Lil' Gourmets

0:00Shibani Baluja:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Shibani Baluja:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today I'm going to speak to a founder and CEO of a very cool emerging kids brand.

1:32Shibani Baluja:I have been obsessed with the kids food space. I think There's been some great traction, but so much more opportunity to really get kids to eat real food early on. So today I have the pleasure of having Shabani Beluja. She is a founder and CEO of Lil Gourmet's. And Shabani, I'm so happy to have you on here today. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. You're so welcome. So let's cut right to the chase. So you became a CPG founder, but to my understanding, that wasn't really on your radar. So how did this all start happening for you personally? Yeah. So I spent my life in food. When I was a kid, my parents started in one of the first Indian restaurants where I grew up in Michigan.

2:24I'm first generation from India. And so I spent my childhood working there, doing everything from, you know, busing table to eventually managing front of house. And after grad school, I went back to food. I joined Kraft Foods. And I spent a little over a decade there in mergers and acquisitions and just really loved the job. I would study industries. I'd studied brands. I'd see what was coming into favor, what might be going out of favor, what made sense with our portfolio, what no longer made sense. But at the same time, I personally was struggling through an extended infertility journey. So about five years to have my son and it was unexplained.

3:13And so I eventually turned to food when I couldn't figure out what else to do. And I cleaned up my diet, I eliminated all processed foods, and really discovered that food is medicine. And I had my son, who's now 12, Jaden. Yeah. So when the time came to introduce Jaden to solids, I just assumed that I would use the baby foods on the market. I was, you know, busy working mom, like so many of us already overwhelmed with being a new mom and my career. But when the time came, the irony really hit. He was sitting in his high chair. I had a jar of organic carrots and it was supposed to just be organic carrots.

3:56And I opened it and I looked at it and I was like, doesn't look like carrots, didn't smell like carrots, tasted it, didn't taste like carrots. And that's when the irony hit. Like this was essentially the food I had cut out of my diet in order to have them. And here I was about to feed it to him as one of his first foods. So just it didn't work for me with that experience. And so I ended up, you know, second struggle of motherhood was figuring out, well, how am I going to get this kid food that I feel good about? Right. And so I would cook all these meals for him, you know, every Sunday, basically spend the day cooking, cleaning his meals for the week.

4:35And in doing so, I just I focused on introducing him to a variety of veggies. And I always do spices just by background. Right. I didn't even think about not using spices. And I knew, you know, a background in food and having always studied industries, I knew baby food was a very U.S. and Western Europe kind of centric industry. And so if you went to Asia, you went to Latin America, kids are just eating what parents are eating. So I fed him that way. And as a toddler, he loved veggies. He loved flavorful foods. And he actually hated processed food. And so the whole experience just got me so curious.

5:16So I started studying more about the importance of first foods. And what I was finding was emerging infant nutrition research was proving that a strong correlation exists between our early foods and our future eating habits. And so what I was seeing with Jaden is exactly what I should expect to see because he had been introduced to veggies early and because he had been introduced to diverse flavors early. He loved veggies and he loved diverse flavors. And so really interesting.

5:47Shibani Baluja:Also, yeah, the spice, right. By and large, the kids food space is very bland. Just get plainly. Right. So that is interesting that you just trusted your gut and was like, no, I'm going to add spices. I'm going to use flavors from my culture too and not necessarily take those out. Exactly. Like a very common first food in India is rice and lentils. And you just you don't make lentils without spices. You know, if you think about you and I, if we're going to eat cooked veggies, we're not going to eat them unseasoned because they don't taste good. The whole thing is we want, you know, we wanted, I wanted my kids' food to taste good.

6:30And so that's just how we did it. And so with that kind of medical knowledge, I then started studying the shelf a little bit closer. And what I was finding was about 90 % of products were fruit first. And everything at that point was pretty much shelf stable. But most foods started with apple, sometimes pear, sometimes banana, but 80 % of it was apple. And so we weren't actually introducing our kids to any variety in ingredients, in flavors. And so what then the science was saying was, well, if we're introducing our kids just to kind of these very bland flavors early on, we're actually encouraging them to only want bland foods, which then in turn was making them want more processed foods because they get that bland or salty type of that's that's what they want at that point.

