Little Spoon - How to Build a Brand Parents' Trust

Rose (00:03.82)
Well, let's start at the beginning. Angela, what made you first spot the gap in this baby food aisle?

Angela Vranich (00:11.356)
Yeah, so it was really around 2014, 2015 in the natural product space, seeing the shift toward fresh. There were all these cold pressed juice brands coming out, fresh dips, fresh salad dressings. There was even fresh pet food. There were just so many fresh pet food brands that had come on the market and was really just taking a look at the space and seeing.

what categories really hadn't been disrupted hadn't changed. And baby food was this glaring category that hadn't changed in decades. Gerber was still the dominant player in the industry. And there was really, it was really ripe for disruption. We were living in San Francisco at the time and it was just like, it felt like the epicenter of kind of this early.

Rose (00:51.288)
amazing.

Angela Vranich (01:00.784)
these early tailwinds, like we were seeing so many interesting things pop up and like you said, cold breast juice and all these across the whole industry. We were just seeing it kind of firsthand in our lives and then obviously from the industry perspective and we went for it.

Rose (01:20.448)
Yeah, well, and Ben, think launching a baby food brand before becoming parents is a little unique angle for you too in the heritage story. So what convinced you it was the right move?

Angela Vranich (01:30.556)
Yeah, people do find that interesting and amusing that to 20-somethings at the time without kids would enter this market. mean, it was just that the market was so underserved. It was so glaring to us. mean, as Angela said, we were sort of left to scratch our heads wondering why there were a dozen companies selling fresh dog food.

and literally not a single option on the market for babies, for fresh food. As a parent, basically have to, the trade off at the time was you have to make it homemade or you have to settle for what you could buy in the grocery aisle. And we were starting to see, not only from the kind of industry vantage point, but of course, friends of ours and...

other people in our orbit that were entering this new life stage and it kind of clicked. There was all the same kind of base of consumers, the same tailwinds that were giving rise to categories like pet food. Those same consumers were just kind of earlier in their journey, right? Like it's sort of natural behavior to...

You start a relationship, you get a dog, you get settled in, then you start a family. And so it was sort of like, wow, so there's gonna be this whole new generation that is gonna be kind of entering this new phase of life. And there's really no brand that is appropriately serving them.

Rose (03:15.0)
So talk to us about those first production days. What did building from scratch really, really look like for the two of you?

Angela Vranich (03:23.408)
Well, we've got lots of stories. I mean, so I think the first thing was, like, building from scratch meant that we needed to figure out, you know, how do you... how to even make a product like this? If you were to go, let's say you wanted to make, a beverage brand or, you know, pretty much any other snack, pretty much any other consumer product, there's a whole ecosystem of...

contract manufacturers and third party companies that you can turn to who can make that product for you. But baby food is not that way. That ecosystem doesn't exist. And so we were sort of having to figure out... I mean, we were talking to... We probably talked to over... I I would bet 100 companies easily.

talking to people in the of the hummus space or even in juice trying to find these kind of adjacencies. But there was nowhere to go. So we were sort of like, all right, how do we bring this product to market? And at a certain point, it just became a little bit of desperation. mean, was like, whoever would even talk to us, we were happy to talk to them. But what we found is we found a manufacturing partner in the end.

that really, you know, had kind of brought to the table what we to learn as sort of the most important ingredient was someone who had a really open mind and believed in what we were doing and would really get behind it because it's a bet, right? I mean, they're having to, you know, they have...

other products they can make that have more kind of proven demand. How, you are you gonna take actual, you know, space in your building and time from your employees to take on something that, you know, could have, you know, who knows how it's gonna go. So we found someone that we were super kind of who was really believed in our mission and believed in our ability to execute. you know...

Rose (05:20.0)
That's true.

Angela Vranich (05:40.3)
what we did was we basically partnered with them. They weren't in the baby food business to be clear. They actually were a, believe it or not, a tamale factory. Needs males. So yeah, really, really, yeah. I could still smell the corn masa walking into that factory. But we ended up taking a space within the space.

Rose (05:54.012)
Hmm.

