About Us
Imara was born from a simple belief: every child deserves access to nutrition that supports their potential.
Nutrition science shapes policies, programs, and public health solutions around the world, but how does that information get translated to the very people who live it everyday? Imara was created to bring that knowledge closer to families by translating research and policy into practical tools, thoughtfully developed foods, and meaningful solutions for children's nutrition.
Our Nutrition Counsellor provides direct one on one guidance for families struggling with nutrition or feeding challenges. We think of support as a partnership, not a prescription. Every child's path looks different, so our role is to meet families and care teams where they are, with guidance built around a specific child rather than a generic milestone chart.
Toto Moto, our line of toddler foods is designed to be a nutrition dense, all natural option for kids 6 months to 3 years. We start with the nutrition question first, then work backward to make sure it's something a child will actually want to eat. Taste and trust aren't add-ons to the science — they're what get the science onto a plate.
We treat information on our Nutrition Insights page as a responsibility, not a marketing tactic. Every piece of guidance starts with primary research, not secondhand trends, and gets refined until it's genuinely usable at your kitchen table — because we'd rather explain the reasoning than hand down a rule.
Everything we create is grounded in nutrition science, evidence, and real-world experience. We believe good nutrition should be understandable, achievable, and relevant to the everyday lives of families.
We don't follow trends. We follow evidence.
Our approach combines scientific rigour with compassion — recognising that every child is unique, and that families need solutions that actually work in real life.
Our Approach
For over 20 years, Erin Smith has worked at the front lines of child nutrition — from refugee feeding centres serving up to 290,000 people, to shaping the global guidelines that define how the world treats severe acute malnutrition in children.
She's led nutrition programs across Africa and Asia, directed multi-country health portfolios for organisations like Helen Keller International and the United States Agency for International Development, and co-contributed to UNICEF's global CMAM (Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition) guidelines — the standard used to treat malnutrition in children worldwide. Her work has directly informed international policy, including a 2016 World Health Assembly resolution on the marketing and labelling of infant foods.
Alongside the systems-level work, Erin has always stayed close to the household level, designing and running programs where the actual unit of change was one family, sitting down with a parent to work through why a child wasn't eating, what was realistic given their circumstances, and what would actually stick. She directed one of the first home-based nutrition programs shown to produce measurable results at the family level, and years earlier, while working in rural Tanzania, she founded a small non-profit supporting children with disabilities linked to maternal under-nutrition; work that meant knocking on doors and building trust with individual families, not just designing policy from a distance.
Erin holds an MPH in Nutrition from Tulane University, and is completing her Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS) credential, expected December 2026, bringing a clinical, individual-client lens to two decades of program-level work.
Erin has spent her career turning nutrition science into programs that actually reach families, whether that meant running feeding centres during a famine, designing national nutrition strategy, or securing funding to bring evidence-based programs to scale.
But the through-line in all of that work was never the setting; it was the same question, asked in every context: what does this specific family, with this specific child, actually need to make nutrition work in real life? In humanitarian settings, that question is often life-or-death. In a home kitchen, it looks different — a child with a feeding challenge, a picky eater, a parent short on time, it's the same question, and it deserves the same rigour.
Erin is also a mother herself. She raised her own daughter across environments where getting things right meant being resourceful, not relying on things simply being provided for her, which is a perspective that shapes how she thinks about feeding real kids in the real world, not a textbook one. And as the nutrition landscape here at home keeps shifting, that hands-on, adaptable approach feels more relevant than ever.
Imara is the next chapter of that same work: taking two decades of hands-on nutrition science, tested in some of the hardest settings in the world, and making it usable in the one place it matters most — your kitchen.
Erin Smith, MPH
Meet the Founder
