Whole Foods Said Wait. Little Spoon Built A $150M Brand Instead.

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0:37Hello, friends. I'm Ray Latif, and you're tuned into Taste Radio, the number one podcast for anyone building a business in food or beverage. How do you build a$100 million CPG brand when your first retail opportunity falls apart? For Littlespoon, the answer was to stop waiting for the shelf and start building a relationship with the customer. After its initial plans to launch fresh baby food with Whole Foods hit a roadblock, co-founder and chief product officer Angela Vranich helped steer the company toward a D2C first strategy that transformed Littlespoon into the largest direct-to-consumer baby and kids' food brand in the U.S.

1:24The company has since expanded into more than 100 products, entered retail through an exclusive partnership with Target, and built a business around understanding what modern parents want. In this episode, Angela breaks down the decisions, challenges, and operating principles behind Little Spoon's Rise, from product innovation and customer education to scaling a complex food business without compromising quality.

1:57Hey, folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I'm supremely honored to be sitting down with Angela Vrenich, who is the co-founder and chief product officer of Little Spoon. Angela, it's great to see you. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. You are in your beautiful office in the glitzy neighborhood of Soho in New York City. I'm in the basement of our office here in Newton, Massachusetts. I imagine that it's pretty fun being where you are. How long have you been in New York City? We launched the company in 2017. We moved our office here in 2018. So eight years. Eight years. Wow. Yeah. Very cool.

2:33And have you been in that office since? We have moved around. This is our third office. So our first office was on Spring Street. It was basically a glorified one bedroom apartment. We have nine people working out of that office. And then we were at an office on Bond Street. We had like 20 people out of that office. And we have about 35 people in this office. We're on Crosby. in Soho. And it's really lovely. We moved here a little over a year ago. Well, it reflects the growth of Little Spoon, which has blossomed into one of the most admired CPG brands in our space. And, you know, in a weird way, I almost hesitate to call you a CPG brand because you're so much more than that.

3:11And when we refer to CPG, we often talk about retail. And most of your business is direct to consumer. Until recently, you were initially focused on retail. You were initially looking to become a baby and kid food brand that was focused on one particular retailer, at least at the outset, and that was Whole Foods. It didn't really work out that way. You know, when we initially concepted Little Spoon, we had one product, which was fresh baby food. And we thought we were going to launch in retail and really wanted to launch in Whole Foods. So we started working on the product. We actually got a couple commitments from a couple regions of Whole Foods, which at the time they were doing all their buying regionally.

3:58So we were going to launch in Soap Pack, we're going to launch in Rocky Mountain, did a big production run, we even bought coolers to go in line in their baby food aisle, because at the time there was no real destination for fresh baby food. And unfortunately, at the time, it ended up being a great thing to happen to us that it didn't work out. But at the time, we kind of hit a bump in the road with their global food safety team. And there was just some turnover and, you know, fresh baby food was a high liability product. And they were like, you have to fill out all this paperwork before you can start selling.

4:32And there was turnover with buyers, there was turnover at corporate, and we just kind of were stuck in this limbo, waiting around to launch at Whole Foods. And we weren't even sure that day was going to even come and decided to launch direct-to-consumer instead of waiting around and twiddling our thumbs. So we set up a website and started selling our fresh baby food online. We launched with 10 SKUs of Little Spoon Baby Blends. It kind of blows my mind to think about that because you could have just said, well, we have to find another retailer. I mean, direct-to-consumer, especially selling fresh baby food that needs to be refrigerated or frozen Were you shipping it frozen at the outset?

5:12We were shipping it refrigerated. Refrigerated. Not only is that in itself costly, but you have to earn the trust of consumers who will believe that it has stayed refrigerated throughout its shipping. It's even more striking that you went the D2C route given your launch of a marketing company in college. If I'm getting this right, and I think I am, it was called Sprout Squad. Is that right? Yes, that's correct. So I had a little marketing company in college that was called Sprout Squad. And we did product demos and product merchandising for a handful of brands. It honestly started out as like a fun project and then kind of blossomed into a real business my junior and senior year of college.

5:58Because at the time, I mean, product demos were like a huge way that brands were marketing in stores. And when you would get into like a Whole Foods, they would make you commit to doing a certain number of demos at stores. And so brands were always looking for companies and individuals to go in stores and do demos for them. So really kind of spread word of mouth. And that's kind of how I found myself in the food space. It's interesting when you launch a company that is direct to consumer. I wonder what your first hire is. I would think it's someone who is a digitally savvy person. But who was your first hire and what did they do for the company?

