Healthy Kids Fast! mixes tech, marketing and health

Beth Robeson's new venture, Heathy Kids Fast!, has been a long time coming. As a principal with Robeson Marketing and Design, she has spent much of the past decade focusing on communication, marketing and PR campaigns.

But in her spare time, she's been nurturing another mission: helping families become healthier.

"It goes back to my passion," she says of Healthy Kids Fast! "If I didn't have the business, I would do this anyway."

Robeson has been conducting seminars on nutrition and healthy cooking with parents and children for a number of years. Along with learning how best to cook with toddlers ("which can be insanity," she says), Robeson began collecting tips, suggestions and practices that could help parents address common problems: picky eaters, children who won't touch vegetables or the chaos and expense that can surround a family outing to a restaurant.

She's combined these lessons into Healthy Kids Fast!, a 30-day interactive program of short, daily lessons designed to help both parents and children make better choices when it comes to healthy eating. She's developing the program to have strong interactive components, both in the form of workbook/cookbooks for families to complete together and in the use of podcasts and an online magazine to build a community of health-conscious parents.

"I want this to be interactive, with parents and kids learning to talk with each other," she says.

The project has garnered attention: Robeson was picked as one of the finalists in micro-lending organization Bad Girl Ventures' third class of women-owned startups. After completing a series of business-skills classes, Robeson will compete with her fellow finalists for a $25,000 startup loan.

Robeson says she's excited about the potential for Healthy Kids Fast! Not only does it leverage her many years of work on the subject, but she says it appears to be in line with parents' growing awareness of the implications of healthy lifestyles on their families.

"I think there's a wealth of information out there," Robeson says, adding that she's also excited to use a career's worth of marketing skills to make the program a reality.

"I've been marketing for other people for 11 years," she says. "It's been great, but to be able to do exactly what I think is the right thing to do, it's going to be exciting to see how that plays out."

By Matt Cunningham

Follow Matt on Twitter @cunningcontent