Monica: Congrats on all of your recent success at Biena Snacks! You’ve had such a whirlwind year after securing $8 million in your recent Series B and being nationally recognized as a leading chickpea snack brand. We’d love to hear you reflect back on how it all got started.
Poorvi: When I was pregnant, I was searching for a better snack for myself. I found that most snacks didn’t offer the combination of taste and nutrition that I was looking for, so I took matters into my own hands.
That experience of not being able to find snacks that were both tasty and nutritious, combined with my professional background in consumer products, prompted me to launch Biena in 2012. Our goal is to make it easy for Americans to snack healthier by creating a true no-compromise solution. We want to disprove the assumption that tasty and nutritious can’t exist together in a snack.
Our brand name comes from the word “bien”, meaning “good” in Spanish – and we’ve turned that into our mission. We knew we wanted to create snacks that are delicious, made with real food ingredients, AND nutritious. We call these our 3 Standards of Goodness. It’s hard to create snacks that meet all three, but that’s how food should be!
Monica: We can all definitely use more goodness in our lives to stay healthy and happy! How has that philosophy influenced the way you incorporate it into your own life, personally and professionally?
Poorvi: Happiness is being surrounded by people that I respect and admire, doing the work that I love. There is something really special about food. It’s relatable to everyone; we all spend a good portion of each day eating and enjoying food.
I found that people truly want to make healthier choices but have a hard time finding something that they love to eat that also allows them to make a healthy choice for their body. Being able to change how people eat, even if we’re only impacting one snacking occasion per day, can have a big impact on someone’s life. Knowing that we have an opportunity to impact Americans in that way fills me with a tremendous amount of contentment and joy.
My current work as CEO of a fast-growing healthy snack brand exposes me to a broad range of perspectives on health and wellness. Whether I’m talking to our team members, or hearing from fans of our snacks, it is incredibly interesting to see the many different ways people define what health and wellness mean to them.
I take the best parts of those learnings – things that feel right to me and my life – and apply them to the way I live to increase my own health and happiness.
Monica: What can you share with other entrepreneurs on how to find balance in their day-to-day that helps them thrive in life?
Poorvi: When you’re running a fast-growing business, it can seem like there is never enough time in the day. Create leverage for yourself by prioritizing the top 1 or 2 things that will have the biggest impact in your business.
Constant re-prioritization and deep focus on the few things that create the biggest leverage, even at the expense of other items on your to-do list, will add up over time to make a big, lasting impact on your business.
Learn more about Biena Snacks at: www.bienasnacks.com.