Wow

Angela Vranich (06:07.74)
We outfitted it with a lot of our own equipment, but they had one thing that we really needed, which was critical at the time, which was a giant steamer, because we were steaming fresh vegetables to puree into our baby food. And so we were using the giant steamer that they had. We put in process our own proprietary process that we had come up with, and we're using their labor. And that's how we started making the first batches of Little Spooner, making it by hand, and 100, 200 pound batches.

And that's really how we got it off the ground.

Rose (06:40.596)
That's amazing. Partnerships just they matter so much, you know. And I've worked with brands trying to disrupt legacy categories. And I know how hard it is to challenge. It feels like almost an untouchable space. And one early stage food brand I supported had the exact same challenge. They just couldn't even find a co-packer willing to take the risk. So hearing your story about this amazing factory and finding the one guy with a giant steamer and making it work, that kind of

Angela Vranich (06:53.358)
yeah.

Rose (07:08.908)
That resourcefulness is often what makes or breaks, I think, a founder's trajectory.

Angela Vranich (07:15.228)
Absolutely. And I mean, to add to that too, we were the first company to really try and make fresh baby food. And we were using this process called high pressure processing or HPP. So it's an alternative to thermal pasteurization where you use cold water pressure to keep the product safe at refrigerated temperatures. And back then, no one was even making.

know, packaging that we could use for this particular product that would hold up through HPP. So we actually had to go out and find, it was a whole other process, had to go out and find packaging manufacturers to make custom packaging for us that were willing to work with super small minimums. mean, you know, we were an unproven company that we were bootstrapping at that point, we hadn't raised any money. So found, you know, a couple of...

packaging companies that were willing to work with extremely small minimums, make custom packaging for us. mean, and that was a whole other host of processes, getting the packaging made, testing it, putting it through HPP. So it was really, really like a journey. So by the time we had, you know, our first cups of baby food, was like, felt like we had already, you know, a marathon.

Rose (08:30.61)
So what happened next? Once you had the product in hand, then you kind of faced the retail limbo, right? Like where to distribute it, how to get it to market. So how did you approach that?

Angela Vranich (08:41.476)
Yeah. So we were initially... well, taking a step back for anyone who doesn't know, just for context, Little Spoon is an entirely direct consumer business. We only sell exclusively online at littlespoon.com. And we've been that way since day one.

But on day zero, like in those really early moments, maybe the original plan going in actually was to launch in stores, was to sell in retail. So we actually had kind of a whole plan that we had formed to launch this initial set of products, which...

I mean, as you know, we also have today a wide array of products, which I'm sure we'll talk more about, but the time it was just our baby blends, just our purees, we started the business with, we were gonna launch those in Whole Foods, actually. And we had...

We had a commitment from Whole Foods for distribution across multiple regions, like five or six regions, I think, that we were going to launch in. long, long, long story short, partly for the reason that Angela mentioned, which is that this was kind of unchartered territory. Nobody had, there was no precedent for.

fresh baby food. You know, all baby food. I mean, since the 20s when Gerber started and, you know, basically created the very idea of baby food, which was, you know, food, you know, pureed, fruit and vegetables in a jar that, you know, it's pasteurized and set on the shelf for years. That was what baby food was. And so the idea of having baby food that, you know...

Angela Vranich (10:35.772)
was perishable, fresh, know, minimally processed, was, while exciting to Whole Foods, also sort of this giant question mark, like, is this legit? You know, is this safe, right? And of course, safety is of number... I mean, even for us, from then to now, I mean, is the absolute number one thing.

Rose (11:03.372)
day.

Angela Vranich (11:04.156)
Right? you know, but yet it was a hurdle. they, you know, we were sort of at the 11th hour, was kind of a whole, I mean, we had actually done a production run and we had made our first, I mean, it was very small at the time. didn't feel that small, But it felt giant at Yeah, like hundreds of units. Yeah. We produced and we were starting to...

like actually ship product into distribution to ultimately get to Whole Foods. we, I mean, a chance encounter with the, at the time, someone in the global grocery team at Whole Foods at a trade show, Natural Products Expo West, a chance encounter.

in the bathroom of all places led to kind of sparked this conversation, which all started really positive. And it was like, this is great, super exciting, love what you're doing. But have you gone through the QA process? Have you talked to our global food safety team? We just need to check some boxes and make sure, you know, that we...like before we actually like...

officially roll out. We're like, well, that's great, but we have product like on trucks right now on its way to, you know, the Rocky Mountain region to, whatever. And so basically we got caught in this kind of like limbo state that that person actually ended up leaving Whole Foods a week or two later. And then it was this...