6:35So our very first hire was a brand ambassador, actually, who was kind of a boots on the ground person in New York, just blanketing New York City. We were finding every possible kid event, mom event that we could pop up at and really trying to create this groundswell and get the word out about Little Spoon in person to these parents because we knew that they really communicate word of mouth to each other. And so we had a brand ambassador who was on the ground just trying to get the word out. And that little. Was it a mom or was it someone that just had a relationship with a lot of other moms and parents?

7:09She was not a mom. She was actually just a recent college graduate who was living her best life in New York City and just like going all over, loved meeting new people and was just like networking her way around the city into all these different types of parenting and kid and mom events. That's amazing. And did you have to train her or sort of keep an eye on what she was doing? Or would you kind of leave her to her own devices and let her do what she does best? You know, we had check-ins with her every day as to what she was doing. But it's funny, like we'd be like two ships with her because she'd always have like two bags slung over her shoulder, like going to the next event.

7:46And yeah, we had periodic check-ins. We just kind of let her do her thing. How effective was it? Were people signing up for subscriptions? Were people actually buying from the platform? Yeah, I mean, it was really effective. Getting the word out in the early days, like having people being able to like see and touch and experience the product was so important. And so I think in those early days, it was really effective. Did you ever feel like there was a point where you needed to get back into retail or were you all in on DSC? And what made you feel like online sales were and would be the foundation of what Little Spoon is today?

8:23We launched direct to consumer and we ended up selling over a million meals in our first year. And we were like, wow, this is really working. And we never looked back at retail because D2C really enabled us to have that direct one-to-one relationship with our customers. So we knew their names. We knew who their kids were. We were able to really speak to them in a unique way. So like knowing who your customer is, is so important, especially in a business like Little Spoon, where you're working to establish trust and a lot of brand equity with these families. And so, you know, it worked, it clicked after the first year.

9:01And so we knew that we wanted to continue building the brand direct to consumer. If you launched Little Spoon in 2026, would it work? Direct to consumer, that is? I think so. Yes. We were also very well timed when we launched Little Spoon direct to consumer, because it was, you know, really right when millennial parents were starting to have children and the millennial generation is different than the generation prior. They're more digitally native. They're strapped for time. They value convenience. They really understand that food equals health more than prior generations. And so we were really able to get in with that audience, I really think, at the right time.

9:37I think 2026, there's more competition. There's more noise. It's a different environment. I think we would be able to make it work. I think it would just be a lot different than how we did it back in 2017. Perhaps more expensive, maybe a longer timeline. Definitely more expensive, that's for sure. Yeah. I want to back up for a sec because we haven't really talked about the vision for Little Spoon when you launched the company, and that was to deliver better products for babies and eventually older kids as well. This is a question that is asked of every entrepreneur, and I'll ask it of you. What did you see as the opportunity?

10:16Where was the white space for Little Spoon? Working in the natural products industry with my marketing company, Ben had his distribution company. We were both just kind of like in and around the space, looking at what was going on, tracking trends, you know, around 2014, 2015. It was really this like rise of fresh food in the natural product space. HPP, high pressure processing, which is the technology that we on the baby food was being used on cold-pressed juice. It was like the era of juice cleansing. And every treater you'd go to, there'd be all these new HPP products, dips, dressings, hummus, pet food.

10:50There were like 10 fresh pet food brands. And so really saw the opportunity in the baby food space to create something fresh, really just opportunistic. Neither of us were parents and saw that this was a category that could really use a fresh take and be disrupted and decided to go after it. It makes sense. People want to feed their kids the best food, or at least I would assume people want to feed their kids the best food they can. I think price, however, is one of the factors that makes it really difficult for families to feed their children the best food that there is out there. And accessibility and affordability is something that's near and dear to my heart because we should be able to democratize access to better food for all.

11:37How did you think about that? Was that a factor in the brand vision, at least at the outset? At the outset, I would say we really set out to create a premium product, which we knew came at a premium price point. I think as we've grown the brand beyond baby food, so we've grown it to 10 plus product categories. We have over 130 products at this point from baby toddler to big kid and the infant formula that you see on the screen behind me. accessibility has been something that has been also top of mind and very important for us. I think, you know, at Little Spoon, we have a big focus on quality of ingredients, transparency and testing.

12:16We will never be the cheapest option at Shelf or online, but we do feel like we are the best value for the money that you're getting when you're spending with Little Spoon. Yeah, it's important to know who you are and who you're targeting and why they're buying your product and the fact that they are willing to spend a certain amount of money on your brand. The question then becomes, well, how do we acquire those consumers and how do we make sure that they are not just one-time consumers, which I think speaks to your role as chief product officer as well. And of course, what I'm getting at is innovation.

