Who Is Heidi Van Pelt? Vegan Chef and Taran Noah Smith’s Ex-Wife, Married 2001 to 2007
Heidi Van Pelt is an American vegan chef and food business owner. Most people know her name because she was married to Taran Noah Smith, the child actor who played Mark Taylor on the TV show Home Improvement. But her story is more than that one marriage. She also created a well-known vegan cheese brand and later opened a vegan restaurant in her home city.
Quick Bio Table
| Detail | What We Know |
|---|---|
| Full name | Heidi Van Pelt (also written as Heidi VanPelt; used Van Pelt-Belle in later business news) |
| Known for | Vegan cooking, the Playfood cheese brand, and her marriage to Taran Noah Smith |
| Job | Vegan chef and food business owner |
| Home state | Missouri (she moved back to Kansas City in 2005) |
| Reported birth date | July 11, 1968 (shown on several bio sites, but not confirmed by major news outlets) |
| Ex-husband | Taran Noah Smith, former actor |
| Wedding date | April 27, 2001 |
| Divorce filed | February 2, 2007 |
| Marriage length | About six years |
| Age gap | She was 16 years older than Taran |
| Main businesses | Playfood (vegan cheese and food) and Fud (vegan restaurant in Kansas City) |
| Social media | No official account confirmed |
Who Is Heidi Van Pelt?
Heidi Van Pelt is a cook who works with plant-based food. She became well known in the early 2000s for her cashew-based vegan cheese. A local Los Angeles news site described her as the “genius chef” behind the cheese that she and her husband sold under the name Playfood.
She is not a movie star or a TV personality. She became a public name mostly because of who she married, and the news stories about her usually started with that fact. Still, her own work in the kitchen is the part of her story that lasted the longest.
Early Life and Background
Not much is written about her childhood in major news sources. Several bio websites say she was born in Missouri on July 11, 1968. Those sites often copy each other, so we cannot call the date fully confirmed.
What we can say is this: a Kansas City newspaper reported that she moved back to Kansas City in 2005. At that time, she said there were not many raw or vegan food choices in the city. That gap in the local food scene later helped shape her next steps.
How She Met Taran Noah Smith
Taran Noah Smith was a child star. He played Mark Taylor on Home Improvement from 1991 to 1999, across 201 episodes. He won two Young Artist Awards for the show. He later said that he knew he did not want to act anymore after the show ended, when he was 16.
Some websites say Heidi and Taran met around 1999 through the vegan community. We could not find this in a major news source, so please treat it as a possible story and not a proven fact. What is clear is that both of them cared about vegan and organic food, and they later built a business around that interest.
The 2001 Marriage and the Age Gap
Taran married Heidi on April 27, 2001. He was 17 years old. She was 16 years older, which means she was about 33.
The wedding got a lot of attention because of the age gap. People talked about it in magazines, on TV, and online. According to Wikipedia, the marriage “sparked much controversy.” A Los Angeles news site even joked that Taran married an older woman before it became a celebrity trend.
It is worth saying that the couple lived through a lot of public talk during these years. Taran was also in the news at the time because of a fight over his trust fund when he turned 18.
Playfood: The Vegan Cheese Business
In 2005, Taran and Heidi started Playfood. It was a California-based company that made non-dairy cheese and also ran vegan and organic food service. The idea came from Heidi’s recipes.
According to a dairy-free food website, the Playfood products were made from cashews and came in squeezable bottles, a bit like paint tubes. The product list included:
- Cheezy Cheese: a cheddar style spread
- Nacheezmo: a spicy nacho style sauce
- Whip Cheese: a cream cheese style spread
- Cream Tang: a sour cream style product
The same website said the products were free from GMOs, gluten, soy, and trans fat. For vegan shoppers at that time, good dairy-free cheese was hard to find, so people were curious about it.
The business did not have an easy start. A Los Angeles news site reported that the city stopped the couple from running a vegan restaurant out of their home in Sherman Oaks. They kept going by serving food in a Studio City restaurant and through a mobile kitchen for events.
The Fight Over Playfood
After the marriage ended, the two did not just walk away from the business. A Kansas City paper reported that Heidi and Taran faced each other at the Platte County Courthouse in Missouri, ready to fight for control of the vegan cheese company they had built during what the paper called a short and stormy marriage.
A food site later described it as a long custody battle over the brand. After the court fight, the products finally reached stores. But the same site noted that Playfood did not last. It said the company eventually closed down.