Then we had to start kind of fresh with somebody else. There was a lot going on. It was sort of in the post-Amazon acquisition era, so there was a lot of other noise, I'm sure. We were not a priority. We were certainly not a priority, and I can understand why. But to us, it was devastating. mean, were... Everything we had worked towards up until that point in time was centered around this retail launch. And Whole Foods was like...

Angela Vranich (13:17.616)
There's only one Whole Foods, you know? It was where we wanted to launch. It was where we thought we needed to launch. And so, yeah, mean, basically what we did was while we entered this holding pattern in which, you know, at first we thought maybe it be a few weeks, which led to a few months and even longer, we decided, you know, hey, we can't just sit here and wait. We can't sit on our hands. We have to...

We have to sell product. Yeah. We built this brand. came this far. And so what we did was we built a website. We had a website, obviously, but not one that could not an e-commerce site. And we kind of like naively cobbled together our first website, which is on WordPress actually, and launched eventually, launched

Direct to consumer.

Rose (14:16.844)
Well, you know, and I just wonder how do you go about earning trust with new parents in such a digital only format? Because obviously trust is such a huge part and a new brand, it usually takes time to build that up.

Angela Vranich (14:30.864)
Yeah, so we, you know, when we made the decision to start selling online, it was really like we took a step back and we're looking at who is our customer and our customer is really these millennial parents, modern parents who are doing their research online.

We wanted to be the first thing that came up when they started researching what they should feed their child. And we saw it as not only an opportunity to sell them baby food, but also educate them on what they should be feeding, when they should be feeding, how they should be feeding. And so we have a whole educational component around not just feeding, but around parenting in general, because there are a lot of questions that come along.

parenting, especially for new parents. So really saw it as an opportunity to educate parents on their most burning questions. And later on, we ended up even building out a separate platform called Is This Normal? Where parents could write in, ask questions. We have a whole panel of experts, and it's really like a whole educational flywheel for parents to get information about all things related to kids and parenting. But in going back to like

Rose (15:20.481)
Yeah.

Angela Vranich (15:48.964)
just at that time, right? We were seeing, as Angela said, there was this millennial parent, obviously strong shift into digital territory. A lot of research was happening online. And so you might, as a new brand on the shelf in the store, somebody might discover you that way.

Rose (16:00.725)
Yes.

Angela Vranich (16:18.862)
lucky enough for them to even notice you there. But then, unlike a category like beverage or something else, it is a very highly considered purchase. I walk into a store, like, looks like a cool label. I'm gonna buy this if it's a kombucha or something. But if it's food for your baby, it is a totally different... The bar is different and the level of consideration and research is...

Rose (16:31.67)
Very.

Angela Vranich (16:48.08)
is elevated. And so we knew from the beginning that one, you know, we need to earn their trust. But how do we earn their trust? How do we even get them to consider us and get to know us and what we stand for? So much of that was already starting to happen online, even in those early days. And this was back in, you know, 2017, 2018 when we launched.

It was very clear to us that winning in the digital space was winning, period. And that was where we decided to place our bet.

Rose (17:28.778)
Yeah, I mean, it's such a it's a fascinating story. And it reminds me of one of my own. At one point in time, I took over a leading DTC for a very legacy brand one that was global 150 countries.

They had decades of trust with the brand, yet no roadmap for converting that into an online relationship like at all. Not any of that mentality or thinking. So the shift you made really early in recognizing prioritizing DTC as a relationship tool, and not just a distribution method, I think was really bold, really smart.

And I really wish more brands made that choice for the right reasons like you did, like super early on. I think that that was just genius and much to your credit in every way.

