80 Million Products Sold: How Little Spoon's Founder Would Start From Scratch Today

0:00This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like WAIFE, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas and Free People. Plus, free shipping and returns and free styling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Hey business besties, welcome back to Female Founder World. I'm Jasmine, I'm the host of the show and today I'm chatting with the chief product officer and co-founder of Little Spoon, Angela Branich.

0:39Welcome to the show. Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. Okay, people that don't know Little Spoon, what are you guys building? So at Little Spoon, we are on a mission to make parents' lives easier and kids healthier. We are the only one-stop shop platform where you can get baby, toddler, and big kid food. So we started in 2017 with a line of fresh baby food and ever since then have been growing with our customers. So today we have over 120 products on our platform and we serve up to age seven. People who are watching this on Spotify or if you're on YouTube, you can actually see some of the products on the table in front of us as well.

1:11So you can get a feel for what it is that you guys create. I also want to call out some milestones because you hit really big milestones last year, just to help people understand like the sheer scale of what you guys have done. It's incredible. 40 million sold. Is that right? 80 million. 80 million. Yeah. Well, Well, not last. I mean, 80 million to date meals sold. Your team is 100? Yeah, we're 110 now. And you've just, as of like this week while we're talking, rolled out into Target as well. Yes. We launched in retail for the very first time after seven years in business. Congratulations. Okay.

1:43The stuff that I want to talk to you about, I want to talk about the early years in the business, like the stuff that worked and how you got traction and lessons for the rest of us who are like there right now. and then versus what's growing the business and where you see things that are pushing the needle in 2025 because like these are very different landscapes and I also want to talk about this like DGC versus wholesale piece of the business as well because I'm really curious about this because you were going to launch into wholesale didn't happen and probably a blessing in disguise really yes so I want to talk about that for everyone who's sitting around thinking I just need to get into Whole Foods or Target and like all of my problems will be over and why you've kind of like done it at the pace why you've done it.

2:20Okay. So let's go back to the beginning, 2017. Tell me the origin story. Where did the idea come from? Like what was this baby food, toddler food market like at the time? Yes. So I identified the opportunity well before 2017. I started working on it in 2014. Actually, I was working in the food space with my husband, who was my then boyfriend. He was also in the food space. Identified an opportunity in baby food in particular. At the time, there was just this whole shift toward fresh. So fresh juices, there were 10 fresh pet food brands everywhere you turned. Everything that was shelf stable was being made fresh and put in the refrigerated set.

2:56Baby food was one category that had not been touched. So I did not have kids. I still don't have kids, but I looked at the baby food set and I saw an opportunity to create a fresh, better for you baby product. So set out to create Little spoon. It took a couple of years to get off the ground because at the time there were no fresh baby food brands. So I had to build out a whole manufacturing facility, custom packaging, and really like get to a place where we could commercialize it, which took quite a while. But that's, you know, we officially launched in 2017, but really took, took a bit to get to that point.

3:31And you were, when I was looking at your story before this, like you were pretty entrepreneurial before this business started, like what was your background? Yeah. So when I was in college, I had actually started a marketing company for natural and organic food and beverage brands. It was kind of like a little business that grew pretty organically into a big business. I had several dozen independent contractors working for me around the country doing demos and merchandising. And so that was kind of like my first foray into the food CPG space and was just always in and around it. Had friends working in the space and always just tracking trends and keeping my out.

4:05And I knew I wanted to start something else after that. And that was Little Spoon. But that sounds like that would have been working and you're like pretty young at the time. I can imagine like that actually could have been something that you just like pursued and grew that. Why did you decide to shut that down to do this? I honestly, it was, it really was just like this little business that grew into something much larger, but it wasn't something that really interested me. Like I did not want to be employing dozens of independent contractors and figuring out demos and merchandising for products.

4:33Like I wanted to have a brand and a product of my own. So I ultimately decided to just shut it down and go a different direction. I understand that. I also feel like that's something I hear a lot from people who are like agency owners or freelancers that kind of, I can do the thing for other people, but I want my own baby to grow. Like I want my own business that I'm building. Yeah. So you launched in 2017. What did you launch with? What was the first product? So we launched with 10 SKUs of baby food. That's a lot, no? Not really. Yeah, not compared to now, but even back then. Like just on this side of the table.

