The North Star

Partake Foods founder and CEO Denise Woodard is setting standards and breaking barriers — and doing it for all the right reasons.

BY JOANIE SPENCER

In the US, women are starting businesses at a much faster rate than men. However, they’re only raising a fraction of the venture capital funding. According to TechCrunch+ citing the latest PitchBook data, women-founded startups raised less than 2% of all venture capital funds in 2022. And for women of color, the slice of the pie is even smaller.

Enter Denise Woodard, the first Black woman to break $1 million in startup funding for a packaged food or beverage company. New York City-based Partake Foods is a brand of allergy-friendly cookies and baking mixes that is breaking ground for not only consumers with food allergies but also marginalized entrepreneurs. Some might call Woodard a North Star for women and people of color, but the truth is, she followed a star of her own.

A former sales and marketing executive for well-known CPG brands, Woodard developed an affinity for entrepreneurialism when she was named director of national sales for venturing and emerging brands at The Coca-Cola Co.

“I got to work with high-growth, missionoriented beverage brands, and that gave me a glimpse into entrepreneurship,” she recalled. “I saw how a seemingly regular person with a big dream could make a change.”

Woodard didn’t realize it, but that was a foreshadowing of her own career path.

On the surface, her story isn’t new: She’s a mom who started making allergy-friendly treats after her daughter, Vivienne, was diagnosed with several food allergies. It’s often the origin story for many emerging brands in the betterfor-you food space. But the way Woodard built the brand made her a hero in more ways than she could have expected … and not just for Vivienne, though she was the driving force.

When you start a food company for your child’s nutritional needs, failure is not an option. Vivienne was her North Star.

“It would be one thing if I started any other business and it failed,” Woodard said. “But there was no way I could have looked at my daughter and said, ‘Mommy started a company to make things better for you. And then it got really hard, and a lot of people said no, so I quit.’ That was not going to be the example I set for her.”

In some ways, developing the product was the easy part. And while having sales and marketing experience with one of the country’s biggest beverage brands looks great on a resume, marketing is only a small piece of what it takes to launch a CPG startup.

“I started the business in a very small way and had to learn on my feet,” Woodard recalled. “I was bootstrapping and delivering cookies out of my car. But that gave me the opportunity to learn every facet of building the company.”

Because it’s almost impossible for largescale brands to be nimble, the boom in emerging CPG stemmed from the fact that big companies are innovating via acquisition. Woodard used that insight to shape how she innovates in her own product development.

Learning the hard way about innovation and scale, she’s self-taught in developing a formal Stage Gate innovation process and food safety in manufacturing.

“A lot of times, entrepreneurs think a brand revolves around packaging or a logo,” Woodard said. “But through my experience at Coca-Cola, I know it’s every single touchpoint a consumer has with your business.”

WATCH NOW:

Denise Woodard shares her journey from bootstrapping Partake to production at scale.

To that point, much of what Woodard has learned about the criticalities of creating an allergy-friendly product didn’t come from her time at Coca-Cola, in securing co-manufacturing deals or in building the business at all. It came from being a mom.

“It’s really scary for food allergy parents when companies aren’t particularly clear about things like the type of facility where their products are manufactured,” Woodard said, noting that it’s unnerving when labeling isn’t clear about what potential allergens are in a facility.

“Through that experience, I’ve learned how important it is to be as transparent as possible with our consumers,” she added. “That includes transparency about our supply chain and where we’re sourcing our ingredients from, what testing we’re doing on our finished products so that our consumers can make an informed decision about whether our product is right for them. I care more about the safety of our consumers than I do making the sale, and I learned that from being a part of this community.”

The implications of making an allergy-friendly product — Partake cookies and mixes are free from the Top 9 allergens — finding a co- manufacturer when it was time to scale proved to be one of the hardest challenges for Woodard’s burgeoning brand.

The only thing harder than finding the right co-manufacturer was securing the funding, especially when manufacturing is so costly. But overcoming those challenges eventually put Woodard on a path to break the ceiling for Black businesswomen in manufacturing and beyond.

