Behind Her Empire: How Her Daughter’s Allergic Reaction Led Denise Woodard To Create Her Own Snack Company

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: How Her Daughter’s Allergic Reaction Led Denise Woodard To Create Her Own Snack Company
Denise Woodward

In 2016, Denise Woodard was on a conference call when her daughter had an allergic reaction to a snack containing peanuts and corn. This terrifying incident pushed Woodard to make a drastic life change and thus, her allergy-friendly snack company, Partake Foods, was born.

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, Woodard discusses the lessons she learned in her corporate roles and the arduous journey of building her company from the ground up.


Woodard grew up in a multicultural household and is the daughter of a Korean mother and Black father who helped set the tone for her career.

“For my mother, success looks like you were a doctor, a lawyer, a business person, maybe,” Woodard says. “Their expectation in sending me off to college was that I would go to corporate America and that I would work my way up the corporate ladder.”

And for 10 years, that’s exactly what she did. Woodard held sales roles at Coca Cola, FedEx and Philip Morris, but her experience was devoid of opportunities to learn about other parts of the business — which made it difficult when starting out on her own.

"If I were to go back and do it, again, I probably would have taken stretch assignments or different lateral roles," she explained. "I would have explored that more because I think it would have made me a more well rounded business person."

Starting her own business required a huge learning curve. Her goal was to provide her daughter and others like her with allergy friendly snacks that were both tasty and nutritious.

"Is this worth leaving a career that I love?" Woodard asked herself at the time. "But I really believed that there was space for it, because I'd seen firsthand that I wasn't getting a solution for the issue that we had."

Once she had a product, she needed a way to push that product in front of a larger audience. She worked with a blogger who was well known in the gluten free space, and while the recipe was delicious, it was not scalable for the company.

“Don’t always associate a big following or fame with somebody being the right fit for you,” she said. "I should have gone for someone who worked at at a food company who had experience in commercializing and scaling up a food product. But instead I found this influencer, and in theory, it seemed fantastic, but I didn't have enough experience to understand that it wouldn't be the same thing."

Eventually, after cold calling several co packers, she found one that was the right fit, but was ultimately turned down. But Woodard was determined and ended up running a Kickstarter campaign that “finished in the top 1% of food Kickstarters at the time.”

This achievement got the co packers' attention and they ultimately agreed to work with Woodard to grow Partake.

But Woodard still faced many challenges in the fundraising sphere. After encountering thousands of “no’s” while trying to raise her seed round of funding, a good friend of hers introduced her to a partner at Marcy Venture Partners, a joint venture fund co-founded by Jay-Z.

"They were big believers, thankfully, in me, and really enjoyed the product" she said. "What seemed like a dream actually turned into reality."

One thing led to the next and Marcy Ventures led Partake’s seed round which caught the attention of other investors who initially rejected Woodard’s request.

Two of Woodard's biggest takeaways from her entrepreneurial journey is to never underestimate the power of cold-calling, and that it's ok to start small.

"I think that particularly in an inventory based business, working capital and the requirements around working capital promotion, sales and marketing is very expensive," she said. "And I think when you bite off more than you can chew—no matter how great the founder is, no matter how great the product is—it's really hard to manage through that. And it's it's okay to start small."

dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.

This podcast is produced by Behind Her Empire. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.

Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

Read moreShow less
LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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