How They Built a Direct-to-Consumer Baby Food Brand and Scaled to Selling Millions of Products Each Month with Angela Vranich and Ben Lewis From Little Spoon

0:07Um, you know, business is a partnership. is through, you know, living and breathing your business. And, um, and so, you know, why not do it with someone who, you know, you, you, you love and trust and, and know inside and out and, and live with. So, you know, we're, um, you know, and there, there's probably some notable downsides of building a business with your spouse, um, but, uh, maybe for another time, but, uh, but over a drink perhaps. But, but, you know, I think that there's so many advantages to it as well. And, and I think a lot of it just comes back to like what it takes to build a successful business and to really, you know, get something off the ground and scale it.

0:54It takes a lot of time and grit and persistence and hours and, you know, having your partner be along that same track with you. And it's a really cool, powerful thing. I mean, I don't even know how we would do it otherwise, because I think we wouldn't have the same level of sort of appreciation about what each other, what each of us are putting into it and going through. And so, yeah, it's just like super helpful. I think it's honestly in a lot of ways a competitive advantage. Hello, I'm your host, Mike Gelb, and this is The Consumer VC, where we discuss the intersection of venture capital and consumer innovation.

1:40This show is brought to you by Propeller Industries, the leading strategic finance and accounting partner for venture stage companies. Now, I know this is free content, but that doesn't mean I don't have a favor to ask. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe on YouTube or whichever channel they're listening name from. And if you want the full experience, subscribe to the newsletter at theconsumervc.com. I'll send fundraising updates all in the consumer space, and you'll also receive new episodes straight to your inbox. All content episodes are for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not investment advice.

2:15Our guests today are Angela Vrenick and Ben Lewis, the founders of Little Spoon. Little Spoon creates clean and healthy options for babies and kids at every eating stage with no corners cut and delivers over a million products for families doorsteps each month. That is wild. Now we discuss why they were so focused on the DTC channel, their approach to mapping out their supply chain early on and also financing their growth, where they're at today and where they're headed, how they think about growth in the future, whether it's DTC or in retail. Without further ado, here are Angela and Ben.

3:01Ben and Angela. Angela and Ben, thank you both so much for joining me here today. How are you? Great, Mike. How are you? Nice to be here. Nice to be here. Doing well. Doing well. So let's start from the very beginning. What made each of you curious about consumer brands and what got you both into working with consumer brands? In what variety? Yeah. So, I mean, I'll start. I kind of always been, always sort of thought of myself as being an entrepreneur. I feel like it was sort of, I didn't know, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was a kid, but I knew that it was something for myself. I knew I wanted to build something.

3:42I kind of accidentally entered the world of sort of CPG and consumer brands back in beginning of end of high school beginning of college I started a bottled water brand with with a couple of friends who I went to high school with and we were like literally just making deliveries out of the backs of our cars and kind of just started out as this, this little, this little project that we got into one thing led to another, we got into Whole Foods. And that was sort of like, my mind was blown, right? That was sort of like the entry point into this, this whole world. And then that kind of led me down a few different, a few different paths.

4:26And I mean, basically just got really sucked in, I guess, in some ways into the world of food and beverage and really always gravitated towards sort of the brand side. I mean, as a consumer, I definitely am someone who's, you know, like, I love going to the grocery store. I love like literally seeing what's on the shelf, seeing what people are buying, understanding sort of the different sort of niches that that brands are filling. And, um, and so, you know, why we, why Little Spoon is maybe, uh, a different, a different conversation. We can kind of walk you through the opportunity and why we, why we decided to start this.

5:12Um, but, um, but I would say if it wasn't Little Spoon, it would probably be something else in this, in this world. Um, just because it was sort of, it got me, The bug got me. Yeah. And I mean, Ben and I are a couple and we've known each other, it feels like forever. So we've known each other since the end of high school. So I knew him when he had his bottled water brand in high school and watched him start several other companies in the food space after that. And when I was in college, I started a marketing company for natural and organic food and beverage brand. So that was kind of my first lens into the natural products industry and really got me, you know, looking at, at different foods and tracking trends.

