Small Bites: Smart Snacks #LifeSkillsNow Mini-Series for back to school season
This Mini-Series teaches kids how to prepare delicious, nutritious snacks that support focus, learning, and energy. From no-bake granola bars to homemade salsa and gluten-free chocolate donuts, this series inspires healthier eating with fun, hands-on recipes and expert tips. 👉 Click here and scroll to “Fuel Your Brain with Smart Snacks”
Flip the Box Over: Michelle Schor on Feeding Kids the Honest Stuff
Michelle Schor is the co-founder of Hundy!, a frozen fruit pop made from exactly one ingredient: fruit. No juice or concentrate, no protein math on the back of the box. That single-source ingredient is the whole point, and it comes straight from how she was raised and how she now feeds her 14-month-old, Zoey.
In this week’s Order Up! interview, she talked about growing up food-obsessed in Canada, the PCOS diagnosis that got her reading labels instead of trusting them, and the sleep-deprived weeks when a new baby and a new business were both brand new at once. Michelle’s funny about the parts that were hard, honest about the parts that still are, and specific about what she wants parents to notice in the freezer aisle.
She’s also done one of the most bad-ass new mom things we’ve ever heard: she pitched Shark Tank two weeks after giving birth. She had been practicing her lines from a hospital bed, then flew from Austin to Los Angeles without her newborn, and talks to us about how she had to hand off her newly-pumped breast milk to a production assistant between takes. Hundy! didn’t get a deal, but she and her team walked away from the taping more determined than ever, and she doesn’t regret a thing. In fact, Hundy! is is planning a national launch with a major retailer early in 2027.
We learned a lot from Michelle this week, not just about how to read the ingredients label but also about pursuing your dreams. Just like her daughter Zoey, we’re obsessed with Hundy!, too!
A Conversation with Michelle Schor, Co-founder of Hundy!
Introduce Yourself: I’m Michelle Schor, co-founder of Hundy! I work with my husband, Aviv, and about 14 months ago we had a baby girl, Zoey, who is also a Hundy! fan.
Hundy! is the first frozen fruit pop made from one ingredient, and that ingredient is whole organic fruit. We never add anything else. With Zoey, Aviv and I have two babies now, the company and the kid, and they’re both equally important. Two weeks after giving birth, I flew to LA to pitch Shark Tank. That was the first time I’d left Zoey at home. We’re based in Austin, and it’s been very cool to watch both babies grow up at the same time.
Before Hundy!, what did food look like for you growing up?
I’ve loved food for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Canada, so a lot of my favorite memories involve maple syrup on everything, big winter soups, and what I called elevated grilled cheese, where I’d use fun cheeses and dunk it in the soup. Poutine too, but ours always had toppings to make it a little better for you.
I knew I loved food at five years old. We were at a hotel in Florida, and my parents only let me have one soda a day. So in my swimsuit, I applied for a job at the restaurant, and they agreed to give me a soda every half hour if I folded napkins. I don’t know how my parents allowed it, but I’ve always been determined to find a way to whatever I want.
My dad was an entrepreneur with his own product, and by seven or eight I was demo-ing it with him. I fell in love with handing someone something to try and watching them make it part of their life. As for frozen treats, I was a frozen-fruit kid. Frozen grapes on a paper towel in the freezer, popsicles all summer. I was a figure skater, so I wanted something refreshing that didn’t sit heavy the way cake or chocolate did.
Did becoming a mom change how you shop and cook, or did that start earlier?
It started before I was a mom. I have PCOS, and I struggled to get pregnant, so I really leaned into how much diet affected my body. That’s when I started reading the back of a package instead of the front. So many brands say real fruit or clean ingredients, and then you flip it over and it’s juice, or concentrate, or a list of things you can’t pronounce.
My pregnancy was high risk, so I cut coffee, watched sugar and carbs, and kept it clean. Those little things added up, and now they shape what we put in Zoey’s body too. Aviv and I both love to cook, and we make about 95% of our meals at home.
How did Hundy! actually start?
We moved to Austin at the end of 2020 and fell in love with the startup community building consumer packaged goods (food brands) here, the HEB grocery stores, Central Market, the little boutique grocers. We were standing in the novelty freezer aisle one day and realized nothing there was clean. Everything was trying to be fruit, but nothing on the back of the label was fruit. When did organic grape concentrate start counting as real fruit? I must have missed that class!
Once we dug in, we understood why the space was empty. The machinery to make these types of products barely existed. Cold chain is the hardest part of the business, harder than shipping a bag of chips. And we’re working with one natural ingredient, so every pineapple and every mango tastes a little different, and you still have to keep it consistent. Aviv and I have always liked solving problems. We built Hundy! on the side while running a marketing agency, and when the agency got acquired at the end of 2024, we jumped in full time.
There’s a real gap between wishing something existed and actually making it. What gave you the confidence to go full time on Hundy!?
Taking it day by day. Nothing is linear. I picture being on a road, where sometimes, there’s a huge curve instead of a straight line, and the job is to keep going around it instead of stopping or reversing. And I remind myself we’re not sending people to space. We’re putting fruit in a grab-and-go format and keeping it good.
I’m also an immigrant. I came to the US my last year of college, and after my dad passed away I decided to stay and figure out the visa, the goals that don’t look perfect at the start. That’s been the pattern for almost everything I’ve pursued in my life, including having Zoey. You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only option. And you have to listen to feedback and leave your ego at the door.
