Natasha Chawla & Greens & Beans: Feeding Families Better, One Pouch at a Time

Natasha Chawla is a C-Suite growth leader, investor, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of global experience driving revenue, brand transformation, and market expansion for Fortune 500 organizations. Known for blending strategic rigour with creative vision, she has built a career accelerating business performance through customer-centric marketing, innovation, and data-driven decision-making.

As Founder and CEO of Greens & Beans, Natasha brings that same executive discipline to the food industry. She launched the company to solve a modern challenge: making clean, nutrient-dense, plant-based sauces accessible for busy families without compromising on taste.

Greens & Beans is redefining the pasta sauce category with vegetable-forward, wholesome, and flavourful products designed for today’s health-conscious consumer.

A passionate advocate for sustainable growth and purposeful brands, Natasha invests in and mentors emerging ventures aligned with wellness and innovation.

A business growth strategist and sports mom, she is driven by building scalable businesses that create meaningful impact, at the table and beyond.

NATASHA CHAWLA, GREENS BEANS, PLANTBASED FOOD, CHFA, VANCOUVER, BC

THE BUSINESS.

Greens & Beans is a Vancouver-based, plant-forward food brand reimagining pasta sauces with real vegetables like butternut squash, beets, carrots, and lentils, blended with mom-inspired flavours that feel both familiar and authentic.

The business is built on the ethos of quality, freshness, and making healthy eating convenient.

These values are embodied in the 7 Veggie sauces, nutrient-dense and allergen-free creations made with clean labels, which is why they are known as Superpower Veggie Sauces, and come in a modern stand-up pouch and are shelf stable.

The current lineup features four SKUs:

7 Veggie with Beets and Basil
7 Veggie with Beets and Lentil
7 Veggie with Carrots and Lentil
7 Veggie with Squash Masala

Each sauce contains a minimum of seven vegetables, and two SKUs contain lentils for plant-based protein. Full of fibre, every pouch equals 40 percent of daily fibre intake.

The 7 Veggie sauces are extremely versatile, bringing both flavour and nutrition to everyday meals, from soups to stews and curries, to pizza, pasta, and more, making them an all-purpose kitchen essential.

NATASHA CHAWLA, GREENS BEANS, PLANTBASED FOOD, CHFA, VANCOUVER, BC

IN HER WORDS.

“My entrepreneurial spirit showed up very early, perhaps as early as Grade 10, maybe even before. I distinctly remember filling out a school form that asked what three things I wanted in the future. One of my answers was that I wanted to own a restaurant.

Over time, that vision matured into wanting to build a food business. I have always had an entrepreneurial lens. Whenever someone shared an idea, I could immediately see its business potential, how it could be positioned, differentiated, or scaled. I was naturally wired to think in terms of opportunity.

I truly recognized this trait during my corporate career while leading growth initiatives across global markets. I realized I was not just executing strategy; I was thinking like an owner. I was constantly asking where the opportunity was, what the white space was, and how we could build this better.

The first real emotional spark came unexpectedly. I remember walking past a boutique chocolate store called Pure Sin and vividly seeing myself building and growing something of my own. That moment of clarity stayed with me and has led to where I am today.

Greens & Beans was born from a personal experience. As a working mom raising a child with allergies, I found healthy options diminished after toddler age, leaving fast food as the easy but guilt-filled choice. I wanted a solution that would help me make meals faster without compromising on nutrition and taste.

Most importantly, I wanted clean, allergen-free ingredients.

As a child, we always ate clean, home-cooked food with very minimal processed food. I wanted to follow the same standard, have the same home-cooked, wholesome essence but in a format that would work for modern, busy families.

That is how I started this idea, with simple vegetable-based sauces cooked at home with a focus on clean ingredients, nutrition, and flavour.

Over the years, I have dabbled in small ventures, from running informal classroom sessions at home with underprivileged kids to organizing home furnishing exhibitions. Every experience reinforced two fundamentals: deeply understanding the customer and creating true value. Greens & Beans is built on both these fundamentals.”

