Gifting Smiles: Catching The Attention of Lay’s Chips with Jean Paul Laurent

November 9, 2020

If Jean Paul Laurent’s smile looks familiar, that might be because you’ve seen him at your local grocery store. His smile is one of the handful featured on Lay’s Smiles for Miles of Aisles campaign. The reason – his years of impact on keeping smiles healthy for people around the world. As an award-winning social entrepreneur, Jean Paul makes his difference as the founder and CEO of Unspoken Smiles. They are dedicated to solving the oral health crisis globally, a hardship impacting over 3.5 billion people worldwide.

If there is one thing to learn from Jean Paul Laurent, it would be that oral health is essential for overall health. Good oral health comes from good maintenance starting at a young age. Without proper dentistry resources available, many people in small communities in developing nations are not able to maintain their oral health, and only seek treatment when they have a problem or pain.

While Jean Paul was attending NYU as a part of their dentistry program, his world changed as he knew it when the catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, killing 220,000 people. As his home country, he experienced tremendous grief seeing so many close friends and family members lose their communities, their homes, and even their lives. Given his passion for giving back and his connection to the country he once called home, Jean Paul knew he had to do something. He decided to return home to give the gift of dental care. This was the moment Jean Paul saw that this need was greater than what he could provide alone.

In 2014, Unspoken Smiles was founded – dedicated to providing access to quality dental care to everyone, everywhere. Unspoken Smiles has provided dental care and created smiles for more than 7,000 kids in eight countries across four continents.

What else can you expect in this episode?

The story of the first time Jean Paul visited Haiti after the earthquake
How Jean Paul went from dentistry to nonprofit founder
Why Unspoken Smiles is different from a typical non-profit, and how they empower communities to spread their impact much farther
How he was nominated to be on the Lay’s Potato Chips bag, and what it means
His tip for better oral care.