The dad who built a better children’s vitamin for his own daughters

The origin story is almost too ordinary. Darren Litt's young daughters needed a daily multivitamin, their paediatrician said so, and when he ordered the recommended brand it turned up as neon gummies clumped together with sugar and dye in the bottom of a plastic tub. Most parents would have sighed and used it anyway. Litt looked at it and decided his girls deserved better, and that other people's kids probably did too.

In 2020 he and his co-founder Adam Gillman launched Hiya Health, a children's multivitamin stripped of the sugar, dyes and fillers, sold by subscription in a refillable bottle that kids decorate themselves. His daughters Rylan and Remi were the first and most honest taste-testers, weighing in on everything from the formula to the colours, which is exactly the focus group you want when your customers are children.

It worked, and then it really worked. Hiya grew to more than a million subscribing families, and in December 2024 the health company USANA acquired it in a deal that valued the brand at around two hundred and sixty million dollars. Not bad for a business that began with a dad being annoyed on his daughters' behalf in a kitchen in Los Angeles.

The girl dad thread here is subtle but real. Litt did not set out to build an empire. He set out to fix something small and specific for two little girls he loves, and trusted that caring about the details for his own kids would translate into caring about them for everyone else's. It did.

It is a useful reminder that not every celebrated dad has to move a mountain. Sometimes he just refuses to accept that the thing his daughters swallow every morning has to be rubbish.

We celebrate Darren Litt because he took his daughters' side against a sugary status quo, and a million other children got the better version too.

Who is Darren Litt?

Darren Litt is one of the girl dads celebrated on girl.dad, based in Los Angeles, California. The short version: He turned a parent’s small frustration into a better product for a million children.

What kind of story is this?

girl.dad files it under Business, published 20 April 2026.