7:31So it really was just so eye opening to me because it felt like, okay, we're, you know, we're, we're seeing childhood obesity increase. We're seeing this really big pain point of parents and picky eating. We actually have the solve, but I, I didn't see anyone in the, in the baby food industry trying to kind of launch something or I guess, I guess legacy brands, right? I wasn't seeing them really try to encourage our kids to develop their palate so that they could become healthy eaters as they aged up. And so that idea just kind of nagged at me for a while until I was like, I think I need to just try and see if I can make a change here.

8:21Very cool.

8:22Shibani Baluja:And I really like the how you've diversified your product of expanding the palette and introducing more vegetables than even fruit and also the spices and more of the palettes and not just the traditional sense of what's in the U.S. market, but really helping them expand. And so it sounds like you had a very cool job, though, at craft. So what was that moment you're like, oh, man, now I have to do this or like I can't get this out of my head. But I like my job. Like, what was that? Yeah. To take the leap. I'm sure that was not an easy choice. It wasn't easy. I mean, I tried to do it on the side in the beginning, but, you know, had an infinite home, had a demanding job.

9:09So that just went nowhere. And I guess fortunately for me, this was about 20. So this was 2015 craft merged with Heinz and 3G Capital. And so it became an easy choice for me to leave. I had through this experience, you know, lost passion for the brands that I was working on. And I'd say I spent my last two years there really trying to increase our exposure to natural organic brands, just knowing what I knew at that point. But it's really hard to turn a ship that big. So, yeah. So once we were acquired and they were eliminating the mergers and acquisitions team, it made my choice very easy. There wasn't anything else I wanted to do there.

9:59I loved M &A. Maybe I would have stayed had this not happened, but but life kind of just took me elsewhere. And so I left there and I I was interviewing for another job. And I just remember sitting there and it was, you know, big cubicles and and thinking this is just not what I want right now. my heart, my heart is not in this. My, I really will regret not taking the leap, especially when I have that opportunity handed to me by, by the craft merger with Heinz. So at that point, I very naively said to my husband, just give me a year. I'm going to figure out if this is something that has legs and 10 years later, I'm still seeing that.

10:45So.

10:46Shibani Baluja:Wow. So this has been a journey for 10 years. Yeah. So it took, it took us about three years to get to launch. Even though I had the vision of what the product would be from a technical point of view, um, and we haven't really gotten into the brand. So, um, so really what we're trying to offer is, is three, three key points of differentiation versus what was in the market at the time. The first we hit on the focus on veggies. So all of the products, all of our products deliver a hundred percent of a baby's daily veggies. So over a serving of veggies in each pouch, then our focus on flavor, and the focus on flavor really to kind of diversify their taste buds.

11:25And then the third is the freshness. So we're actually a refrigerated baby food. So we minimally process everything we use high pressure pasteurization. So same technology as like a cold press juice, right to really retain the nutrients and taste of a homemade meal. So those were the three kind of key points of differentiation that I went to the market with. And I talked to a lot of consumers as I was trying to figure this out. And I really did want to make sure that there was, I saw the white space, but I wanted to make sure there was demand. And definitely what I was seeing and hearing from parents was consistently 50 to 60 % of them saying, yeah, I only use kind of shelf stable either in a pinch or I don't use it at all.

12:10And they really, like me, were looking for fresher options. Veggies are the number one thing, as you know, that parents are looking for. So it really was those three things that I just, I guess, grounded the brand in. But then as I went to co-packers, because I decided I, you know, with my background at craft and it being a fresh baby food, I didn't want to start in a certified kitchen. I just wanted to start with experts. And so as I went, yeah, yeah. So as I went to co-packers, um, you know, there's a lot of pushback. They're like, you can't get to the, um, the acidity levels that you need to have a clean label product without using citric acid or some other powders.

12:55But I just, that wasn't, I wasn't going to do it if I had to do that. Like for me, it was like, I wanted it to be as clean label as a homemade meal. And so I just had to keep tinkering. I got pregnant with my daughter who's now nine. And I think that probably gave me the time to keep tinkering. And perhaps had that not happened, I would have given up on it. But when I was, you know, five, six months pregnant, I'm like, well, I guess I'm not gonna try to find a job right now. I'll just keep working at this and see if I can figure out these formulations. And so would just be in my kitchen kind of tinkering away and finally got it to where at least it was good enough to launch.

13:43And then we've improved on it since.