5:05Yeah, like our initial insight, though, was like we need more flavors because people wanted, you know, they want to expose their kids to different ingredients. And so, you know, only we only had 10. It really wasn't that many. And a few of them were single ingredients. So that was like our first real learning was like we got to get some more some more flavors and some more assortment for people because I think people just get bored and fatigued after. And what was your what was your launch plan? Like you've got this product. I'm assuming that actually creating the thing would have been super, super hard because that feels like a category that probably has a lot of red tape around it.

5:37Yes, it was incredibly hard because no one had ever made fresh baby food before. We could not find a manufacturer who even wanted to make it for us because obviously there's a lot of liability associated with making baby food. And we were using a new food technology called high pressure processing that, you know, was an alternative to thermal pasteurization. So there were a lot of nuances with that. It was what allowed us to keep the product refrigerated, but also safe. So it could be sold in a retail environment. No one had ever used it for baby food before. So we had a lot of, had to run a lot of tests.

6:09We had to develop custom packaging, which was time consuming and expensive. And like I said, we couldn't find a manufacturer. So really had to go out and get creative. And we ended up finding a tamale factory in Los Angeles owned by a guy. Yeah, by a guy named Pascal who had an open mind and extra space in his factory and was like, you can have like a little corner of this room. And what Pascal did have that we needed was a gigantic steamer because he was steaming tamales and we needed to steam produce to go into the baby food. Yeah. So we basically outfit this little space within a space. We brought in some consultants to help us like build out a whole like HACCP plan and process to make sure everything was like, you know, we were following good manufacturing practices and kind of like popped up this little manufacturing spot inside the tamale factory.

6:58And we're literally making baby food by hand. Wild. Okay. Where did the first customers come from in the early days? So initially we actually thought we were going to launch into retail. We got approved in a few regions of Whole Foods, but ended up like... Oh, that's so hard to do. It's been around for years before that happened. So we, I mean, we created an MVP of the product. This was all bootstrapped, by the way. Like we were using savings to fund the business at the time. Created an MVP of the product and started exhibiting at a couple expos. Got in front of a couple Whole Foods buyers. So there were two regions of Whole Foods at that time.

7:36They did their buying on a regional level. Now they've, I think they do most of their buying on a global level. So you had to get approved region by region. We got approved in the Rocky Mountain region and we got approved in the SOPAC region. And we fully thought we were going to launch there. Even to the point where they were like, there's no destination for fresh baby food, but we'd love for you to put coolers in line in the baby food aisle in the middle of the store. So we were like, amazing. We will buy you coolers. We literally went to China, sourced like three containers of coolers that we bought there, had all these coolers.

8:08We'd done our first production run of food. and then we got stuck in kind of this like internal corporate limbo at Whole Foods where they were passing us around because they'd never sold fresh baby food before and so they were like we need you to fill up this mountain of paperwork and then you need to talk to this person and there was just all this turnover internally there people quit or people left by the time we got approval the buyer that had brought us in he had already gone the new buyer wasn't necessarily interested in talk about this enough like the buyers move around and all of a sudden your like relationship completely changed 100 % contract is like on the hook yeah so we got sick of waiting around for them decided to launch direct to consumer so our coolers are still sitting in a storage facility somewhere in Florence California we pay for them every month but we launched direct to consumer in 2017 and we honestly never looked back it was truly the best thing that could have ever happened to us We sold over a million meals in that first year, which was so crazy.

9:05And I think it really was the best thing that ever happened to us. So thanks, Old Foods, for jerking us around. Okay, so you sold a million in the first year. That is wild. 2017 is a different time to now. Were you spending a lot on paid ads at the time? I feel like a lot of brands that I speak to did that. So it's funny because performance marketing, it was still kind of like in its infancy back then. And there were, it wasn't as like robust of an engine as it is now. Back then when we launched, we actually launched with a waitlist. So like wanted to create some buzz and excitement around it, even though like there was no, there was no waitlist.

9:43It was, the waitlist was fake, but we were, it was more so just for us to like regulate the number of people that could buy the product. Cause we wanted to make sure that the experience is what we wanted it to be and like workout king. So launch with a waitlist, what really worked well for us in the beginning. And this was back then was like grassroots marketing efforts. Our first hire was a grassroots marketing person here in New York who is going to like probably three events a day. Fitness classes, mommy and me events, like anything where we could find like our relevant demo. She was popping up and sampling everywhere.

