the formula, like but we really don’t want to like many people go in with good intentions, but in reality, sometimes sets in. And so I commend you for staying the course.
Go ahead, please. I just, I just get it when you say that, like, that’s a big deal. I want to draw that out. I want to draw that out. I appreciate that. I so appreciate that because yes, it was. , for us, it wasn’t necessarily like, are we going to fold? Are we going to, are we going to compromise? But it was like, are we going to launch this thing?
You know, it was like a yes, no, like, are you just going to stop? Because you can’t do it. I get it. We shouldn’t have a refrigerated product. It’s too hard. We started talking to grocery buyers. All of that was like corroborated. Yes, it’s hard. It’s difficult. They don’t want this yet. You know, prove it.
Prove it out. So we launched first on Instagram. We started, you know, DTC, like, With the option of DTC, let’s call it, where we would ship our product with ice packs to customers houses with like a 50 minimum order, which is crazy for bars that you’ve never tried before. And somehow, you know, thousands of people ordered them on DTC.
So we were like, Whoa You know, there are indeed enough of these health conscious parents out there who are willing to do a lot to get like this that are truly better. And we were able to use that to convince our first grocery store buyers that, , If a critical mass of people were willing to spend 50 plus dollars on bars and sale that they’ve never tried, then spending 8.
In store would be an easy sell. And so a few stores like Wegman’s, for example, in the Northeast, who’s an amazing grocery chain that we really have always sort of looked up to, they took a chance on us and put us in 34 stores to start and close. Quickly expanded us to more stores, which, , is sort of all we can ask for at this early stage.
We’re only eight months old, and I believe we’re in 150 stores now total. Yeah. Are almost 150 and for us it’s about going slow building this sustainably and really getting the case studies that we need to prove this out that we deserve to grow and that more health conscious parents like us are sort of looking for this all everywhere.
And you know, what’s interesting when you say that is I can see it. I can see people would, would pay for that. Just even for the idea that it would be the right product for their kids and their kids would like it. But the tricky part would be, are they going to like it? Right? So that’s the hard part.
You’re right to commit 50 to buy a box of something. I feel kind of like, I know I’ve done that but you know, some kids are picky eaters. So without giving them a little try like and then people came and bought many of them I think that’s a amazing feat and it’s a great it’s like you’re almost like you’re moving that Segment of the market forward like proving that and You would expect in years to come or whatever like when this is just a common thing not saying it’ll ever be that common, but it takes time .
To move in industry. So now when people see that, you know, they’re like, well, what is this happy wolf? Right. And then there’s more demand. That’s amazing. I love this story. Yeah, yes. And yeah, our goal is to like, not have people having to. Buy them off. Anybody actually wants to buy, you know, I think everybody wants to make their lives like as streamlined and simple as possible.
So people are willing to do it, but yeah, our goal is to be part of people’s weekly grocery run and like, so they don’t have to spend quite so much time thinking about it. And yet, you know, we have many customers who have ordered over and over online while they wait for us to be in the store in their region, so that’s really great.
So I have to ask kind of the obvious question that’s been on my mind here, and that is, you mentioned you had two toddlers, like what is that like being an entrepreneur with two youngins? Like that’s gotta be, that’s another level of this, right? Yeah. So she’s, I guess she’s almost not a toddler and my son is too.
And, some days, I don’t know that I should be admitting this on a podcast. Some days I’m like, I wish I started this business, , in my twenties when I just like was able to grind all day and just work like night and day and have no other responsibilities or priorities. But I do think having two young kids, it always keeps everything in perspective, like as much as.
I want this business to work. And as much as I so believe in the product and the mission of what we’re doing, like every single day I have staring, , in front of me, a reminder of what is truly important in life, how little , yeah, it’s like, helps, I think, ease the stress and the. The stakes of entrepreneurship, because I think if I was at a different phase in my life, this would all feel so, you know, like critical.
I’m stressed and now it’s like, no, like this isn’t, I get to do this. I’m so lucky and I’m doing this,, for my kids. And I don’t know, just like, actually a wonderful time of life to do this. It helped me, , really. a master at productivity because the time allotted for work is the time allotted for work.
And then I have three hours where, , five o’clock hits and then like I’m on mom’s duty till eight o’clock PM earliest. And so I’m super productive. And I think just, I’ve talked to so many, you know, especially female entrepreneurs who are really sort of trying to do it all. I think embracing the fact that you can do it all but it won’t ever be perfect and you’re not going to be a perfect mom or a perfect business owner or perfect, you know, but just doing your best is such a privilege and like we get to do all of this.
It’s. Once you make peace with that, like, , you’re maybe not going to be the president of the PTA and you’re not going to, you’re not going to, you’re not going to win, like, mom of the year at school, but like, that doesn’t matter. Your kids don’t care and they’re just going to be proud of you one day when they look back and see what you did.
So I think it’s really difficult. I think never going to be easy for anyone, but I’m so grateful that I get to do it. Ah, what a wonderful story. , do your kids get a kick out of or think it’s fun to see the little , on the package and to know that that was like them, the little happy wolf?
It’s so funny. They like, just don’t get it. And they’re like, they think I just make bars in the kitchen all day. Of course they’re young, but Somebody like, what did your mommy do? She’s a bar maker. Like, as if that means anything to anyone, but they do love the product. I’ve sort of tried to create like a bit of a scarcity mindset when it comes to the bars in our house.
Like, I, I don’t want them to get sick of them. I don’t want them to feel like, , I mean, that would be really bad for the brand. And kids do get sick of things. They see. , kids need diversity and snacking that is a fact. So I give the Happy Wolf Bites to my kids like twice a week. And they still think of it as like a really special treat rather than a, , multiple times a day we have.
Oh, that’s amazing. Wait until they get a little bit older that they can understand like, wait a minute. That’s us? Wait a minute. You didn’t just, you couldn’t, you could have just not brought food. One box home from the office every week. Like I literally drink one box home instead of keeping the fridge stock.
Oh, that’s good. No more till next week. That’s amazing. Oh, what, what, Jana, this has been so much fun having you on the show and learning more about the happy wolf story, why you created the bars in the first place. I love that when an entrepreneur has a problem or has some, Something that a pain point that they feel that they can solve for themselves.
And in turn, when solving it for themselves, they have that aha moment or progression where they’re like, you know, a lot of people need this. And in your case, this is the first time I’ve heard this exact story. It’s like, it’s like, yes, I talked to 700 plus families and then yeah, they had the same problem.
So then, so , if more entrepreneurs would do that, we’d have some more interesting things out there. So I love it. I love the story. That being said, Jenna, if somebody’s listening to this and if they want to, , obviously check out , the product if they want to follow on social or otherwise, and just follow the journey, , like, how do they do that?
What’s the best way? So, you can visit our website at happy wolf dot com and you could order online or see our store locator from our website and we are very active on Instagram at happy wolf snacks where you really can. Follow our journey, sort of day to day building this brand. Amazing. And for everybody listening, we’ll put all that information in the show notes.
So you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives and having them share their journey. Their mission, their, the reason behind their mission their story and really what we can all learn from that.
So we all progress together. That’s the whole point of mission matters is that we all want to progress together. If you like that, then hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming on. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re releasing new episodes. So again, definitely hit that subscribe button and Janna, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I’m so happy that I could learn more about the Happy Wolf story and I could bring it to my audience. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Take care.