A lot of our readers have been postpartum. Very few have gone on national TV two weeks later. How did you get through that?
Shark Tank approached us at Expo West (a consumer packaged goods conference) in March 2025, when I was in my last trimester; honestly, I was looking down at my stomach thinking, well, this isn’t a real thing I’m going to do. But they kept moving us forward in the process, so we did the paperwork step by step. We also moved into our house five days before I gave birth. Obviously, do everything in your life all at once, ideally! Ha!
I was practicing my pitch in the hospital. That’s how close it was. I think I compartmentalized the whole time. At a doctor’s appointment, it was all baby. At home, it was all Hundy! Then Zoey came, and flying to LA was the first time I left her. I couldn’t bring her because of the measles outbreak, so I just accepted it.
Nobody tells you that sleeping in one-hour increments isn’t sleep. It’s a factory reset, and then you’re back up. On top of that I was pumping on the go for the first time, handing a PA my breast milk for the fridge. As a new mom, none of that feels normal yet, even though it is. And you’re trying to dress a recovering body for national TV.
If another mom told you she had to do something hard right after giving birth, what would you tell her? The real-talk version.
You can do it, and it’s not going to be pretty. Time can be your best friend or your enemy, so look at your hours: the ones that aren’t for the baby, how are you using them to show up as the best version of yourself? Getting dressed and leaving the house is genuinely hard postpartum, and you’re full of hormones as well. Postpartum depression is real. But when you get to the other side, you’ll be proud of yourself. It should be worth it, especially if you love what you’re doing.
The Sharks didn’t make a deal, but the episode still helped Hundy! How do you feel about it now?
I’m always glad I did it. We were the last to go, so it was 11pm my time after a full day of nerves and pumping. The Sharks loved us and loved the product, and there was a point in the room where I thought we’d get an offer, and then it just didn’t come. One of them rewatched the episode later and still couldn’t tell me why.
Pretty soon after, we raised money at a better valuation and brought on our own version of sharks, people more specialized to Hundy! Trae Young, who’s an athlete himself. Randy Spelling, a life coach and a real supporter of the brand. Dr. Scott Cohen, a pediatrician in LA. We woke up the next day and decided we were still going to get it done, just not the way we’d planned. That’s been the whole path since.
When you open your freezer now, what’s in there besides Hundy!?
A lot of Hundy!. Then smoothie stuff, because Zoey loves smoothies, plus frozen veggies and a few healthy heatable things like little better-for-you pizzas. Honestly we eat more out of the fridge, simple things like salmon and salads, and we dress them up with our spice cabinet, sauces, vinegars, lemons and limes.
One rule we’ve kept for ten years: when we have dinner, we don’t work. We don’t talk about the retailer launches or who we’re pitching next. We can’t even see the TV from the dining table. We cook together nine nights out of ten, plate it together, and Zoey watches. That hour lets us separate work from home, and those dinners are some of my favorite moments of the day.
You’ve read more better-for-you packaging than anyone should. When a parent has to scan fast, kids melting down, what should they look for?
Start with the length of the list. If it’s a huge paragraph, that alone tells you something, and you don’t even have to read it. Then look at the first five ingredients. If at least half of them aren’t whole ingredients, I probably wouldn’t take it home. And ask whether you can even read it. I’m an adult and a mom, and there are still better-for-you products with ingredients I can’t pronounce.
Remember that packaging is most of the battle. The US is behind on labeling laws. In Japan or Canada, you can’t claim real fruit unless there’s a real threshold of it in the product, and a lot of what’s sold here couldn’t make that claim there. If you need help, there are apps: Oasis, Cal AI, Yuka, Bobby’s app. Or hand your screaming kid the box and let them look at it with you. Zoey’s 14 months and has no idea what I’m saying, but it buys me a minute.
How do you talk about ingredients with kids without making food a moral thing, without making sugar the villain?
Sugar doesn’t have to be the villain. Your body can break down natural sugar. The question is how much, and where it’s coming from. Aviv and I have two approaches. He’ll ask a kid, do you like taking care of yourself? Do you like making good choices? They say yes, and then, well, do you want to try Hundy!?
Mine is the secret-sauce version. I lean in and say, guess what: this is a popsicle you can have any time of day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack, and your parents will say yes. The kid turns to their mom like they’ve just been handed a superpower. Most of them like it as much as the sugary stuff anyway. We also just feed Zoey what we eat. She’s had salmon since about seven months. She throws food too, but changing up a sauce usually gets her to try.
When Zoey looks back on growing up in your house, what do you hope she says?
That she appreciated the time we put in, and that she has the same love for food and her own family one day. I hope she cooks and experiments like I did, and invites friends over for little dinner parties. Food can teach you culture, it can teach you how to take care of yourself, and it can just be fun.
I also hope she saw two parents building something, being resourceful, and being a little unafraid. There’s always a grass-is-greener version of every choice. I want her to be okay with what she has and to take it day by day. She’s been on work calls since she was three months old and watching us cook since the day we brought her home, so we’ll see.
What’s a cooking skill you use all the time that you think more home cooks should know?
Slow down on the stove. I love the stove, not the microwave, and people turn the burner on high and then wonder why the salmon came out dry. Give it the extra five minutes of love and let things simmer and sauté. Most of my meals are a protein going in one pan and a sauce or vegetable in another, then thrown together. I’m not a baker. The stovetop is my whole game. Barbecuing I leave to my husband.