10:17She was all over the city, like at all times. And we just really tried to create local buzz around Little Spoon and really did that in a concentrated way. in New York and then in San Francisco, which is where I was living at the time. I love the idea of, and a few people I've spoken to have done this, where they find a city or an area where they're like, I'm just going to saturate this particular with like a very specific demographic. And it'll feel like we're a lot bigger within that group because everyone will be recommending it to everyone and they'll see it in a few different places. And I feel like when you've got such limited budget in the beginning, it is just a really smart way to growth.

10:52It seems to still work today. Yeah, we do that now. We'll pick a few cities where we'll run specific ads. We'll like blink, we'll blanket events. So everywhere parents are going, there's Little Spoon being sampled. And well, I mean, it works. You know, you see an uptick in those certain geo-targeted areas when you do things like that. Okay, amazing. So you had this person who was boots on the ground doing this kind of like community building, sampling, scrappy marketing. What else were you doing in that first year? It was a lot of just like working out kinks with the website and shipping, our product was perishable.

11:24So figuring out how to really commercialize and operationalize selling perishable baby food and shipping it to people. And then thinking about what we were going to launch next, because we launched with, like I said, 10 SKUs of baby food. We found out very quickly that we needed to have more options for people. But as fast as we were acquiring customers, they were churning out because babies only eat baby food for a finite period of time. So they typically start eating food around six months and some people start feeding their kids solid food as early as nine or 10 months. So they would only be with us for a few months.

12:00We were paying to acquire these customers, but then they were leaving us only a few months later. So we really wanted to keep them around and keep them on our platform and find more ways to keep them engaged. So the first year was also really building out a product roadmap and kind of figuring out using consumer insights and figuring out what we wanted to launch next. When people say like using consumer insights, what are some of those things that you did to actually figure out, okay, we're going to launch like toddler food, I'm guessing is what it was next. And this is what we're going to launch.

12:29And this is what they want. Like what were you doing surveys? Were you having phone calls? Was it like, how were you getting that info? Yeah, it was everything. It was surveys, phone calls. It was making samples of potential new things, sending them to a small subset of people, getting them to try them with their kids, give us feedback, really just gathering insights any way we could. I think the beauty of our business model direct to consumer is like you do have that one-to-one relationship with that customer. And that's one of the things that we've really had a strong emphasis on throughout the growth of the brand is having that flywheel, that customer feedback loop that really has helped us inform all of our product decisions that we've made.

13:12I think if you're selling in traditional retail, it's a little harder to get that feedback. You're kind of relying on syndicated data, sales. With direct-to-consumer, I mean, we have real-time data on everything that's selling. We're the first line of defense. If they have an issue, if they have something to say, if they like something, they're reaching out to us directly. So it was really easy for us to gather those types of insights. For founders and brands who are in their first few years of business and they just like want to get into one of those big chain retailers and it's not working. Like what advice do you have for them based on your experience?

13:50Because it feels like, like you said before, like the fact that you went to DTC straight away and focused on that for a significant amount of time really paid off. Oh, geez. I don't know. That's a tough question because it really depends on the product. I think if I were to launch a brand now and wanted to launch it in retail, I would walk before I ran. I think try to find like a small regional retailer you can get in and really knock it out of the park and try to prove yourself, prove out metrics that you can then take to some of these bigger retailers and say this is resonating with a smaller retailer in a smaller space.

14:23And I think having that data will only help you. What kind of data? just customer sales data understanding how products are performing at a skew level really just understanding what's resonating with the customer and then it will help you know the buyer at a bigger retailer will make their decision that much easier to hopefully bring your product up yeah amazing i mean it's like with anything right if you've got a case study and somebody else that it's worked for then people are going to be more likely to trust you exactly okay let's talk about money i want to know how much it costs to start this thing So it cost about$200 ,000 in savings, which was a lot of money at the time.