5:56And, um, you know, I knew I always wanted to start something of my own, but I would say that was kind of my first foray into the space. And yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I know, um, um, that's, that's awesome. I know that, uh, you, you, you both were, you know, a couple in, in high school and, and, and of course we're, you know, uh, partners all the way up. Um, now obviously you're, you're, you're both married and, And that's amazing. Why did you both kind of navigate towards each other as well on the business side too? And how did that kind of come about with, you know, being a couple and then also starting a business when eventually became Little Spoon?

6:34Yeah, I mean, it's kind of all we know because we've been doing this for so long. I mean, obviously, there was a life before Little Spoon, but we're so all in on this.

6:51And we launched the brand six years ago. We were, of course, working on it before that. And so we've been doing this for a while. And obviously when you're building any business from the ground up, you know, let alone, you know, a consumer brand, you got to go all in. It's, you know, it really takes a lot to, I mean, in a lot of ways you are kind of devoting a big chunk of your life to building. And so I think we, I'd like to say that we thought it all through fully before we got into this, but that would probably be giving ourselves a little too much credit. I think that ultimately, though, at least sort of in reflection, the awesome thing about building a business with your partner in life is that business is a partnership.

7:51And again, you're building something. You're taking it from literally an idea to you're creating something out of nothing. And the only way to do that outside of just pure luck is through living and breathing your business. And so, you know, why not do it with someone who, you know, you love and trust and know inside and out and live with? So, you know, we're, you know, and there's probably some notable downsides of building a business with your spouse, but maybe for another time, but over a drink perhaps. But, you know, I think there's so many advantages to it as well. And I think a lot of it just comes back to what it takes to build a successful business and to really get something off the ground and scale it.

8:44It takes a lot of time and grit and persistence and hours and having your partner be along that same track with you. And it's a really cool, powerful thing. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't even know how we would do it otherwise. Cause, um, I think, you know, we wouldn't have the same level of sort of appreciation about what each other is, you know, what each of us are, are, um, putting into it, putting into it and going through. And so, yeah, it's just like super helpful. I think it's honestly, in a lot of ways, a competitive advantage. That's amazing. Um, well, how, how, when you both decided, okay, we're both going to start this business together.

9:25How did you think as well about responsibilities, making sure that as well, you know, Ben, you don't kind of interfere with maybe Angela's domain and like, and kind of vice versa? I think our skill sets are pretty complimentary of one another. So, you know, Ben is really wonderful. I mean, he's the CEO of the business and he has a great background in, you know, the operations side of the business. He really brought a ton of knowledge to the table. I was more you know into the marketing side of things the brand side of things the product innovation the product creation side of things so I think our skill sets really balanced each other nicely and we really just both fight naturally found you know our paths within the company there there wasn't too much like shared territory yeah I think a lot of like no for sure I think a lot of you know what was shared of course was like the the vision the mission like you know really kind of uniting around some like shared beliefs and a plan but but yeah in terms of day-to-day um even like even in the earliest days and and certainly now um our roles have always looked and still look you know completely completely different from one another um and so Angela's yeah very like she was you know the one that that like developed our initial all the packaging, all the, the, the branding, the, the recipes, I mean, doing all literally the R &D herself in our kitchen.

10:51Um, and I was doing all the, you know, less exciting, less fun stuff, like, you know, capital ops, all the, all the stuff that it takes to actually get it off the ground. Um, so yeah, we, we were, we made a really good team in the beginning for sure. So speaking of, you know, getting the business off the ground from the very beginning, Why did you want to enter the baby food arena and go head to head against Scribbr? What was the insight that kind of brought you to do this? And also, how did you even learn about the baby food industry? Great question. All good questions. So I'll start by saying, and if it's not obvious, I'll say it.

11:40We actually don't have kids. which people find to be kind of funny, a little bit ironic, right? Starting a baby food company, don't have a baby. But, you know, we had, as we talked about, both of us were kind of in and around the food space, saw very clearly that there was a gap in this market. There was, I mean, baby food literally is a category that had not changed in a hundred years. I mean, Gerber, you mentioned, right? They're the sort of incumbent, you know, the big incumbent. Gerber started in the 1920s, essentially creating the very idea of baby food, right? Packaged baby food, you know, in a jar, sold in a grocery store.

