How Tara Bosch of Snackish Takes the Lead
Tara Bosch was just 21 when she developed and then launched SmartSweets from her Vancouver basement apartment, building the low-sugar candy company into a major brand before selling it. Her next, more recent venture, Snackish, was inspired by her five-year-old daughter’s obsession with chips—with Bosch seeing an opportunity to create better-for-you potato crisps.
Bosch is approaching this second entrepreneurial act with a few hard-earned leadership lessons folded into the mix. At Snackish, a women-owned and women-led company, she is putting particular emphasis on building the right team, trusting people to do what they do best and knowing that being the leader doesn’t mean she always has to be right. “I also really believe in having the humility to be the stupidest person in the room,” she says.
Now 32, no one could accuse Bosch of being stupid. But she has learned that good leadership has less to do with having all the answers than with knowing when to listen, when to trust herself and when to let others lead.
This interview has been edited for length.
You started SmartSweets when you were very young and had to grow into the role of CEO while the company itself was growing quickly. How would you describe the leader you were then compared with the leader you are today?
I really grew up alongside SmartSweets. I was 21, had dropped out of college and was learning almost everything for the first time—how to build a company, how to lead people and, honestly, how to trust myself. In those early years, I thought being a great founder meant carrying as much as I possibly could. I was incredibly hands-on and close to everything. The biggest evolution for me has been learning to trust—both my own heart whispers and the incredible people around me. With Snackish, I had much more clarity about the leader I wanted to be and the company I wanted to build. I surrounded myself from day one with extraordinary women who are better than me at what they do, gave them meaningful ownership, and built a culture where leadership is distributed rather than everything flowing through me.
What’s something you believed about leadership at 21 that you no longer believe?
I used to believe that carrying the most meant caring the most. I don't believe that anymore. Being in everything works when you're five people. It doesn't work when you're building something meant to become enormous. Today, I think caring deeply looks like creating radical clarity around where we're going, surrounding yourself with incredible people, giving them real ownership and then trusting them to lead. The goal isn't to make yourself indispensable. It's to build a company full of people who feel deeply responsible for bringing the vision to life.
What did building SmartSweets teach you about leadership the hard way? Is there anything you’re consciously doing differently with Snackish because of those lessons?
One of my biggest lessons was learning to trust my own intuition. I would seek out people who had built what I aspired to build and sometimes give their experience more weight than my own gut. Over time, I learned that advice can be incredibly valuable, but ultimately you have to run it through your own filter.
I also learned that growth magnifies everything. Great people and great systems compound, but so do unclear roles, avoided conversations and decisions you know in your gut need to be made.
What initiative that you spearheaded makes you particularly proud?
Building our Snacktory. Before we sold a single bag of Snackish, we made the decision to self-fund and build our own 66,000-square-foot manufacturing facility around a proprietary process we developed from scratch. On paper, there were probably a hundred reasons not to do it. It was capital intensive, complicated and definitely not the conventional way to launch a CPG company. But I've always believed that if you want to create something radically different, you can't necessarily follow the blueprint that already exists. The Snacktory gives us control over the things that matter most—product, quality, innovation and speed. Our product development, manufacturing and broader team can work side by side. We can have an idea, get curious about it, test it, learn and iterate incredibly quickly.
How do you lead in a way that empowers others to be their best?
I've always been very vision-led. I want people to be able to see where we're going so clearly that they can make decisions without needing me in the room. At Snackish, everyone is an owner—literally. Every person has meaningful equity because I want everyone building this company to have their lives changed by the value they're helping create. But ownership is also a way of working. It means having a voice, challenging things, making decisions and feeling responsible for leaving Snackish better than you found it.
READ: Canada’s booming snack market moves toward functional health and bold flavours
Snackish is women-owned and women-led. How does this influence the company’s leadership style?
I don't believe there's one way that women lead, and I wouldn't want there to be. What matters to me is ownership and representation. Women have historically had far less access to capital, equity and the rooms where the biggest decisions are made. I know firsthand how transformative ownership can be, and one of the things I'm most proud of is intentionally creating more of it for women through Snackish.
And having different lived experiences around the table inevitably shapes the company. It influences the products we create, the questions we ask, how we build community and how we think about the people we're ultimately serving. For me, this isn't about saying women lead better. It's about building more tables where women have the opportunity to lead, own and create meaningful value.
What role do you have outside of work that makes you a better leader at work?
Being Willa's mom, without question. She inspires me everyday, and is my “why.” I built SmartSweets for my grandmother, and now I’m building Snackish for her. Motherhood has changed my relationship with time, presence and what actually matters. Building companies can make everything feel urgent. Being a mom has taught me that not everything that feels urgent is important and that some of the most important moments require you to be completely present. Snackish began with the two of us. We both love chips, and wanted to change what a chip could be, which sparked the vision for Snackish in creating the everyday snack for a new generation. I'm still incredibly ambitious and move with a lot of urgency. But there's more intention behind that urgency now.