Angela Vranich (18:14.108)
Well, thank you. was definitely, I mean, there was definitely a little bit of luck and circumstance involved. mean, have a Whole Foods thing. Maybe had I not run into that buyer in the bathroom, maybe we would have launched the retail and maybe we'd be where we are. Maybe we wouldn't be, maybe we wouldn't even be around. I wouldn't be, there's a good chance we wouldn't be around.

honestly, because I think that the market was not ready for what we had. And winning at the shelf for so many reasons would have just not been. It would have been a different game and a more costly one. so, yeah, no, it worked out really well. And I thought also your point about doing it for the right reasons. I feel like we started to see, I remember in the beginning when we were

when we were getting going, there were a lot of companies out there, especially we were in San Francisco. So was sort of this, you know, the hotbed of all the Silicon Valley. You had brands like Allbirds and Casper and, know, like Warby Parker. There's sort of this whole crop of like...

e-commerce companies and they were early, early. And then of course like Blue Apron and so on in the food space. But basically the point is there were a lot of brands I saw, we saw that were kind of like e-commerce or like they went with the e-commerce or they went with subscription because they liked the business model, not because the business model really served their customer or...

made sense with the use case. And, you know, in our case, we knew that we had a customer. Again, this research is happening online. We know the parents are super busy, strapped for time. Convenience is, you know, ease convenience. These things are like critically important.

Rose (20:01.761)
you

Angela Vranich (20:24.73)
what better way to deliver, to educate and to deliver trust, or to really properly earn their trust and deliver on a high level of convenience than just showing up straight to your door and being able to have that one-to-one connection.

So, for us, it worked really well. And I think for brands where there is a good alignment to the consumer need, that's ultimately what it always comes back to for us is like, is this serving our customer and is it really addressing the pain points that they have?

Rose (21:01.984)
I think that that is, it's a really great topic and I want to pivot into the space of customer centric innovation. It always fascinates me on how you keep the customer at the table at all times in the journey of building and growing company and your product suite has really grown meaningfully. So what frameworks help you to decide what's next and it keeps the customer right at the forefront of your innovation.

Angela Vranich (21:28.442)
Yeah, I think the beauty of our business model is that we really have that one-to-one relationship with our customers. So we are the first line of defense when they have a question, if they have a complaint, if they have a compliment. So we're hearing all of their feedback in real time, which is awesome because that really fuels our innovation pipeline. It enables us to be very nimble. If there's something that's not working, we can iterate very quickly and act on.

you real feedback that we're getting. Yeah. Oh, no, I would. Yeah, I was just going to I was just going to second that. It's it's that the power of that relationship. mean, that's I would say we've that's been the secret to our strategy, really. I mean, it's not really that much of a secret is we're just really good listeners and.

Rose (22:01.994)
Yeah, so go ahead.

Rose (22:12.8)
everything.

Angela Vranich (22:23.694)
know, truck take, like when we hear from our customers that something, you know, whether it's something we're doing well or not, we're able to ingest that information and react to it in a way that I think has, you know, led to the growth of our product portfolio and really just the overall business over the last, you know, since day one.

Rose (22:50.665)
In our pre-interview, you referenced something around operational gravity. It sounded very interesting. So what did you learn when every employee connected directly with customers?

Angela Vranich (22:56.314)
Yep.

Angela Vranich (23:03.546)
Yeah, so Operation Gravity, well, I'll just explain what that is. So one of our core values of the company is that our customers are center of gravity. in the early days, it was easy to really, like, to live that just with every, know, going over the course of the day. For us, I mean, we were responding to customers, we were...

Rose (23:15.148)
I love that.

Angela Vranich (23:31.302)
you know, managing the inbox and the social media accounts and the like everything. So we were on the front lines and, even as the, even in the earlier days, like we were still hearing about things that were going on sort of, you know, one-off instances. But, you know, as the business gets bigger, it, despite your best efforts, it gets harder. People get more sort of siloed. You get more kind of removed from that. And so,

It's been something, you know, we take, we've, you every week we do like a voice of customer in our all hands meeting, our weekly huddle. really, everything we do is really rooted in the needs of the customer. So, that's just kind of the backdrop. We launched Operation Gravity. Operation Gravity was this initiative that was inspired by...

a really powerful interaction that actually Angela and I had. We were kind of randomly out to dinner back in the fall in Miami. And we were at this restaurant and kind of just out of nowhere. This, manager of the restaurant, you know, it would come over and we were not wearing anything. It's a little spoon. There was nothing. Like he was we were shocked that he knew who we were.

