Julie Sawaya comes from a family of doctors and nurses, but it didn’t take long for her to notice the healthcare industry’s imperfections. Along with her co-founder Ryan Woodbury, they discovered a scary truth: most pregnant women don’t get enough nutrients from their vitamins.
What started serendipitously as next-door neighbors at Stanford Business School evolved into this remarkable duo’s mission to revolutionize perinatal nutrition.
A Match Made at Stanford Business School
Sawaya and Woodbury both knew they wanted to grow their families after graduating from business school. As trained nutritionists and self-proclaimed nutrition nerds, Julie and Ryan knew that the perinatal stage required a special attention to nutrition, even before trying to conceive.
“We had already begun researching the needs associated with this stage and had nutrient testing done to understand what we might need to start filling in gaps. We were both shocked to discover that despite eating incredibly well and even supplementing our diets, we both faced some really massive nutrient deficiencies,” observes Sawaya.
Pioneering a Practitioner-Approved Solution
The duo realized that if the two of them - educated, curious, and health-minded - experienced these deficiencies, what about the millions of other women? The problem was much larger than themselves.
Sawaya remarks, “I never looked back once I saw my nutrient testing results, and realized that I was in the 95% majority of women who have serious deficiencies despite taking a prenatal.”
Sawaya and Woodbury delved deep into maternal prenatal health, spending over three years developing their prenatal vitamin from scratch with a diverse group of practitioners, from nutritionists to dieticians to midwives and OBGYNs. In this endeavor, they found that most prenatals include bare minimum nutrition based on outdated guidance and stale research.
Even more, the practitioners shared that they were often cobbling together a dozen different products to get their patients the correct nutrients and dosages, so a comprehensive yet tailored prenatal was welcomed by practitioners and patients alike.
Extending a Caring Nutritional Experience
Today, Sawaya and Woodbury, now both moms to young children, are taking their personal experiences with motherhood to continue pushing the maternal health field forward. Sawaya has experienced setbacks along the way, including difficulty with breastfeeding her second baby.
“Through it all, I’ve learned there is so much on the journey to motherhood that we can’t control. It helps me to focus on a big thing that I can control – my nutrition,” Sawaya notes.
In addition, it has become clear that prenatal nutrition and education can have a significant impact on a family’s future. In line with this sentiment and unlike most other companies in the space, Needed continuously upgrades their products in accordance with new research, ensuring they are devoting resources to improve existing products. Needed is also a content destination backed by expert contributors that educates hopeful, expectant, and new parents on topics ranging from egg freezing to doulas to breastfeeding.
Needed Is What Mothers Need
Needed products far exceed the standards set by the FDA’s up-to-date Good Manufacturing Practices, and they involve third-party labs to test for heavy metals, microbes, allergens, and other contaminants, ensuring they’re compliant with current regulations. Not only that, but Needed is a Certified B Corp, and a climate neutral company.
In a very “full-circle” way, Sawaya mentions how she “wrote her business school application about starting a business that ‘redefines good health,’ so it’s safe to say I’m living out my dream…I’m grateful to have the ability to relate to and positively impact many thousands of women who trust Needed with their perinatal nutrition.”
