Introducing a child to common food allergens is always a stressful time for parents, but for one mom, the experience led to a trip to the emergency room. Denise Woodard of Partake Foods told Mom.com that her daughter’s first Thanksgiving was a moment she will never forget, and ultimately led her to launch a new business.
Woodard said that after introducing bananas to her daughter, she noticed she broke out in hives. She eventually discovered that her now 8-year-old daughter has food protein induced enteric colitis and is allergic to tree nuts, corn, and eggs.
But the diagnosis didn’t come easy for their family. Woodard said they took their daughter to the emergency room on Thanksgiving after she threw up 14 times over five hours after eating baked macaroni and cheese. Upon arrival, they were told it was just a stomach bug.
They later took her to a food allergist, where they received an Epi-pen, which unfortunately had to be administered just days later.
“I was on a work conference call, and our nanny, Martha, was giving her a new snack that literally just had two ingredients, just peanuts and corn oil,” Woodard recalled. “As soon as she ate it, it was like her lips started to swell up, her tongue started to swell up, and she started turning blue in our living room.”
With special dietary restrictions, the mom said she eventually became “frustrated and disappointed” with what she could find on the market for her daughter.
“I felt like the products that were on the market, from a taste perspective, she wasn’t pleased with, and nutritionally, I didn’t feel great about them,” Woodard said, adding that she was also nudged by Martha to launch the business.
Eventually, Woodard launched Partake Food, which is a natural food brand that makes cookies and breakfast mixes free of the top nine allergens and is gluten-free, vegan, kosher, and most importantly, delicious.
But being a full-time entrepreneur comes with its own set of learning curves. The working mom says she involves her daughter in the business as much as possible and embraces seeing her daughter flex her business and marketing skills at such an early age.
“I also try to give myself grace, and knowing that some days, I’m going to show up as a really strong business person. And that means I might miss school drop-off, or I might miss pickup,” she said.
Woodard, now one of the first Black women to raise more than $1 million publicly for a CPG food startup, is basking in the moment of seeing her hard work pay off. But she says she feels like she has a responsibility to “help accelerate other Black women as they go on their entrepreneurial journeys.”