But he knew that we were the founders of Spoon. He said as he just came over to our table and said, I love your company. And we were sort of just taken aback by that because we've never really been recognized in this situation like that. But then he proceeded to then tell us sort of about how much Little Spoon has helped his life, his marriage has been so pivotal in...

feeding their child, both parents are working. mean, and just on and on, it was so knowledgeable about our products. was was unbelievable. It's like I felt...I remember...we were so tired. I remember we had like just flown in. We were sort of like debating, we go out to this dinner? And we left just like on a high. It was just this like unbelievable feeling to...

Angela Vranich (25:52.098)
talk to this customer and hear firsthand about that experience. And it was literally that night that we decided... I said to Angela, was like, would it be crazy if we had every single person in the company? Like, how do we replicate that? How do we scale that? My first thought was, I wish I had that on video. And then I was like, well, imagine if we could just...

you know, how can we replicate that in some way? And so we came up with Operation Gravity, which was, as you alluded to, pairing every single person on the Little Spoon team, every single full-time employee with a Little Spoon customer and matching them up and doing, you know, basically... Customer interviews. Customer interview. Yeah. It was an hour, 45 minutes to an hour.

I mean, it could be less, but basically that was the allocated time. And they just got on a Zoom call and talked. And we gave our team sort of a basic training on sort of like how to interview customers and how to... Make sure they weren't asked leading questions and... Right, because we wanted to also use it as an opportunity for...

real insights, like real research. I mean, the feel good part is like that's worth a lot, certainly, but it was also like, we have close to 100 people who are going to be, you know, imagine like all the great insights that we could glean from, you know, having.

those having that many conversations. So we kind of approached it as a research project and a team sort of enrichment opportunity. And I mean, it was just unbelievable. mean, people...

Angela Vranich (27:55.214)
still talk about it on our team. Everyone, mean, there are some people who cried. mean, like just the stories that we heard, the anecdotes. mean, we can people continue to reference. I mean, I even think about like the customer I interviewed and some of the pain points that she was telling me about. you know, those things have like sparked ideas.

that I've had and had, you know, I mean, we hear about this from other people on the team. It's just a really moving process. And obviously, you know, it's sample size of one. You can't base every decision off of it, but it really, these things really put a face to the customer and really just creates this like more ownership, I think, more ownership, you know, what we're doing, our mission, just giving people a lens into our customers' lives.

and understand the impact and who we're creating products and solutions for.

Rose (28:51.563)
so important.

really so important. And this is something that we preach off in our Compass Rose that it's like the second a brand loses touch with the person who they're serving, the growth starts to plateau. You can just see it. And as I've worked with founders who let dashboards replace dialogue, I think like that is so crucial and critical. The difference is night and day, you know? And it's so easy as you're scaling to get lost in the numbers and lost in the sauce, but like the real importance is that discussion happening. And as you said earlier, listen,

Angela Vranich (29:12.858)
Mm-hmm.

Rose (29:22.906)
and I think that's wonderful. It also sounds like Operation Gravity embeds consumers into the DNA of not only Little Spoon brand, but each team member and employee that you hire. So how has this shift and such a strong value been received by team members? How does that play out in the culture?

Angela Vranich (29:43.558)
You know, I mean, I would say that because we have always been a very customer centric business and we're constantly elevating customer, you know, pain points and, know, sharing, mean, we have, our Slack is very active sharing with our care team sharing, you know,

photos and videos and like remarkable messages that we hear from our customers. And so I think people feel the connection, but it's different when you're reading it or hearing about it than like actually feeling it firsthand from a conversation. So I think it just really like makes it a little more tangible perhaps.

Rose (30:30.722)
Thanks

Angela Vranich (30:32.06)
I don't think it created a cultural shift for us because I think fortunately we've been, that's been I think one of our, one of the things we've done quite well is the customer centricity, but certainly it's helped a ton and I think especially as new people come on board to be able to get that exposure.

