The YouTuber-turned-entrepreneur behind healthy food brand FlavCity has gone from talking grocery store shelves to stocking them.
After spending more than a decade as a popular YouTuber walking supermarket aisles and critiquing ingredient labels for some 10 million subscribers, Bobby Parrish has launched one of the fastest growing health and wellness brands in the category.
Earlier this month, FlavCity — Parish’s line of wholesome foods and supplements — rolled out in nearly 2,000 Target stores nationwide. The launch was the culmination of Parrish’s years spent building a loyal audience with his YouTube videos and “Bobby Approved” app.
“If I look back at my career, all the great ideas have come from the community,” Parrish, 46, told NYNext. “So many people I know by first names, I know where they live because I send them products, they’ve been there throughout the process and they’ve helped me grow.”
While others with influencer origins often rely on licensing deals and hype to push an individual product, with FlavCity, Parrish has engineered something more innovative. He’s created something closer to a vertically integrated business: transforming more than 21 million followers — primarily on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok — into an always-on focus group, then channeling their collective intelligence into product development.
Beginning in the early 2010s, Parrish carved out a niche on YouTube walking viewers through aisles in Chicago, dissecting ingredient labels and showing consumers how to spot genuinely “cleaner and healthier” foods in a marketplace crowded with misleading health claims.
“I wasn’t doing it for subscribers or monetization,” he said. “[My wife and I were] doing it for fun. Unknowingly, we were also honing our skills.”
By 2017, Parrish was making enough to quit his job in finance and go all in on content creation. Quickly, though, the audience ballooned beyond what he could manage.
“I was getting DMs and emails every day [about what ingredient were clean and what needed to be swapped], it wasn’t sustainable,” Parrish said.
So, in 2021, he launched the “Bobby Approved” app, a barcode scanner that analyzes ingredient labels, flags unhealthy components and — if the product is disapproved — provides a more healthful alternative.
The app has been downloaded nearly five million times, according to a Parrish spokesperson. It’s also become a treasure trove of behavioral data, a sort of window through which Parrish can see what products people are curious about.
“I noticed that people were scanning a lot of protein powders, [for example], but that very few were actually ‘Bobby Approved,’” Parrish said. “I thought to myself, ‘Okay, if people want a clean protein powder, why don’t I come out with one?’”
Powders were among the original offerings when FlavCity launched in 2023, then followed by electrolyte mixes and instant lattes. In 2024, Parrish brought on Shawn Bushouse as co-founder and CEO to help manage the growing product line.
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To this day, all products are made with real food ingredients, never seed oils, refined sugars or artificial flavorings.
“It’s really exciting because, you know, I’m the ‘grocery-store guy,’” Parrish said. “I’ve been making videos at Target grocery stores for years. And as big as my reach is, there are still a lot of people who don’t know who I am. We’re going to capture those customers — and give them something that’s actually good for them.”
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