Food for Hormones: Snacks Built for Women's Cycles | Blush & Bloom Podcast | Ep. 51 with Garima Surana, Founder of Roller Coaster

Walk down any snack aisle and ask a simple question: who was this actually built for? The protein, the macros, the hard-edged branding. Most of it speaks to muscle and performance, not to the hormonal, cyclical bodies half the world lives in.

In this episode of Blush & Bloom, I sat down with Garima Surana, founder of Roller Coaster, a women's health brand making what she calls "food for hormones," functional snack bars formulated around the menstrual cycle rather than around gym goals.

In This Episode, We Cover

✨ Why so many "healthy" snacks are built around performance, not women's bodies

✨ How cycle syncing and seed cycling become an everyday, clean-label snack bar

✨ Why women's health stays under-researched and underfunded, and what that costs

✨ How a bootstrapped, pre-launch founder keeps a product evidence-based

✨ Turning a personal health crisis into a company, as a second-time, immigrant founder

Snacks Built Around Your Cycle, Not Gym Bros

Garima's starting point is simple. "We make functional snacks for women's health. So we call it food for hormones," she says. Rather than one bar for everyone, Roller Coaster formulates for the two halves of the cycle: the follicular phase (roughly day one to fourteen) and the luteal phase (day fourteen to twenty-eight), with a clean label, zero added sugar, and nutrients like vitamin B6, magnesium, zinc, and omega-3s.

The contrast she draws is with a snack aisle that, in her words, is coded for men's bodies. Roller Coaster is the opposite, built, as she puts it, "not for gym bros, for real women like you and me."

What Seed Cycling Looks Like in a Bar

The bars build on seed cycling, a naturopathic practice of eating specific seeds in each half of the cycle: pumpkin and flax in the follicular phase, sunflower and sesame in the luteal phase. The idea is to make that routine effortless by baking it into something you would actually reach for, so no one has to grind seeds on a busy morning.

Garima is candid that this area, like much of women's health, needs more research, and she is planning an observational study with a University of Greenwich advisor. Her clean-label rule is refreshingly blunt: ingredients "you can pronounce. So if you can't pronounce it, we don't have it."

The Research Gap Women Keep Paying For

One of the most striking threads is how little we still know. "Would you believe there are over 150 plus symptoms of PMS?" Garima asks. She points to how underfunded women's health remains, noting that conditions affecting millions of women receive strikingly less research attention than far less serious issues affecting men.

That gap is not abstract. It shows up as years-long waits for diagnoses, symptoms dismissed as "just push through it," and a market that has largely ignored what women's bodies actually need day to day.

About Our Guest: Garima Surana

Garima Surana is a second-time founder and the founder of Roller Coaster, a women's health brand making functional snacks formulated for the menstrual cycle. Before Roller Coaster, she built and exited a podcasting marketplace focused on amplifying women's voices. An immigrant founder building in the UK, she wants Roller Coaster to become, in her words, the PepsiCo of women's health.

Connect with Garima:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garima-surana-290331a0/

• Roller Coaster: https://rollercoaster.health/

• Roller Coaster on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rollercoaster-health/

Resources & Links

Listen to the full episode here:

🎧 YouTube: https://youtu.be/9ftpYE66OL8

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6NEsMfkG3dvl0pYXU40Efi

🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blush-and-bloom/id1832044848

More from Asele:

✨ Website: https://www.asele.tech

✨ Asele App: https://asele.health

✨ WhatsApp Community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/F8GY4RV7Bm2CtCfq6TONsV

✨ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asele.tech

✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asele

💬 If a snack could actually work with your cycle instead of against it, what would you want it to do for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.