13:45Shibani Baluja:So walk me through the brand build. So that was nine years ago. To today, a lot more competition has entered the market. This is a really hot space. So what have you done to really help differentiate your brand and your products and really keep innovating in a space that when you first got started, it's almost the reverse. There was like nothing else out. Now there are options, but you're like, okay, cool. The category has grown, but also keeping it going, right? Like I would love to hear your perspective on the brand itself and then the strategy. Yeah. So, so when we launched, um, I spent my first, so we, we actually launched the product in late 2018 and spent the first six years in, um, little cups.

14:44So, um, really was trying to encourage spoon feeding for kids. So knowing that, knowing how important it was to kind of savor flavors and the importance of like using a spoon and hand-eye coordination and just recognizing satiety cues, I kind of, this is probably a piece of advice I'd give to other founders. You know, I kind of pushed myself that this was the way, the only way I could do it. But I can show you, Kelly, I know your viewers won't be able to see, but it was a little cup like this.

15:18Shibani Baluja:I remember this packaging. Do you? Okay. Okay. So, so it wasn't doing well on shelf. And I, I went through kind of four iterations of the design on the cup and we kept designing like this and this is how we wanted it to merchandise. And so for the listeners, you know, a front first merchandising that gave us like a three inch, a three inch billboard, but we kept getting merchandised sideways. And so we had about an inch and because we were a baby product that had different names, had a different look, and we were in the refrigerator, nobody knew what we were. And so I went through four designs of this.

16:04So this is five, six years of just trying to figure out how to get this cup to work. When people tasted the product, they loved it. We knew we had the repeat, but we could not get that trial. And with this last design that I that I loved, and I thought it was so kid friendly, and I thought it spoke to the brand. I walked into a store thought sitting sideways, and it just hit me it's it's not it's not the design on the cup, it is the cup itself, it is, it, you know, it is not going to work. And so that was early 2023, where I had to make a decision. Do I pivot? Do I go to a pouch, which is something that I, you know, had been kind of talking.

16:47What was your resistance to the pouch? Um, I felt like, or the research was showing, right. And if, if kids, babies, especially over rely on a pouch, they're not recognizing satiety cues. They're not, um, they're developing, um, sometimes some like sensory like issues and not getting a variety of textures. And we were offering a variety of textures. But what I realized was the pouch actually didn't stop parents from using a spoon, right? And that's what so many parents do of infants. They're actually, it's actually makes it easier because you can squeeze it right to the spoon. So I think I had to open my eyes to that.

17:32It wasn't something that I used as a parent. And so I resisted it. And when I thought about what am I going to do? Am I going to go to the pouch? Or am I going to shut down? I went through this exercise of like, okay, what are my negotiables? And what are my non-negotiables? My non-negotiables were freshness and veggies. You know, flavor was, well, I thought it was, it's necessary to make the vegetables taste good without masking them with fruit. But the cup was never anything I even talked about, really. So it became clear, this was a negotiable that I had like dug my heels in. But it really wasn't necessary.

18:14And so, so ended up deciding, okay, gonna go, I'm gonna, I really believe in the product, I really believe in the mission. I got to give this thing a shot. And so had to basically start the company over. So the products you see today, we launched in April 2024. And we lost retailers along the way we, we had to do an entire supply chain reinvention, we had to reformulate. So really, when I think about now where we are, it's a it's a product that launched in April of 2024. But I have battle wounds for much longer.

18:52Shibani Baluja:Wow. Because to be honest with you, when I first saw your product, I was thinking it was newer because I just saw the pouches more recently. I didn't even realize that those cups were a part of it. So which, you know, is also good in a way that like gives you more of that emerging brand feel because you essentially needed to reset the whole room. I did. I did. Yep. So after resetting, that was in 24. Now we're early 26. What has been the feedback from retailers and consumers with the pouch? Yeah. So I think what we love now, and you asked about competition and things. So what we've seen now is fresh baby food is driving all growth in baby.

19:39And, you know, there are two very strong brands out there with once a on a farm and little spoon, which I love, right? We are a smaller brand. We haven't raised the capital of these, of these brands. And so I know a category always needs brands to succeed, right? Our parents have multiple need states and we're, I think, complimentary to the other brands out there, right? We were much more meal focused, veggie focused, whereas those brands are still, more fruit heavy and have gone across a lot of categories. So I think what's happened in the category is so exciting to us. So retailers are investing in fresh baby food in a way that they were not five years ago.

