The US baby food market is expected to exceed $100B per annum by 2025. The importance of proper nutrition during early childhood cannot be understated. Yet, the incumbent baby food producers have a long history of using sugar, salt, and fat in their offerings. Little Spoon is a direct-to-consumer brand focused on providing high-quality, nutrient-rich organic food for babies and children, free of artificial sugars, preservatives, and, additives. The company ships nationwide with the baby offering (Babyblends) starting at less than $3/meal with the kid’s line (Plates) starting below $5/meal. The company recently launched its own online parenting community – Is This Normal, a resource-based destination for parents to converge around topics related to parenting. As the pandemic led the push towards unprecedented interest in digital and online solutions, Little Spoon recorded 300% growth year-over-year.
AlleyWatch caught up with the Little Spoon founding team (Lisa Barnett, President and CMO; Ben Lewis, CEO Michelle Muller, Chief Experience Officer; and Angela Vranich) to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $73M, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Series B with Valor Equity Partners and Kairos HQ, $44 million financing round.
Tell us about the product or service that Little Spoon offers. What inspired the start of Little Spoon?
Launched in 2017, Little Spoon has disrupted the century-old baby and children’s food market, offering parents high-quality, accessible nutrition and wellness solutions delivered straight to their doors. Little Spoon has delivered more than 10 million meals since launch, and saw the business multiply over COVID parents searched for convenient, healthy, and affordable meals to ease the overwhelming stress of pandemic living.
Little Spoon was created with the mission to make parents’ lives easier. Babyblends, a line of organic purees, is offered at below $3/meal and Plates, a healthy toddler & kid’s meals line, at below $5/meal. Each Little Spoon product is free of preservatives, additives, and artificial sugars and are made with non-GMO, organic, and high-quality ingredients.
How is Little Spoon different?
Little Spoon ships nationwide, making quality, nutritious and affordable meals for kids accessible no matter where you are located. We also have a rotating, season menu that offers variety to the mix.
In addition to Little Spoon’s growing product line, the company also launched Is This Normal, an online community platform built to serve as a resource for today’s generation and to challenge the dated narratives on parenting culture. Is This Normal was inspired by messages the company received through its 1:1 customer texting (and phone) support service, and has organically grown as a destination for parents to find information on the realities of parenting in a modern, non-judgmental voice.
What market does Little Spoon target and how big is it?
We speak directly to parents with babies, toddlers, and big kids.
What’s your business model?
D2C.
How has COVID impacted the business??
We were fortunate to be in a place where we could help families weather the COVID challenges by providing accessibly priced, high quality, and ready-to-eat meals for babies and kids without having to leave your home. As many of us know, going out to stores wasn’t always an option, and finding the time to balance work from home with virtual schooling and no childcare was impossible. Families were struggling when it came to balancing the “new normal”. As a result, COVID accelerated our business: during this time, our team grew by 4x, our newest line of kid’s meals, launched in September, sold out in a week, and the entire business grew dramatically – where we’ve seen 300% growth YoY.
During COVID, we also worked hard to create a community/space to help parents through the hardest year+ of their lives. We built out an advice column where anyone could write in and get a personalized video response back to their parenting questions on Is This Normal and launched a digital community that now includes thousands of parents across the US.
Lastly, we launched a number of initiatives to support the community during COVID:
- We started Little by Little, effectively offering our customers who were essential workers or faced loss of employment the food at cost. We extended this to corporate partners as well, everyone from Union Square Hospitality Group to private practices was able to offer their employees our meals at cost.
- We also donated over $100,000 worth of meals across the US through Feeding America and continue to donate product frequently to support families.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Our mission is to make parenting easier when it comes to keeping kids healthy. This means creating nutrition and food solutions that are fresh, high quality, easy to use yet accessibly priced – which hadn’t existed before and is a mission that our investors share with us. We’ve successfully built out a different approach to growth, powered by our community-driven model which our investors value. They also had the opportunity to watch us scale the company, remain laser-focused on improving our customers’ lives, and accelerate growth during COVID (including launching a new product line).
Our mission is to make parenting easier when it comes to keeping kids healthy. This means creating nutrition and food solutions that are fresh, high quality, easy to use yet accessibly priced – which hadn’t existed before and is a mission that our investors share with us. We’ve successfully built out a different approach to growth, powered by our community-driven model which our investors value. They also had the opportunity to watch us scale the company, remain laser-focused on improving our customers’ lives, and accelerate growth during COVID (including launching a new product line).
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Many! We will continue to innovate and bring new, healthy solutions to market that make keeping your baby, toddler, and big kid healthy easier. We are excited to share what’s in the pipeline with everyone at a later time.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We will continue to build our platform as an end-to-end one-stop shop for all things keeping your kid healthy, fueled by an investment in our Is This Normal platform and customer-driven product innovation.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
We love 19Cleveland at Little Spoon HQ!