It's yeah, I mean it's priceless definitely and I also think connecting people in the business who really aren't as close to our customers like obviously our customer care teams talking to the customers all the time I run our product development team so we're you know, we're talking to customers We're gathering insights, but people for example like on our tech team. They're not really talking to customers ever so really giving them that lens into

the customer's lives. What's working, what are the challenges that they have? I mean, it's incredible. It's incredible. yeah, we try to continue to do things like that. actually, Mother's Day is this weekend. And so just before this in our office, there's our whole conference room is...

crowded with people making handwritten notes for little spin customers. Yeah, we had a little hour long arts and crafts session. It was a nice little break in the day. We wrote some notes to our customers and those will be mailed out for Mother's Day, which is really sweet. So we always try to do things like that and surprise and delight the customers in that way too and make our team part of that as well.

Rose (32:10.744)
Amazing. know, another topic that I'm very curious about, given that you were a pioneer in the space, you really set some rigorous new safety and testing standards for the overall category. What led you there and how do you balance regulatory compliance with kind of self-imposed value-based standards?

Angela Vranich (32:34.008)
Yeah, you can take that one. Yeah, so I mean, obviously trust, as we talked about, is critically important. And one of the things that we've observed from the beginning, and it's actually only gotten more pronounced, it's only gotten worse, is that consumer trust of, call it big food companies or...

the legacy brands, these big incumbent players, the consumer trust in these brands has eroded over time. We actually did a survey last year.

of 2000 American families with kids under five and only 9 % of them said that they have a high degree of trust in baby food companies. so, yeah, and so, you know, it, and it makes sense because there's been, whether it's congressional investigations or recalls or instances of contaminants in food.

and people getting sick and all the ultra process movement. I all these things. There's been a lot of...

headlines, and I mean, it's top of mind for people. so, anyway, we recognize that and we are continually, I mean, from day one, we've really continued to do our best to... Let's see, we have our dog here, isn't he? Continue to really, you know, listen to our customers again and figure out how to meet their needs and how to be...

Angela Vranich (34:22.224)
you know, how to really advance this very antiquated category. And so what we learned is that with trust at an all-time low, that, you know, the regulatory standards actually in the US were also...

surprisingly low or just non-existent. And a lot of consumers were actually looking to buy an infant formula, that's actually a great example of this, looking to buy products from Europe and have them shipped over to the US because they didn't trust the products coming from the US, which is crazy. And so, anyway, I've seen this all play out and we started kind of plotting...

Rose (34:44.6)
I'm not sure.

Angela Vranich (35:12.526)
a plan to do something that no company has ever done before, which is set transparent safety limits, clear transparent standards for 500 toxins and contaminants and commit to testing every single batch of our food and sharing the results with our customers on littlespoon.com.

Rose (35:28.958)
Wow.

Angela Vranich (35:42.936)
And it went a step further. said, if any batch of ours does not comply with our published standards, we won't sell it. So as a customer, don't have to be, you know, apparent, you don't have to be worried about, like, I need to look up every single batch that I'm buying. I'm gonna get my box and I need to just, you know, go online and figure out like, what is the level of this and that? No, it's just, if we're shipping it to you...

it meets our standards. so just to give that peace of mind and relief to our customers is, I mean, it's what we're all about as a brand. it was just such a natural opportunity. So it was a lot of work and it was largely Angela's team on the product side.

to make that in the food safety side, to make that even possible as well as just the cross-functional effort across the whole company from procurement to even the tech side to enable the whole thing. So, yeah, something we're super proud of, raising the bar in this industry that so desperately needed a refresh.

You know, there are a lot of companies that have followed us on this, actually, not to the level that we're doing, to, you know, sort of versions of what we're doing. And look, we're happy to see it. mean, you we're not...it's not something we are...

It's not, this is not the advantage that we want LittleSpoon to have. certainly, when it comes to quality and safety, we welcome every other company in the space to get on board. And so we're seeing some nice positive movement and hoping that that continues.

Rose (37:34.252)
That's excellent, really excellent. You know, and there's also a question in my mind about choosing the right brand collaborations and partners that allow you to speak with parents.

and not necessarily at parents. just, you when I look at some of your latest collaborations, it's interesting to me because I feel like you've really, you've managed to insert yourself into the conversation very naturally. So tell me more about how you go about looking at the internal process when you're vetting a partnership opportunity. And, you know, how do you think about that and balance it with values?

