Denise Woodard (Partake Foods) - How Her Daughter Inspired Denise to Leave Her Well Paying Job and Create A Cookie Everyone Can Eat, How She Started in Retail from Day One, and Impact of COVID

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Thank you Charlie Hanna for the intro to our guest today, Denise Woodard CEO and founder of Partake Foods. Partake Foods is produces super delicious cookies are made with real, healthy, and safe ingredients that everyone can enjoy gluten-free, vegan, non-GMO and free of the top 14 allergens, our super delicious cookies are made with real, healthy, and safe ingredients that everyone can enjoy. We discuss the origin story of Partake and inspiration from Denise's daughter, that decision of leaving Coca-Cola, how she managed to get into grocery stores and raise capital.

A few questions I ask Denise

1. Why did you decide to leave big corporate CPG and your job at Coke in order to start Partake Foods?
2. How did you approach experimenting with ingredients, tastetesting and finding the right formula?
3. How did you go about building your supply chain?
4. What were some of your learnings working for Coke that helped you build Partake Foods?
5. Once you had your product what channels did you start off with?
6. When did you realize you were on to something?
7. When and why did you decide to raise venture capital?What was your fundraising strategy
8. Once you got into retail, what was the strategy to expand?
9. How did COVID affect Partake Foods?
10. Since you grew and are growing so fast, how do you think about leadership and building/hiring a team?
11. What's the future of Partake Foods? What's next on the horizon?
12. What's one thing that you would change about venture capital and fundraising?
13. What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
14. What's the best piece of advice that you've received?
15. What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?