12:55You spoke about 10 categories, over 130 products. To me, that sounds challenging. I was about to say something else, but it sounds challenging. When did you realize you had an opportunity to build a platform beyond that single product line? And what gave you the confidence that you could do so in a way that was going to be meaningful to your existing consumers in one that were just learning about the brand? Yeah, we pretty early on realized that it wasn't just baby food that could use disruption. It was really kids food as a whole. And I think the direct to consumer business model really gave us the platform and license to do that and really create more products to allow customers to age up with us.

13:39So direct to consumer has been amazing in that we're able to have that one-to-one relationship with our customer and really understand what they want and what they're looking for as their children are aging up. And we're able to like, you know, use our platform to really help educate them and guide them as to what they should be feeding their children next. So, you know, we launched in 2017 with our fresh baby food and very quickly customers that loved Little Spoon were saying, we would buy more from you. Do you have kids meals? Do you have other things? Because my child's growing out of the baby food.

14:09I mean, kids only eat baby food for a very narrow period of time, sometimes as little as four months, sometimes it's six to eight months. So as fast as we were acquiring those customers, we were losing them because they were aging out of our products and we really wanted to make sure that we could keep them on our platform. So our second product line that we launched in 2020 was our line of plates, which is a line of ready to heat kids meals for toddlers, which really allowed us to age up with the customers that were already on our platform.

14:35Angela Vranich:More than 70 % of new CPG products fail, often over margins founders never fully understood. Outsourced accounting can close that gap for good. Visit belaysolutions.com slash BevNet for a free small business accounting guide from Belay. Artificial intelligence is reshaping every corner of the beverage industry, but where is it creating real value today? Stay tuned till the end of this episode for a bonus interview when I sit down with Andrew Kreises and Lucinda Akwat of VIP to explore how AI is moving beyond analytics to automate decisions, improve efficiency, and transform the three-tier system.

15:20I want to unpack this one-to-one relationship that you've mentioned a few times. What does that entail? How do you cultivate and develop a relationship with your customers such that you feel like you know them really well and that they trust you, not just as a company, but as a partner in helping raise their kids? I think when you're feeding a child, it's a very sacred experience as a consumer. And so we really felt like if we were able to get people to trust us with their child's first bites of food, we would have license to feed those children as they were growing up. And one of the things that we do really well at Little Spoon is speak to our customers and educate our customers.

16:06And going back to the whole millennial consumer, if you were to look at the baby brands and products on the shelf, when we launched back in 2017, it was a lot of branding and messaging that was catered to the baby, like very goo-goo-ga-ga, cheesy kids' names, cartoons on the package. And the child isn't the one making the purchasing decision. It's the parent, and it's a modern parent, and they want to be spoken to and educated in that way. And so beyond our products, we've built really a whole brand platform, and we have a whole educational content hub called The Feed where, you know, parents can go and find guidance.

16:41And I think that guidance and messaging coupled with the products that parents and kids love has really helped build that brand equity and build that passion that so many of our customers have for the brand. Did you feel like you needed to focus almost as much on content and communication as the brand and products themselves? Content was a big focus for us because when parents are feeding kids, especially for the first time, they have so many questions too. So we are the first line of defense with our customers as a direct-to-consumer brand. If there's a question, an issue, a compliment, they're coming to us first.

17:19They're not going to the retailer where they purchased the product. So customer care and customer service was always a very central part of our business. And really making sure that we provide that content and education to our customers was definitely a big focus from day one. I imagine it would. And I would think that there are a lot of people who reach out asking about food safety and what ingredients you're using and the quality of those ingredients. And I know Littlespoon has spent a lot of time focusing on quality and making sure that the ingredients you're using and sourcing are of the highest that you can source.

17:59It's a big investment, though. It's certainly a challenge. the scale that we're at now has really enabled us to see some of those cost savings with contracting larger volumes. We're contracting whole crops of things and we're able to really work with, I honestly think like more premium suppliers who wouldn't have the fact that our volumes are much larger now that wouldn't have had any interest working with us back in the day. So I think the scale has really unlocked access to a whole host of other suppliers for us, which has been tremendously helpful. And I think in terms of product testing and quality, that is something that Little Spoon has become known for.

18:43And that is really a core brand tenet that we will always prioritize. We do not take any chances or make any compromises when it comes to the safety of our products. We're feeding the most sensitive and sacred population, babies and kids. And so it's a responsibility that we take very seriously. And I think our investors understand that as well. And we really spare no expense when it comes to the quality of ingredients and the testing that we're doing on all of our products. When we spoke a few days ago, you mentioned to me that you don't own any manufacturing. Everything that you sell is co-packed.