12:30And, you know, still to this day, despite so many things, you know, if you look at any other food and beverage category, certainly, or really just the broader consumer landscape, almost every category in every industry has been disrupted. But baby food, you know, at the time when we were just, you know, kicking this idea and opportunity around, baby food was just this space that hadn't changed. I mean, like we were astonished by how little had changed, how little disruption. Meanwhile, I mean, you know, funny, like little anecdote was at the time, you know, we were sort of scratching our heads wondering how and why there were like 10 companies selling fresh pet food and not a single company that had, you know, that was offering a fresh, a fresh option for babies.

13:25And then, and it wasn't just baby food, by the way. I mean, we, you know, that was what we started Little Spoon with. Um, and we'll kind of tell you about our evolution of the business, you know, how the business has evolved and, and, and, and which is a lot over the years. Um, but it was also really notable as, as well, that, that all the, you know, look across the, the kids' food landscape, you look at, you know, companies, um, like Lunchables, um, right. That have been around for decades. Um, so many other legacy brands, you know, look at like, whether it's in the vitamin space or in the frozen food space for babies and kids, like the bar was just so incredibly low.

14:07And meanwhile, you know, I think it's very, it's, it's, you know, an obvious thing to say, but every parent wants the best for their kids. I mean, every, you know, every parent, whether you're, you know, high income, low income, high education, low education, you know, New York City or Arkansas, like you want the best for your kids. And, and I think that also the understanding and awareness about the importance of food as it relates to health and how, you know, we look at our, you know, the, you look at like childhood obesity and stuff. And I mean, you know, we could talk for hours about, about, about the food system and everything.

14:49I mean, not to get too deep, but like, it was just so obvious to us that like there was this market had just not kept up with the times and um and one of the things that was very you know exciting and interesting going back to the pet food example which um you know what what started out as some somewhat of a head scratcher turned into like it clicked it was really obvious it became obvious why there were so many companies in the fresh pet food space is because a lot of, you know, a lot of folks that before they're ready to start families, before they're ready to actually like, you know, get married and, and start, you know, you know, like have kids and build a family often are having, um, often are, you know, getting a dog.

15:38Right. And that's kind of a very natural evolution. It's certainly one that, um, we did and we can relate to. And, um, a lot of, I mean, that was just, that was, that's just like, that's a, that's a societal norm. And so the, the, the light bulb moment was like this, the same sort of consumer segment that has driven the disruption in the pet food space. And those were, that was still very early days in that market. That same consumer is probably, you know, some number of years out from being ready to have, you know, babies and kids and build a family. And we know the types of sort of values and needs and wants and expectations that this generation of parents have.

16:21It just simply wasn't being met by the big legacy brands in the market. Yeah, it also seems to like an understanding of, okay, if parents, if, you know, pet parents want, want their pets to eat healthy, healthy, nutritious meals, right, then probably they're going to want to even 10x that for their, for their actual kids, right, and make sure their actual kids are, are actually eating healthy, nutritious meals. So totally, totally get it from like that lens. So talk to me a little bit about too, what was the initial product set that you launched with and really the part in the kind of age group from a baby that you really wanted to kind of first focus in on and target?

17:07Yep. So we launched with an initial set of 10 SKUs, so 10 baby blends or baby food purees. And we're really targeting that, you know, 6 to 12 month old baby. Babies typically start eating purees around 6 months and wean off, you know, around 11 or 12 months whenever they start solid table food. So launched with initial set of 10 SKUs, but it became clear very, very quickly that we needed far more offerings because kids typically start with a single ingredient puree. They'll move into some simple combinations and then they'll move into textures. And then parents want to keep introducing new and exciting.

17:49And that's just within that baby puree stage, right? Our baby blends product. Right. Not to mention all the other sort of use occasions and eating stage evolution that that kids have as they go from sort of the six-month-old baby to the nine-month-old baby to the toddler and so on. It's, you know, those needs are constantly changing. So, yeah, we could definitely walk you through sort of how we evolved the product offering over time because it's changed considerably. But one thing I'll just note, when Angela mentioned baby blends, You know, we this was our this was our first product category, like she said.