14:57Most of that went toward we had to buy some equipment, some expensive equipment to put in the tamale factory. We had to create custom packaging. So we had to like purchase, you know, first find packaging suppliers that were even willing to work with our small minimums and purchase tooling for custom packaging. So that was really where I'd say the bulk of the expenses came from. Okay. And then did you end up raising money? We did raise money. We raised like an angel round, which was like a million and a quarter. So we raised that. We met a handful of investors and we exhibited at our first expo, which is there's a big natural products show that if any food and beverage girlies are listening, they should totally go to natural products expo west it's in an anaheim every year it's one of the best shows so we were exhibiting there met a few investors when they invested they thought we were going to launch in retail and they were because they were retail people and so when we decided to pivot to direct a consumer they weren't exactly thrilled but we were like just trust us we think this is the right decision but we raised a million and a quarter from them okay amazing and do you disclose how much you've raised since or is that like not to put you on the spot no you don't And when did you start paying yourself?

16:15We started paying ourselves. We were giving ourselves like a modest salary, but we raised a series A in January 2020. And that was when we started taking first. Yeah, properly taking a salary. Like a few years. Yeah, a few years. Which people don't talk about enough. It can take a long time. Yeah. So were you living on savings? Were you doing like other consulting work? How are you living? Yeah, no, I was living on savings. Luckily, I had savings from the business that I started in college. So that really helped. Did you immediately shut down that business when you started Little Spoon or did you like keep it kind of running?

16:46No, I mean, no, actually, I did shut it down. And then for a brief period of time, I worked not in food, but I worked in television production right after college because I thought maybe that was something that I wanted to do. And then I very quickly was like, no, this is not something that I want to do. Also, I think it's pretty hard to go to go from being your own boss to then working for someone else. Yeah. Yes, it is. That's a tough transition. It is. You've just had this incredible launch in Target quite a few years into the business now. So are you seven years in? Yeah, we'll be eight in November.

17:15Why was now the right time? I mean, we have really grown the business, scaled the business in the last seven years. We hit sustained profitability in 2024. You know, like we've sold over 80 million meals. We have a really loyal customer base on the direct-to-consumer side and, you know, over 120 SKUs. and we started talking to Target probably about a year ago. You know, they were interested in bringing in some Little Spoon products and because we have products across eight different categories on our website, we really wanted to make sure that whatever retail partner we chose was going to get behind our full line of products.

17:54What makes Little Spoon so unique is that we are a full platform of products. We're not building products around a single category. We're not just a pouch brand or just a kid's snack brand. We have products that span every age and stage, snacks, meals, baby cereal, you name it, we have it. And so when we went into retail, we wanted to make sure it wasn't just with like a handful of products, but we wanted to go in a really meaningful way and go in the same way that we've kind of built out our direct-to-consumer platform. And Target was just the best partner and the right partner for that. They really got behind us with this launch.

18:29And so we launched with 23 SKUs across six categories in 1 ,800 of their stores, which is honestly unheard of. It's the biggest food and beverage launch in Target's history. Typically, if you're a newer brand, you know, they'll take in a handful of SKUs and put you in a few hundred stores to test you. So I think because, you know, we were able to come to them and say, look, we've built out this direct-to-consumer business. We have a very loyal customer base. They already knew that it was resonating with parents. And so that gave them the conviction they needed to really go all in with us in a big way.

19:02How do you plan a launch like that? Because you obviously, you know, it's one thing to get on the shelf. It's another thing to get off the shelf. Yeah. What are you doing from a marketing perspective? From a marketing perspective, we're doing everything. Yeah. So we have, this is definitely like one of the biggest campaign moments we've ever done. So I mean, we just launched this three days ago. So if you go to, you know, Little Spoon's Instagram now, we've done collab posts with Target. We're running three television commercials right now. we're doing a ton of out of home so we have billboards we'll have vinyls on sidewalk we'll have flyaway posters and we're actually doing those in geo-targeted cities so Minneapolis Chicago we're going to be running them here in New York what else a whole influencer campaign I mean you name it we're doing it just all kinds of fun fun marketing things one thing I'm curious about listening to your story so you started focused on New York and I guess like the coastal cities and then I hear as you've scaled and a target launch like would indicate this as well you've obviously like really conquered like the rest of America as well and I I don't know how someone does that like how do you take the brand from being something that is maybe something that is used by like a very specific person in like New York or LA or San Francisco and then make it something that is a household product all throughout America.