“There are not many allergy-friendly manufacturers that exist in the US,” Woodard said. “Getting [co- manufacturers] to work with a company that was just a woman with an idea — and making a cold phone call — was a huge challenge.”

After running a Kickstarter campaign that finished in the top 1% of food Kickstarters at that time, Woodard deployed what she called an “I told you so” strategy to get a co-manufacturer on board with Partake. The company still uses the same partner today.

The Kickstarter campaign was just the beginning. Partake was in Wegmans and Whole Foods in the brand’s first year, and managing that high growth rate is expensive. Once Woodard was all-in from a personal finance perspective, it was time to seek funding. After exhausting the “friends and family” capital, she added some fuel to her fire.

It was 2019 when Woodard became the first Black woman to raise $1 million in public funding for a packaged food or beverage startup. That funding was led by Marcy Venture Partners, a venture fund co-founded by Jay-Z. Partake has since raised more than $19 million in capital, achieving one of the largest food and beverage startup funds led by a Black woman.

“Every time I hear that, it makes me feel even more committed to change,” Woodard said.

Looking at the statistics of inequity in access to capital, Woodard has recognized a calling. She may look to her daughter as her North Star for creating a successful business, but in doing so, she has become a North Star for other entrepreneurial women of color.

“I have a responsibility — a privilege — to support other women and people of color as they build their companies,” she said. “Because the inequity shouldn’t be like this. It just shouldn’t be the case.”

Woodard is leading the charge with a self-taught venture capital acumen that’s stemmed directly from building Partake one “no” at a time — 86 no’s, to be exact.

“My experience with Marcy was eye opening to me because up to that point, I was just a number,” she said. “I learned that relationships with investors are longterm. They shouldn’t be transactional; they should be a partnership. You want investors who are aligned with you and your mission and vision for your company.”

Beyond the hard data of revenue and gross margin is where the innovation lives. Finding the right partner who will invest in more than the bottom line is the key to relationships that can truly drive a business forward. It is a sea change that, through Partake, Woodard wants to drive.

“Don’t get me wrong, business metrics are important,” she said. “But there’s also something qualitative that goes with it, and people hadn’t been as concerned about that previously. It’s a reason why I’m so passionate about mentorship today.”

Woodard believes that the venture capital system is designed in such a way that entrepreneurs with groundbreaking ideas could be overlooked simply because they don’t speak the language, and that’s having a big impact on women and minorities in particular.

Through mentorship and teaching others the lessons she learned the hard way, Woodard is helping those who are coming up behind her to increase that success rate in gaining access to capital. She volunteers her time to several mentoring programs, including one through Target, with whom she’s had a partnership for three years. The retailer’s Forward Founders accelerator program organizes cohorts of 30 women and minority entrepreneurs for networking and career guidance.

“If I can share the mistakes or landmines that we’ve come across and help someone else go further and faster,” Woodard said, “that’s what I want Partake to be.”

Now, she’s creating those opportunities earlier through Partake’s Black Futures in Food & Beverage fellowship, built in 2020 and designed to help HBCU students find jobs and internships in the food and beverage industry.

“Throughout my career, I’ve seen a lack of women and minorities in leadership, and I thought, ‘If I start my own company, I’m going to change that,’” she said. “When I went out to hire for Partake, the applicant pool was so homogeneous, so we started the fellowship to create more diversity in the industry.”

Woodard started Partake for the sake of her daughter, and she kept it going as a show of unconditional love. The result was a product that people with allergies — or without — can safely enjoy. But she created more than a company; she started a movement.

When marginalized entrepreneurs hear “no,” they can look up and see Woodard. The success of Partake shows proof of the reward that lies beyond perseverance.

Is that a greater gift to Vivienne than the products themselves? It’s hard to say. But today, when Vivienne sees a problem, she simply suggests, “We should start a company and fix that.” So, perhaps, one gift couldn’t exist without the other.

“When Marcy said yes to me after 86 other people had said no, that changed the trajectory of my business,” Woodard said.

The dedication that led to Partake’s funding is what has kept the company alive, and that is what Woodard intends to pay forward.

“I hope we can do similar things for other entrepreneurs,” she said. “I hope we open doors for them.” CB