18:35And and really the sort of very simple way to explain how that differed from what was in the market is it was it was made fresh. So we leveraged basically like a cold pressure processing technology that. at the time was becoming popular with a lot of like cold pressed juices and hummus and dips and salad dressing brands they were all utilizing this cold press technology to really take products that were found traditionally in the inner aisles of the grocery store that were you know shelf stable and bringing them to the refrigerated set so um we utilize that technology to really make like a fresh baby food product that was reminiscent as if a parent were to make you know purees and fruits and vegetables at home themselves.

19:20It seems like a pretty off the ground, it seems like a pretty tough business because you have a multiple amount of like SKU assortments or product assortments for the children, for the kids. And it's not actually like a long period that people would use your product. I know the product now has expanded and I certainly wanna talk about that. But it so, you know, eventually they might, you know, churn maybe like three, six months afterwards from that. But so you have to have enough variety for parents to be introducing new types of new types of foods for their kids. Is that is that right? Yes, that's exactly right.

20:07So, you know, we launched with that initial set of 10 SKUs and today we have, you know, around 50 just in our baby blends, like baby, pureed baby food line alone. And that's one of seven categories that we offer today, right? So you can imagine, yeah, like 10 SKUs to 50, one category to seven, you know, all in all we've got, you know, upwards of what, 120 SKUs across our, you know, full range of products. And that's really been a huge driver of growth for us, right? It's like being able to be that, you know, really what I would describe and what I would say is really kind of the first and only of its kind in terms of being an end-to-end system or platform of products so that, you know, somebody can come to littlespoon.com when their baby's having their first bites of food and we will basically, you know, they can, they can stay with us as their kid, as their, as their baby grows.

21:12You know, again, the baby becomes a toddler before, you know, it, the toddler becomes an older kid. And then, you know, that same family maybe has a second kid, third kid. And so we're, they're able to stay on our platform and we're able to continue to serve their needs as the kid, as the kid grows. But, but also just through, you know, other use occasions. You know, we have gone from, you know, we not only have our meal offerings, but we've got, you know, we're a wide array as well of sort of more occasional products. Our smoothie pouches, for example, are, you know, we've got snacks, we've got, you know, puffs for babies.

21:54We've got a whole bunch of stuff that really keeps our, you know, keeps our customers more ingrained and allows us to get, you know, frankly, a lot more ingrained in our customers' lives, which has been, you know, not only very rewarding in terms of the connection that we've been able to, you know, build with our customers, but of course, you know, from a business standpoint, it's enabled us to build, you know, a really powerful, a really powerful business through our product offering. Can you walk us through how you expanded in terms of the different time periods for a baby and a child's life?

22:32I know that the initial use case was purees or from the moment a baby was able to actually start eating and maybe wean off the bottle or was having purees in conjunction with bottles. But what was the next age group that you all wanted to target and why? Yeah, so I mean, the natural next age group that we wanted to target was your toddlers. So we really wanted to make sure that we were keeping our baby customers within our ecosystem and serving up products to them that made it easy to help that transition from curate to table food. So it's interesting, actually, the next product that we launched after our baby blends, we launched the baby food in 2020.

23:18Sorry, we launched the baby food in 2017. And the next product we launched was in 2020. And that is our product line that's called Plates. And so Plates are ready to heat meals for toddlers. So everything from macaroni and cheese with hidden butternut and carrots in the sauce. We have our chicken super nuggets that have kale, cauliflower, and carrots hidden inside of them. More global flavors. We have chicken tikka. We have chicken dumplings. All types of, you know, we have about 30 ready-to-heat plates for toddlers. So we launched those in 2020. It was a great success. But one interesting thing that we saw was that parents were still kind of dropping off when their babies were around 12 months.

24:02And they were finished with the baby blends. And then they were picking back up on the plates maybe, you know, six or eight months later. So we saw that there was still kind of this gap there. And we realized, you know, the plates were maybe a little too advanced for a child just weaning off purees. So last year we launched a line of products to kind of fill in that gap, which is our line of biteables. And so those are really tiny cut to size fruits and animal proteins that are really designed to help children. vegetables really designed to help children um you know develop their motor by motor skills pinch or grasp chewing chewing things gnawing on things and so um we found that since we've we've launched that product line we really see parents coming to us going from you know the blends to the biteables and now to the plates and of course as Ben mentioned earlier we also have a line of smoothies which are fruit and vegetable purees in a pouch we have a line of shelf stable snacks that are targeted more towards school age, as well as build-it-yourself lunches.

