Leading, with Taste: Sasha DiGiulian’s Newest Adventure

by Cathryn Larsen

Sasha DiGiulian ‘11 is no stranger to leadership. A world-famous champion rock-climber, humanitarian, and business owner, Sasha has spent her career breaking boundaries, pushing the limits of what is possible, and achieving new heights – on mountains and in life.

Sasha was the first North American woman to accomplish an outdoor climb of grade 9a,5.14d, recognized as one of the most challenging sport climbs achieved by a female. She was also the first woman to conquer one of the hardest “Big Walls'' in the Italian Dolemites in 2013. She has accomplished multiple First Ascents and over 30 First Female Ascents around the world, including a First Female Ascent on the North Face of the Eiger. This past fall, after a long recovery from multiple hip reconstruction surgeries during 2020 and 2021, Sasha led an all-female team to climb one of the hardest “Big Walls” in the world – Rayu, in Spain’s Cordillera Cantabrica region of Picos de Europa. The expedition was the first all-female climbing team to have achieved a “Big Wall'' of this caliber.

Sasha has also been at the head of various humanitarian and social justice efforts, with a particular focus on environmental and gender-equality issues. She is an active participant in the International Women’s Forum, a world-wide, invitation-only network of women leaders from 33 countries. It was at an IWF conference in 2018 that she met her current business partner, Arianne Jones – a former Olympic athlete turned chef and nutritionist.

After connecting over their athletic careers, a shared interest in nutrition, and their mutual disappointment over the current array of available health foods, Sasha and Arianne began Send – an “adventure food” company that uses organic, locally sourced superfood ingredients to create healthy snack bar alternatives. Send is still a young company, having officially launched in May 2022, but it has had a successful beginning. One of the reasons is its unique mission – to “lead with taste” and encourage healthy eating for adventure seekers of all types.

We talked with Sasha recently, to get an insider look at her new venture.

How did the idea for creating Send come to you?

I’ve been making bars in my kitchen, in my blender, over the last decade and actually came up with the name “Send” bars back in 2012. Food, nutrition, and well-being have always been interests for me. I met Arianne at the 2018 International Women’s Forum, and we hit it off really quickly. I brought the idea of a nutrition bar company to her, and her expertise working in food and nutrition enabled us to formulate recipes that exceeded what I had been able to do in my kitchen on my own. From there, our current Send bar recipes evolved.

We started putting together the building blocks of the company in 2020, but then COVID happened and I had my hip surgeries and couldn’t climb for nine months, so I dedicated my time off from my sport to focus on building our brand. I learned a lot about the foods to incorporate into my diet and the foods to avoid because of my hip surgeries. Going through such a massive injury and set of surgeries and recovery, a big part of my journey was in nutrition. Having climbed for the last 24 years and striving for longevity in my career, I recognized that feeding and fueling my body appropriately would enable me to optimize my performance as I continue to grow and mature within the sport. I think that the fact that Send was developed and is led by a team of women professional athletes has enhanced our ability to create a product that we stand by and believe in. It was important to me to create something that I would want to eat on a day-to-day basis; only then could I feel proud of the product and be willing to put my name behind it.

I love the choice to refer to the product as “adventure food” rather than “health bars," and think that really sets the product apart. Can you speak to that?

There are a lot of products out there encouraging people to lose weight or cut out this or eliminate that. I don’t want our product to be advertised as a weight-loss formula or a way to avoid anything, I want it to be considered as a tool in your toolbox to enhance the way that you feel and the way that you can show up in life. “Adventure” speaks to me because the adventure is whatever you’re endeavoring to do in the current season of your life – and that’s always changing. Maybe today, my adventure looks like a set of business meetings, while tomorrow it will look like time in the mountains. Adventure is a relative term and whatever you’re doing, you need to be healthy and energetic with a positive mindset in order to succeed. 

It's important to stress that this product is not just for professional athletes. We’re all on a journey, and good health is an essential part of that. So Send bars are for everyone who wants to feel good.

Can you talk about the process of sourcing ingredients for Send bars in order to create the right kind of adventure food?

We have great relationships with all our ingredient sources. We work with local farms and focus on building sustainability into our product development. Sourcing ingredients from people that we actually know and not incorporating any artificial flavorings, chemicals, or preservatives has been a guiding ethos for us. We start within the product and are guided by its nutritional value and taste, and then we try to meet the margins and be competitive within the marketplace.

A key element that differentiates Send from other bars is that we have a full serving of greens in each bar, along with performative ingredients like adapotgens in both our Perform and Recover categories. Our Perform bars have lion’s mane and cordyceps, which are incredible medicinal mushrooms that help with focus, immunity, and energy. Our Recover bars have ashwagandha and chaga. Ashwagandha is an herb that helps manage your adrenals, and chaga is incredibly potent at managing inflammation – it’s the highest concentrated food on the planet for antioxidants. Having these unique, high-quality ingredients in our bars in a bioavailable format is at the backbone of our company and something we feel very proud of.

At Send, we always want to lead with taste. Therefore, we live test all our recipes, which is such
a fun and creative process. This has been a key part of the brand – intimately knowing every single product that we release.

How have you promoted your products, and what has the reception been like so far?

Honestly, the reception has been amazing. I am astonished every time we sell out! So far, we’ve focused our efforts on creating the product and launching in a really organic way. We try to provide our customers with the freshest ingredients, so we’re using a small-batch production process. It’s a moving target of forecasting how many orders are going to be coming through and, as we grow, adjusting our production to keep up with demand. The power of social media and the power of combining my athletic career brand into this new venture have been really helpful.

Can you give us a sneak peek of what to expect from Send next?

We’re less than a year old, and our initial steps were to really develop our foundation and make sure that the product was showing up and performing in the ways that we wanted. We’ve got a new package design that we’ll be rolling out in the next quarter, and now we’re starting to tackle our retail strategy. We just launched on Amazon on January 1, and as we continue to develop our brand identity, we will work to build a presence in retail nationwide. That is a big aspiration of ours.

As well as being sold on our website and now Amazon, the bars are currently available in five physical locations across Colorado, where we’re based – juice bars, premium fitness locations, and a big mountaineering store in Boulder. It made sense to enter the market through retailers and communities we have relationships with, so we can monitor our product, see how we’re performing, and use that data to inform our next steps. We’ve been leaning into places where people understand the need for quality food and ingredients. That’s something that has really been baked into our brand.

We also recently joined 1% for the Planet, through which we donate a certain amount of our sales to Protect Our Winters, a climate advocacy group. This is an organization I have worked with during my athletic career, and it’s exciting for me to partner with them now as a business leader.

We’re working on two new bars that will come out in February: a Perform Peanut Cacao Crunch and a Recover Banana Bread. For the Perform Peanut Cacao Crunch, we’re using these amazing cacao nibs that are coconut-nectar dusted, which supports our commitment to not use any refined sugar. We’ll be coming out with a variety box that will include all four flavors – our two new flavors and our original Perform Lemon Cherry and Recover Salted Peanut. So there’s lots of exciting – and tasty – adventure ahead!

To find out more about Send or order your own bars, visit www.sendbars.com — and use SASHAFAM for a discount code at checkout. (Thanks, Sasha!)

And don’t miss Sasha’s other exciting upcoming projects. Her book Take the Lead comes out on September 26, 2023, and is available for pre-order here: http://bit.ly/TaketheLeadBook. Also be on the lookout for Sasha’s new documentary project produced by HBO, which is slated to air near the end of this calendar year.