“There are countless steps in building a business, and we have had our share of hits and misses, but every experience has been a lesson in growth.

One of the most memorable moments happened during the initial R&D scaling phase.

After more than ten trials to perfect the recipe from my kitchen to a factory setting, we finally nailed it with a 10-litre batch. The taste, texture, and viscosity were exactly right. We were ecstatic. Confident, we scaled up to 200 litres, and the entire recipe broke down.

The flavour shifted dramatically because the sugars caramelized at scale, and suddenly our pasta sauce tasted like dessert. For a brief moment, we joked that maybe we should pivot into sweets instead.

We ended up producing over 1,000 pouches that had to be discarded. At the time, we were not sure whether to laugh or cry. Today, it is one of our favourite stories, a reminder that scaling is both science and humility, and that resilience is built in those exact moments.

My entrepreneurial journey has been both an evolution and a reality check. My corporate background gave me strong fundamentals, including strategy, disciplined execution, financial rigour, and brand building at scale. I knew how to think about growth. But entrepreneurship brings a completely different dynamic. There is no buffer. Every decision hits immediately. One of our biggest challenges was scaling. What works in a kitchen does not automatically work in a facility. We had batches break down, textures shift, and flavours change at volume. It was humbling.

Packaging was another turning point. We originally tested in glass jars, but as we leaned into e-commerce, we recognized the cost of breakage, insurance, and shipping. This pushed us to move to pouches, which meant reworking the recipe and reassessing shelf stability all over again. However, it was an opportunity that opened many doors.

We also learned a hard lesson in quality control when non-GMO canola oil was mistakenly used instead of our extra virgin olive oil. That mistake cost us a major retail chain. We took accountability, corrected the process, and returned to our original formulation. Entrepreneurship truly tests you, but it is also truly gratifying.”

“Very early on, I started a home furnishings venture with a business partner. We sourced unique, designer pieces and organized curated exhibitions. We were very intentional, planning the events well in advance, driving attendance, and staying flexible in how we priced and bundled pieces. Our focus was always on moving product. The eight to ten exhibitions were successful in many ways. But over time, we realized we were accumulating a significant amount of leftover inventory of one-off pieces that were harder to move as we had sold their combinations before.

Because each item was unique, restocking was not simple, and clearing slow-moving pieces required deeper discounts. We eventually closed the business, but it was a powerful lesson in balancing sales strategy, promotions, and inventory management.

Greens & Beans started as a fresh food company with a line of salads, dips, and curries that I produced in a commercial kitchen, selling into organic and natural stores. It was exciting and validated the demand, but it was also incredibly labour intensive.

With a five-day shelf life, the model required buying ingredients, cooking, packaging, distributing, selling, and running demos all within essentially a single sales window. That experience forced a strategic pivot into shelf-stable sauces, which allowed for scale, stronger margins, better logistics, and a more resilient business model.

As we move through 2026, my vision is to grow Greens & Beans nationally through retail expansion across Canada while scaling our e-commerce presence into the US. We have built a strong foundation, and now it is about disciplined growth, the right retail partnerships, and expanding our digital footprint so families can access us wherever they shop. But beyond growth numbers, my bigger vision is impact. I want Greens & Beans to be part of a broader movement in how children make food choices.

Better choices lead to better health outcomes, and that starts early. The legacy I hope to leave is about shifting mindsets, transforming how families experience food, how children build lifelong habits, and how convenience can coexist with true nourishment.”

NATASHA CHAWLA, FOUNDER & CEO

GREENS & BEANS

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Collaborator: This story is created in collaboration between Helen Siwak and the featured subject. As the founder and publisher of Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine, Helen works closely with entrepreneurs to share their paths of innovation, resilience, and growth. Each story in this series is co-developed through interviews and first-person insights, blending authentic voices with Helen’s editorial expertise to highlight the remarkable individuals shaping British Columbia’s business landscape.