25:04So really creating products to keep people within our ecosystem and carry all the way through. This episode is brought to you by Propeller Industries. If you run a high growth business and you're focused on profitability, extending your runway, and improving your operational efficiency, you probably need a finance and accounting whiz that will grow with you. Well, instead of hiring someone full-time, what would be cost-effective is working with Propeller Industries. Propeller Industries is a leading strategic finance and accounting partner for venture stage companies and has partnered with over 1 ,000 startups and high-growth businesses across consumer products, consumer tech, and enterprise.

25:41Some of the brands that they've worked with are Liquid Death, Olipop, Hymns, Farmer's Dog, Away, MoviePass, and Giphy. Propeller also provides specialized support for fundraising and M &A with transaction advisory services. Propeller's TA team of former investment bankers and investors can step in on more of a project basis when pursuing full-scale financing and M &A. There's a link to Propeller Industries in the show notes if you want to learn more information. Was subscription kind of... I know that you all boast... I mean, you all have millions of subscribers, which is so impressive and absolutely incredible.

26:19was the was the goal from the very beginning to think about this product as a subscription type product where you actually then kind of uh parents keep subscribing throughout the kids um out out of child's development or or did that kind of come a little bit later when when thinking about yeah so it's interesting i mean subscription you know in the subscription i guess the short answer is we were not, we were not set on subscription in, in the beginning. Um, in subscription, you know, after we decided that we were going to build this business as a D to C brand on, you know, an e-commerce brand, um, which, you know, wasn't, you know, day zero.

27:05I mean, that, that was, we, we were sort of, we, we were evaluating, you know, do we want to go D to C? Do we want to go retail? And we did toy around with going retail, but that's, we can come back to that if we have time. But, but in terms of the D to C piece, yeah, subscription was, was definitely not something that we were set on. It was, but it became clear that we have a product offering that was really, truly conducive to subscription. And I think that, you know, You see today a lot of companies that offer their product as a subscription, I think mostly because they want to be, because they think that's the right business decision.

27:55That's fine, but I don't think that you build a great brand by being subscription for the sake of being subscription. I think that, you know, subscription is obviously can be a great business, but it really has to, you know, it's like, what does your customer want? What fits their life? And, you know, they're really solving the, you know, the pain point here. And we knew that, you know, this was the type of our product offering. I mean, even in the baby blend stage alone, let alone, you know, with all the other products, having a subscription really allowed it, you know, really allowed us to, you know, fulfill our mission even better.

28:35which, you know, our mission is to make it easy for parents to keep their kids healthy, you know, making their life a little bit easier by having something that is on autopilot, that they can, you know, just stay on a platform, you know, that we can tailor the offering to the kid at different eating stages. Like we know, you know, if you tell us that your kid is five minutes old and they've never tried solid food before, we're going to give you a different set of products and a different, you know, we're going to make different recommendations than we would if you tell us that your kid is nine months old and, you know, has been eating purees for months.

29:20And so just being able to really kind of tailor the experience and then, you know, keep that customer really engaged and provide value back through the subscription offering outside of the convenience itself. But, you know, educate them and just make things, again, just like a little bit easier along the way. So, yeah, for us, subscription wasn't a foregone conclusion, but it was something that, you know, just made a ton of sense. Well, I'd love to also back up that. I mean, that makes sense also from maybe from a data perspective. you maybe see parents, customers coming back for more and continue shopping.

29:57Why not make this a subscription product as well just to actually ease them and to make it a lot simpler for them so they don't always have to kind of come back each time. So definitely, as you expanded into different age ranges, that totally makes sense in terms of a subscription product. Why DTC from the get-go? Why not retail? I know, Ben, you had experience within retail. Why did you both decide that D2C was the best channel? So it was, I mean, it was a bit of a winding path to get to that decision. You know, it was definitely something we gave a lot of consideration to. We were, I mean, in full transparency, we were originally planning to launch Little Spoon in retail.