Shazi Visram is an entrepreneur who has dedicated her career to protecting and advancing children’s health. Her first company, Happy Family Organics, became one of the fastest growing organic baby food brands in the U.S. It was so successful that, in 2013, she ended up selling the company to Danone for $250M. Fast forward to 2020, and Visram has launched her second company, Healthynest, which she calls the first brain-forward brand for babies. The company works with pediatricians, neurologists and toxicologists to create non-toxic products as well as science-backed enrichment activities that focus on the developmental health of babies during the first three years.
Shazi Visram, founder of Healthynest
John Montre
Amy Shoenthal: Talk to me about going from food to personal care and brain development.
Shazi Visram: Several years after I founded Happy Family, my son Zane was diagnosed with autism. This led me on a journey to better understand how babies’ brains develop. My focus had always been to enrich babies’ health through nutrition, but I quickly learned how important our environment is in that development. Healthynest launched in Fall 2020, creating a new standard of safety and support for parents to make the most of their child’s formative years. This is a time when a baby’s brain is growing and changing more rapidly than it ever will over the course of the rest of their lives.
I spent my entire adult life focused on the baby world. My original idea was that we could positively impact babies’ health if we fed them good food. When I started Happy Family, less than 3% of all baby food was organic. Now it’s closer to 40%. Up until a few years ago, organic food wasn’t even allowed in the WIC program. We had to lobby state by state to get WIC approval, so moms could be able to use their WIC dollars to buy organic food. Now Happy Family is in one out of every eight households.
It’s a very humbling space to be in. It’s really a powerful thing to bring something into a new family’s life. I sold the company to Danone when my son was diagnosed with autism. I felt like I needed to devote myself more to him. I wanted to understand, what is this, why is it so unknown, what are treatments and therapies for him? So as I was going through this personal journey I had this realization that food is only one piece of the puzzle for overall health.
What I learned from my experience with autism is that during the first three years of life, there’s so much that happens. 85% of your brain is formed by age three. All the things in your environment that are biologically dangerous are far worse when a baby is developing.
Shoenthal: Were there any unique obstacles you faced as you started to build Healthynest?
Visram: Healthynest will be launching the first and only diaper in the US made with organic cotton. The Healthynest diaper is the first-ever EWG-Verified diaper, having passed laboratory tests for 900+ chemicals, and it will now be developed with cotton for ultimate purity. 80% of the world’s pesticides go to growing cotton, and using organic cotton is the safer, more transparent alternative. Organic cotton also has a positive environmental impact: 90% reduction in water waste and 45% less CO2 emissions. The Healthynest diaper also eliminates plastic through their paper packaging.
To achieve the EWG-VERIFIED mark, Healthynest was required to analyze every material in our supply chain used in the production of our diaper for the presence of over 900 different toxic continents. This took over three years and many iterations of the product. I’m proud to share that our diaper is free of all 900 toxins.
Shoenthal: When did you feel like you were starting to see success?
Visram: Diapers are a dirty business, and as a parent I know that we need and deserve transparency when choosing what products to use. Since launching our EWG-Verified diaper, the company has sold more than half a million diapers to families nationwide. The reception to our monthly subscription, which pairs the cleanest diapers and wipes with developmental activities and tools for parents to elevate everyday routines and create a more enriched environment, has been overwhelmingly positive. Retention rates are extraordinarily high (90%) as parents recognize the value of a safe alternative without sacrificing performance.
Shoenthal: Talk to me about launching a company during the pandemic.
Visram: The pandemic has shifted society’s focus to health and wellness. Our subscription was really well received during a time when parents were working from home while taking care of their babies. A lot of us needed inspiration and a bit more support this past year. The pandemic forced us to focus on mental health. In fact, it’s been a global awakening around the importance of mental health. Similarly, we’re more aware that everything we bring into our home needs to be safe.
Protecting and enriching babies was our focal point, but the pandemic pushed us to bring in this other layer of support. We’re giving parents access to developmental specialists, we’ve basically created a baby concierge because parents need support too.
Today one in six children will be diagnosed with a developmental disorder including autism, ADD, ADHA, asthma, and more. Our goal is to support parents with the information and tools to create resilience in their children’s developmental health. If there’s one central theme that has been resoundingly clear from our work with leading physicians and scientists, it’s that a baby’s brain is extremely sensitive to their environment.
I want to use my platform to open the discussion around developmental health, so now when one in six families get this diagnosis there’s a place for them to turn.
Shoenthal: What are you most excited about right now?
Visram: We’re opening a space in Tribeca, actually in the same building as Tribeca Pediatrics. It’s an enrichment environment. I want a place for parents to feel safe and learn while watching their babies play with a developmental play specialist. You won’t get that in the pediatrician’s office in your 15-minute checkup.
What I learned with my journey is you don’t speak to a developmental pediatrician unless you have a problem. But you can change course if you’ve been given just a hint of things you can work on like oral motor skills. This isn’t a hard skill to work on, it’s like blowing bubbles. My son didn’t originally have the oral motor skills to do that so it took us three years to get him to learn how to blow bubbles. In doing so, we had my daughter start it early because she was around my son’s therapy. So she benefits from doing these things too. It’s like flexing muscles to become resilient before something becomes an issue.
I like to say, we’re a developmental health brand disguised as a diaper company. I realized that if I could somehow affect developmental outcomes with knowledge upfront and take everything that I learned the hard way, and then take all the access to these world-class thought leaders in neurology and developmental health, that it was kind of my duty to share that with new families. This business is more about me wanting to share the kernels of gold that I learned along the way that can make a major difference for families.