19:20And again, that's a really, or I would think it's a really complex part of the business, given the sheer numbers that you have of product offerings and categories that you're involved with. You're correct. We don't own any of our manufacturing. It's all co-manufactured. We work with over 25 co-packers. We have six fulfillment centers around the country that we ship product from. We do all of our operations in-house. Our quality and food safety team is in-house. And it's over the years just become a very robust engine within Littlespoon. It's become kind of part of our competitive mode. I think the fact that we're able to have the depth and selection of products that we have over 130 SKUs spanning three temperature states.

20:06So, you know, ambient, refrigerated and frozen. It certainly hasn't been easy, but, you know, we've been able to make it happen. Is your business essentially two businesses? When I talk to folks that do have their own manufacturing, it is definitely a two business business. You know, you have the manufacturing side of things and you have a sales and marketing side of things. With Little Spoon, I would think that you almost have an operations business and a sales and marketing business. Am I right in thinking that that's kind of how you operate? I think that's one way to look at it. But I feel like everything, honestly, at the company is quite integrated.

20:39So we do all of our product development in-house. We have a team of six food scientists who all work very closely with, you know, our operations and quality and food safety team. And we work very closely with our marketing team as well on the types of products that we're coming out with. And all of those teams kind of work harmoniously together throughout our whole product development. Taste Radio meetups are continuing in Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco and London. Come hang out with the food, beverage and beer community for live podcast recordings, CPG networking and sample sharing. Want to attend or partner with us?

21:12Head to Tasteradio.com slash meetups. Quick pause to let you know that the leading event for the beverage industry is headed back to Los Angeles this December 6th through 8th. BevNet Live brings founders, investors, retailers, suppliers, and operators together for product discovery, high-value conversations, and partnerships that can shape what comes next. Early registration pricing is available now. Head to BevNetLive.com to register. Mark your calendar. Nosh Live is back December 3rd and 4th in Los Angeles. Join packaged food founders, buyers, investors, and operators for two days of product discovery and conversations focused on what's next.

21:47Early registration pricing is available now. Head to noshlive.com to register. How much do you think about culture when you are managing so many different people? 109 people, you had told me, are the number of people that work for Little Spoon. And with so many moving parts and so many different parts of the business, it would seem like you do have people operating kind of independently or sort of in their own little spheres for a lot of time. But bringing everyone together to make sure that you're all moving in the same direction has got to be an important part of Little Spoon. How do you cultivate culture, again, when you have so many different moving parts?

22:31It's a great question. culture is something that's super important to us at Little Spoon. I think as the company's grown, we have about 109 employees now, which, you know, about like 40 or 50 of them are based in New York and everyone else is remote. You know, culture is something that we focused on as we've scaled. We try to bring our team together as much as we can in New York. We'd like to do virtual events to really like get people to understand who they're working with. We have some really fun things that we do. We have one called Spooner Lunch Break, where we'll take an hour out of the day every trimester.

23:06Everyone gets a$25 DoorDash gift card, and we'll put people together in random groups over Zoom and just send icebreaker questions for people to get to know other people in the company that maybe they don't necessarily work with all the time. And so I think it's just a really nice way for people to get to know each other. A couple of years ago, we did our very first all hands. We took everyone to Mexico, which was It's so fun and very, very special to be able to do that for everyone. So really just prioritizing time for people to really get to know each other kind of in who other people are outside of work.

23:38And I'd also say just transparency within the workplace. We have an all hands meeting every single week where we're going over, you know, our sales numbers for the week, how we're doing, how different product lines are doing, what we're working on. We are big on communication and transparency within the company. So everyone has an understanding of what we're working toward and the mission behind the company. And so giving that level of transparency to, you know, the same level of transparency that you give to a senior employee, to a junior employee, really helps everyone feel like they're working toward a common goal.

24:11Like we are all on the same team. And we also believe ideas can and should come from anywhere. So maybe there's an area of the business that's underperforming. We want everyone to know about that because maybe there's someone on a team that has a really great idea of how we can turn it around. It's something that's always been top of mind and very important to us from day one. That's such a good point, Angela. You never know where the next great idea is going to come from in your business. And so we always attribute great ideas to those who have the most experience. But sometimes folks who are truly entrepreneurial in their mindset come up with ideas that no one else thought of because maybe folks didn't think that idea was possible until it was actually set.

24:57So I think that's a really, really good point. As you continue to grow and develop Little Spoon, I wonder what's next for the brand and how you think about the next stage of development. Is it in terms of innovation? Is it in terms of retail? Is it in terms of a potential acquisition? How do all those things play into the future of the company? In terms of product development, we want to continue going deeper and wider with the products that we're offering our customers. So I feel like at Littlespoon, we launch products at an unprecedented rate. Every week when I'm looking at our slide in our whole hands meeting of our roadmap of products that we have coming up, I'm continuously impressed because we just are launching different products across the business at all times.