BEHAVE was the brainchild of Mayssa Chehata, a lifelong candy lover who founded the company in 2020. Growing up with a diabetic dad, Mayssa wasn’t able to enjoy candy and junk food in her own home, so she went crazy for candy whenever she left the house. As she got older and eventually joined the marketing team at Uber, Mayssa found herself snacking on gummy bears everyday in an office full of unlimited candy. However, as she later moved into a role at healthy food delivery company Daily Harvest, Mayssa became more aware of what she was putting into her body. She started to seek out better-for-you alternatives for her favorite foods like pasta and ice cream, but quickly came to the realization that she couldn’t find an alternative for candy that suited her lifestyle. Having identified a gap in the market, Mayssa set out to create her own clean-label gummy bears.

Mayssa knew that if she wanted to create a better-for-you candy, it had to taste phenomenal. She reached out to celebrity pastry chef and James Beard award nominee Elizabeth Faulkner, who instantly fell in love with the idea, and a few days later the duo got to work. They bought ingredients from Amazon and started recipe testing in Elizabeth's kitchen, working through over 100 different iterations and experimenting with flavors (like lychee and passionfruit) that weren’t found in traditional candy. Ultimately, Mayssa and Elizabeth landed on a low-sugar formulation that they both loved, and BEHAVE was launched direct-to-consumer in August of 2020. The company’s low-sugar, better-for-you candy has disrupted the industry with playful and innovative flavors, bringing a new indulgence to the historically uninventive candy aisle.