How Ciara Turned a Mom’s Daily Frustration Into a Nationwide Brand

Like most parents, Ciara was alarmed by her kids’ eating habits.

Her daughter Sienna wouldn’t eat protein. “She wanted butter noodles, no meat,” recalls Ciara. “She wanted rice, no meat. Everything would be like, no meat, no meat. I’m like, can we please add some chicken? Can we add some steak? How about we just try the steak?”

It’s the kind of daily battle that exhausts parents everywhere. And for a while, Ciara — the Grammy-winning musician and entertainer — had no answer for it.

Then she met Chris Koch.

Koch is an experienced CPG builder who, through his venture studio VO/D, develops new concepts in consumer white spaces. He’d spent two years watching an ingredient called clear whey protein isolate — a form of protein that, unlike traditional whey, dissolves cleanly into liquid without the chalky taste or thick texture that makes most protein drinks unpleasant. Koch had noticed that the ingredient was gaining traction in adult beverages, but it hadn’t been used widely for kids.

Koch envisioned a juice for kids, with real protein and lower sugar content than traditional juice. When he explained the concept to Ciara, she says she didn’t need much convincing to become a cofounder. “Sign me up,” she told him.

That conversation became Frosh, a protein-enhanced juice brand that just launched nationwide in Target, following a sold-out direct-to-consumer launch. And the story of how it got there offers a useful window into how to find opportunity in markets that everyone else has written off.

The Problem with the Juice Aisle

Walk into any grocery store and the juice aisle looks completely covered. It would be easy to conclude there’s no room for anything new.

Koch and Ciara saw something different.

“There wasn’t an option on shelf that had functionality,” Koch explains. Honest Kids had done well at an accessible price point, but didn’t deliver new nutritional value. On the other end of the spectrum, products like Orgain Kids offered protein for children, but only in shake form.

The gap Koch identified was specific: a juice that kids genuinely wanted to drink, that parents felt good about buying, and that delivered real nutritional value.

“It’s about how you deliver something that has mom’s approval but also delivers the taste that kids actually want,” Koch says. “Because as we all know, kids do not compromise with taste.”

Ciara’s kids were the first taste testers, and they were not gentle about it. “Kids keep it real,” she says, and their feedback prompted several revisions to the recipes.

Going to Market

As Ciara and Koch planned their go-to-market strategy, they thought carefully about when and where Frosh would show up in a family’s life. It’s an exercise any CPG brand should go through — identifying the specific and recurring occasions in which people consume your product, to help guide your marketing and messaging.

For Frosh, Ciara and Koch identified a handful of specific occasions: birthday parties, pizza parties, sporting events, after-school snacks. But the one that resonated most was what Koch calls “the lunchbox dilemma.”

“The lunchbox goes to school, they take a bite of the protein option, it comes back half or maybe not at all eaten,” Koch explains. “But our whole solution is, at least they had their Frosh, right? Frosh is in many ways can be acting as food.”

They also lined up a network of influencers to spread the word — including the LaBrant Family, which are among the top-performing TikTok creators, and hundreds of influencer moms.

Ciara will be using her own bullhorn on social media, where she has more than 40 million followers across Instagram and TikTok alone. But she says that, so far, she’s noticed that the most effective spokesperson on social isn’t her — it’s kids. Because on social media, she says, authenticity is everything. So when kids share their enthusiasm for a kids product, other kids (and parents) take notice.

“I think we’re just going to let the kids talk,” she says.