20:22I mean, I really think that the direct-to-consumer nature of our business has helped us reach so many different types of consumers. And like I said, because we're not offering a single category of product, we're really offering all different types of products that people can kind of work into their routines in different ways. We've been able to reach, you know, households all across the country in that way. I want to talk about your team a little bit. So you have 100 on the team now, right? Yeah, 110. Who was your first hire? Our first hire was grassroots marketing here in New York. And then a few other people on the marketing side.

20:57So we have someone who's been with us from the very beginning. She's our chief brand officer now. Her name's Karen. So she's in charge of all of our brand marketing efforts and so much more. And then we had another one of our first hires was an operations hire because the business was so operations heavy. We needed help on that side. You've scaled up this team from a handful of people through to 100. For people who are making those decisions around first hires and team building, how do you make those decisions about who to bring in and how to create the kind of like culture and vibe that you want within that team?

21:29I think what we have an amazing company culture and we've had a great culture from day one and I think what has made our culture so unique is that I'm just as involved today as I was from the beginning as is you know my husband who is our CEO I mean we will roll up our sleeves we've been there I mean we were making food by hand and it's from all a factory so I think you know just understanding what everyone's role is. So for people who are trying to make that decision around early hires and who to like who to bring into the team when someone's sitting across from you in an interview and you're trying to decide whether they're the right person or the wrong person or when you're trying to decide like what role to fill next like how do you make those decisions and what advice do you have for people who are trying to make those decisions like for me I'm a few years into the business we've got a small team there's like three or four of us and I feel like I need help with like everything.

22:28How do you decide like whether to bring in a generalist or someone who's a specialist or like where to focus? Yeah, it's a great question. In the early days, we definitely hired generalists because there were so many hats that needed to be worn. We really needed people who could like roll up their sleeves and do anything that we asked them to. I mean, we had people that we hired to do marketing things that were doing operations type things. We had people that would get looped into just like helping us out with an event that we were throwing or something, even though that wasn't our job at all.

22:58So we hired a lot of generalists in the beginning. And then I think as the company grew, you know, three or four years in, we were like, okay, now we need some specialists because there are areas of the business that we really need to scale. And generalists in the beginning are great because they can wear so many hats. But as we grew, it was like, okay, we need to really hire people that know a very certain area of the business, like performance marketing, who can really just help take this to the next level. Yeah. And then how do you up level as a leader when you go from having this small team through to like leading a team of 100 people at a massive, massive compared to where you started, like definitely company?

23:32Like how does that, how does the person up level in that way? Don't be afraid to hire people that are smarter than you. Which like people say, but like, can we actually talk about that? Because it actually is scary having, feeling like you have to be the boss of someone who just knows so much more than you. Yeah, it is. It can be intimidating. It is intimidating. Sometimes I'm in a meeting and I'm just like, yeah, what am I adding here? Exactly. Should I just leave? Because I think you guys have it under control. Seriously, hire people that are smarter than you. And don't be afraid to do that because that's really how you're going to up level your business and take everything to the next level.

24:03You're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not doing that. And I think now that our team is 110 people, I get to have the luxury of focusing on things that give me energy and that I enjoy. So like the things that maybe I used to not enjoy so much, I can offload onto some of these specialists who like they're really good at them. And I can focus on growing the business and doing things that I really like and where I can be additive. I think that there's something around having the confidence to hire people that are smarter than you as well I think it can be you can feel or like speak for myself I feel like sometimes when I look at CVs coming in or the kind of person that I'd want to bring into the team I feel like I'm the one that should know the most or I'm the if I'm leading this thing like who am I to bring in somebody who is so much more experienced and knows so much more than me but you kind of need to have the confidence to back yourself and say like no what I'm building is like worthy of them there's something there, I think.

25:01Yep, absolutely. Okay. What else do I want to talk about? Oh, you've mentioned expos like quite a few times and I want to talk about expos. Is this something that you think early brands should still be like spending the time and the money and going to expos or are we just using fair now or like, you know, where does it fit into everything in 2025? I think it really depends on what your goals are and what your distribution is. So, I mean, expos are fun. Like they're really fun to be there. They're also very expensive to exhibit. I know of a lot of brands who just like go and walk the floor. They don't exhibit, but they'll still set up meetings with buyers and still like go to all the events and, you know, be out there and they'll have samples of their product.