We should be careful here. Some low quality websites make strong claims about who won, how much money was involved, or what the court decided. We did not find those details in reliable sources, so we are not repeating them.
The Divorce in 2007
Taran and Heidi filed for divorce on February 2, 2007. The Kansas City Star reported on the split in February 2007, and Wikipedia uses that report as its source. The marriage lasted about six years.
Different websites give different reasons for the split. Some talk about money problems, business stress, and the pressure of public attention. These are guesses written by bloggers, not facts from the couple. The honest answer is that neither of them has given a clear public explanation that we could confirm.
Life After the Divorce: Fud in Kansas City
After the divorce, Heidi stayed in the food world. She opened a vegan restaurant in Kansas City called Fud. A local paper reported that it was on the West Side of the city. The paper said she served meatless versions of comfort food, such as tacos, lasagna, and chicken-fried steak.
In that story she explained her goal in simple words. She wanted to take food that people grew up on and make it healthy and vegan. She also liked to have fun with the menu. For example, she joked that her vegan burger looked “bloody,” but the red color came from beets, and the “tendons” were made from seitan, a wheat-based meat substitute.
In another local article, a writer visited Fud and asked if non-vegans ever thought they were eating real meat. She laughed and said it happens all the time. She also said the restaurant had more non-vegan guests than vegan ones.
One food website later reported that Fud also closed. We could not find a clear date for this, so we will not guess one.
What Happened to Taran After the Marriage
To give a full picture, here is a short look at Taran Noah Smith’s life since then:
- He left acting after 1999 and became a businessman.
- He has said he is vegan.
- In 2014, he did disaster relief work with a group called Communitere in the Philippines.
- He works as a technical manager for the Community Submersibles Project, where he teaches people how to pilot small submarines.
Some websites say he married again, and a few even name a new wife. We found no reliable source for this, and some of those pages mix up names. For that reason, we did not include it.
What We Don’t Know
Many articles about Heidi Van Pelt repeat the same claims about her net worth, her family, her health, her faith, or her love life. Most of these come from pages that do not name any source. Here is what we could not confirm:
- Her exact net worth
- Details about her family or children
- Her current job or home
- Whether she has a public social media account
Heidi Van Pelt has never been a full-time celebrity. She is a private person who ended up in the news. Because of that, it is fair to stick to what was reported by real news outlets and leave the rest alone.
Why People Still Search for Her
There are three main reasons her name still comes up online:
- The age gap. A 17-year-old star marrying a 33-year-old woman was big news in 2001.
- The vegan cheese story. Playfood became known as one of the early plant-based cheese brands, and the court fight made it even more famous.
- Curiosity about Home Improvement. Fans of the show often wonder what happened to the young cast members.
Final Thoughts
Heidi Van Pelt is a vegan chef from Missouri whose life got public attention because of her marriage to Taran Noah Smith from 2001 to 2007. Behind the headlines, she was a cook with strong ideas about plant-based food. She helped create Playfood and later opened Fud, where she served vegan versions of comfort food in Kansas City.
If you want to learn more, read the original local news stories linked below. They are more careful than most celebrity bio sites.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Who is Heidi Van Pelt? She is an American vegan chef and food business owner. She is best known as the ex-wife of former child actor Taran Noah Smith.
2. When did Heidi Van Pelt marry Taran Noah Smith? They married on April 27, 2001.
3. How big was the age gap between them? She was 16 years older. Taran was 17 and she was about 33 at the wedding.
4. When did they divorce? They filed for divorce on February 2, 2007, after about six years of marriage.
5. What is Playfood? Playfood was a vegan cheese and food company that Heidi and Taran started in 2005. It made cashew-based cheese products.
6. What is Fud? Fud was a vegan restaurant that Heidi opened in Kansas City. It served meatless versions of comfort food.
7. Where was Heidi Van Pelt born? Bio sites say she was born in Missouri. A Kansas City paper reports that she moved back to the city in 2005.
8. How old is Heidi Van Pelt? Some bio sites list her birth date as July 11, 1968, which would make her 58 in October 2026. This date is not confirmed by major news sources.
9. What is Heidi Van Pelt’s net worth? There is no reliable figure. Websites that list one rarely say where the number comes from.
10. Does Heidi Van Pelt have social media? We could not confirm any official account. Be careful with fan pages and fake profiles using her name.
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