20:25And so I'm grateful that we stayed small over those years trying to figure out what was not working rather than kind of blowing up our distribution when we weren't seeing the velocities. So now, I was going to say, that's a good point for a lot of founders who are in the

20:44Shibani Baluja:really early days to hear because for so many, I'm thinking of my clients because I work with pre-launch CPG food and beverage founders. Usually they're creating a new category or they're doing something totally different. And then they see, you know, people start creeping up and out of the woodworks having similar ideas and products. And I always say like, no, that's actually good. You're going to show that there is demand for this category. You could only go so far being by yourself. Like you need other people too. So I'm glad that you touched upon that because I think that's a very important piece for founders so early on to think about, of thinking about how collectively it's actually helping grow a category.

21:29Right. Absolutely. And, and I would say it's so interesting because now we know, you know, we didn't have like SEO wasn't as strong back then not to date myself. Right. But I didn't know there were these other founders working on these things. Like we were all kind of working on them in our own vacuums, but like once upon a farm was in California, I was in Chicago. There was another brand called Pure Spoon that was down in Texas. Like it's like we kind of were working in our own bubbles almost on similar things. But but yeah, it's I think what we're seeing now is a brand with the strength of a once upon a farm has proven to retailers that there is consumer demand.

22:13And now retailers are like, okay, I see it. It is what is driving growth and we're going to invest in it. So Whole Foods is installing coolers across all their stores. And so we're launching into those coolers just the next week. That's so exciting. Yeah, so it's about, today they've got it in about 300 doors, but it's finally solving what we've had. We've had a couple issues. One was our own product issue and the format being, I'd say declining format that didn't allow consumers to know what we were. The other issue has been placement. because we're sometimes would be placed in produce, we'd sometimes be placed in dairy, but we weren't in the baby aisle, because there weren't coolers in the baby aisle.

23:00But Whole Foods, Walmart, we launched. So since launching the pouch, we approached Walmart, because they've got coolers in about 1400 doors. And so we launched into Walmart in 2025, in those doors. So we're really just kind of going to the retailers that are, you know, one, our consumer shopping at, but also that are passionate about Fresh Baby and wanting to build their Fresh Baby food business. And that is, you know, really our retail strategy right now.

23:33Shibani Baluja:That is also a really great story of you had a great idea. And then it just took a little bit a time though for the retailers to essentially catch up and want to invest in refrigerators in the baby section and I think that's also a really great example of you could have an awesome idea and maybe consumers are really passionate about it but it also you have to also work with the retailers too and it does take time to evolve versus switching to the pouch now these retailers have refrigeration in the kids section, boom, you're in business. Exactly. Exactly. Because when we were in dairy, we might sit next to like a yo baby, but they're a dollar a cup or six cups for$5, right?

24:23And we're at a$3 price point. It makes you as a brand have to really work harder to kind of have parents understand or consumers understand your differentiation and why you have such a premium versus now we're in it we'll be in the baby aisle we'll be next to brands like serenity kids and cerebelly even though they're shelf stable they're at a similar price point and so it's like parents understand like for that quality for organic for you know something like serenity with with again veggie heavy similar to us or or meats right it's it's what they're looking for and so getting to the like products is really, I think, where we'll hit our stride and get past parents understanding what we are, right?

25:08Which is such a hurdle when you've got three seconds.

25:12Shibani Baluja:Totally. Maybe even less than three seconds. Maybe less. Maybe less. Yeah. What is on the horizon? I know that you said launching into Whole Foods, which is so major. Anything else that you're really excited about in the new year? You know, we've actually renamed our product. So we're constantly tweaking. Danica, who heads marketing, and I were always, you know, really just trying to figure out what are our consumers looking for. So one of our SKUs was called Coconut Cauliflower Mash. And in the cup, we shortened it to Cauliflower Mash as we were just trying to shorten names. When we went to the pouch, we needed three words.

25:54So we went back to coconut cauliflower mash. We actually saw that product go from a number two to number four of the four that were out at the time. And it really was confusing. Right. So we started doing consumer research. And what we we ended up renaming it just cauliflower carrot mash. Sorry, coconut cauliflower mash. I'm going to the weeds to cauliflower carrot mash. And it went from at that point, number four to number one. And we were like, OK, this is super interesting. Yes.