Partake Foods Founder Shares Her Biggest Small Business Lessons
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As told to Brianne Garrett
Partake Foods founder, Denise Woodard, shares her biggest small business lessons. She attributes storytelling as a key factor in her company's success.
Denise Woodard | Oct 11, 2026, 1:08 PM GMT+2
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Denise Woodard, founder and CEO of Partake Foods. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I spent my career in consumer packaged goods and spent significant time at The Coca-Cola Company. Then my daughter Vivienne came along. She's 11 now, but right around her first birthday, we had a couple of scary incidents that alerted us to the fact that she had multiple life-threatening food allergies: eggs, tree nuts, bananas, and sesame.
I started to realize that food allergies were going to become a big part of our everyday lives. I was really frustrated with the options from a taste and nutritional perspective. Most of all, I thought about how, emotionally, she wouldn't be able to partake in so many social events like birthday parties, playdates, and school snack time, and that she'd always feel excluded and othered.
I wanted to create a solution for that.