How Vanessa Grondin built fast-growing healthy snack brand Henri Nutrition
Vanessa Grondin stopped by a local grocery store in Quebec City at the end of 2023 to buy snacks for her two children, aged seven and one, ahead of a family trip to Florida, but she was disappointed by the products available in the snack aisle. “The offerings hadn’t changed much since 20 years ago,” Grondin says. “Even though there were a lot of products on the shelves, there was nothing I wanted to buy.”
That got Grondin thinking about developing her own snack products and which health attributes they would have. She wanted something that was minimally processed without a long list of ingredients, with no added sugar and a healthy dose of naturally occurring protein and fibre. With school restrictions in mind, she also wanted them to be nut-free. Lastly, it was important to Grondin that the snacks be affordable—and tasty to both her and her kids.
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Leveraging her background as a processing engineer and recipe developer, Grondin began researching and experimenting with the nutritional and physicochemical properties of various ingredients to find the ideal components for the snack she wanted to develop. “I’m a little bit of a nerd in that way,” she says.
By the spring of 2024, Grondin had left her corporate job to focus on launching Henri Nutrition, a line of minimalist bars named after her son. “It was super scary,” Grondin says of quitting her full-time job. “Coming up to launch, I was anxious and scared it might be a total flop.”
Grondin continued refining her recipe. She initially planned to work with a co-manufacturer to produce her snack bars, but struggled to find a company that met her specifications. So, she took production into her own hands. “It comes with challenges, but it also comes with a lot of opportunities,” she explains. “We control everything: the supply chain, the quality, the process, the cost. So, for us, it made a lot of sense to do that.”
Equipment shipping delays pushed back the initial timeline, but by February 2025 Henri Nutrition was ready to launch with three flavours: Mixed Berries, Apple Cinnamon and Choco Brownie. The brand first landed on shelves at eight IGA locations in Quebec City and six Marchés TAU stores in Montreal. “It’s really exciting to start off with an idea and actually materialize it,” Grondin says of the launch into grocery. “It was really exciting seeing the products on the shelves.”
Still, the launch wasn’t without its challenges. That same month, Grondin learned the company she rented production space from was going bankrupt. “That was really stressful,” she says, especially after she had invested money into developing the space.
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Thankfully, the unplanned move to a private commercial space in Quebec City in May 2025 didn’t slow Henri Nutrition’s momentum. In the back half of the year, the company debuted its snack bars in Metro, Maxi and Avril stores in Quebec as well as Summerhill Market and Goodness Me! stores in Ontario. It also added another flavour to the lineup: Wild Blueberry & Vanilla.
The company saw even more growth in 2026. Henri bars launched at IGA, Fresh St. Market and 50 natural food stores in Western Canada. Two major wins followed: a Canada-wide rollout at TJX Companies stores in the spring and a summer debut as an in-flight snack on Air Transat.
Henri bars are now available in about 1,500 stores—an impressive feat for a two-year-old company. And there’s more news to come. Though Grondin remains tight-lipped on details, a new flavour is launching this fall and new product lines are in the works.
The company is growing so quickly it has reached production capacity at its manufacturing facilities and will need to move again in the next 12 months. But in Grondin’s eyes, the need to move this time is a good problem to have.
As an entrepreneur, she has no regrets about leaving corporate life behind for the uncertainty and thrill of running her own snack business. “I feel like I’m able to express more of my creativity in the company,” she says. “I can have fun growing it. It’s an accomplishment of self-realization.”
This article was first published in Canadian Grocer’s September/October 2026 issue.