Angela Vranich (38:13.146)
I mean, going back to this modern parent that we're catering to, right? I even when we conceptualized the brand so many years ago, we, you know, we really wanted to make it make the brand feel relevant. And like we were speaking to the modern parent, you look at so many of these baby brands on the market and they have kind of these like corny names or corny graphics or, you know, just weird baby sounding copy. And, you know, we wanted to create something that felt

cool, relevant, modern.

and that this new age parent was really resonating with this new age parent. And when we look at brand collaborations, we really look at that the same way. So we've done a lot of really cool brand collaborations, some that might feel a little unexpected. We've done quite a few with food companies. Some of our favorites that come to mind are we've collaborated with the olive oil brand Grazza. We use their olive oil as an ingredient in one of our blends.

and one of our Biteables last year. We did a fashion collaboration with the fashion designer Rachel Antonoff. She had this really cool puffer jacket that had this pasta print on it that went viral a couple of years ago. made for adults and we made a mini version with her most recently. So really just choosing brands that feel

culturally relevant to this parent that we're catering to. Just yesterday actually we launched another really fun one, which is a collab with Barney the dinosaur. So every millennial I think grew up loving Barney. So really choosing these, you know, brands that just resonate with our customers in that way. Yeah, and people have said, like I've had people say, well, Barney, that's so cool. But

Rose (39:55.042)
Really.

Angela Vranich (40:01.924)
Why not do something like, do kids still watch Barney? Is it, is it, you know, why not do like Cocoa Melon or something? And sure, not that we wouldn't, but, but you know, it's this idea that we are serving the parent. The parent is the one making the purchasing decision. They are, especially in our case as a, as a digitally native brand, you know, being able to have something that is so, you know, rare.

Rose (40:17.474)
That's

Angela Vranich (40:31.792)
that really taps into this kind of nostalgia and really delights the parent in an unexpected way. And that's for us, first and foremost.

Rose (40:45.442)
Brilliant, really brilliant. So now that you've been in business for seven years, I'm sure you have lots of lessons that stand out. And I'm wondering what's one of the most painful, but let's just say transformative operational or marketing lessons that you could share with other founders.

Angela Vranich (41:05.948)
That's a great question. So many, I don't know. I would say from a...

operational side. I you know, I think... I would say it's gonna sound really obvious, but really just make sure that, like, everything you're doing in the beginning, doesn't have to be scalable. Like, you can do things in a small way, test and learn. I mean, that's been something we've, you know, like, just...

We testing and learning and adapting and like not being, you know, not going through like as... Going through as few one-way doors as you can. Everything is sort of a two-way door that you can come back through if it doesn't work and do it better the next time. you know, don't be afraid to do things that are not scalable. Definitely test and learn. But definitely also make sure that...

that even though, even if it's not scalable from the beginning, that it can be scaled, and that the economics work. Again, it sounds really basic, but, you know, I...

even remember, I mean, we had, there was a company that we were, it was a competitor of ours in the early days and we were seeing, you know, some of the decisions that they were making in terms of how they were deploying marketing spend and they were shipping boxes from one side of the country, you know, priority overnight to the other side of the country. And it was just like, the math didn't work there. Like I don't, you know, I'm sure they figured that they would be able to get there eventually, but there, you know, that didn't work out for them. Right. So that,

Angela Vranich (42:51.112)
Like, again, basic, it sounds really basic, but a lot of founders, you I think assume, well, we'll figure out, like, we'll figure that out later, we'll figure out the margin later. And that can be true in some instances, but really, you should have the discipline to know when the business model works and when it doesn't work, you know, adapting if it's not...

if it's not fully there. I mean, I that's kind of a, I threw a lot out there in that response, but yeah, those are some of the things that would come to mind for me, at least more on the kind of like operating side.

And I would say, think like always listening and really always creating products for your customers. So, I mean, we launched with our baby food, but we have over 130 skews today from baby toddler to big kids. So people come to us and they start with our baby food and then they'll move through our assortment of products all the way until their child is four, five, six years old. So we have our line of biteables, which are transitioned to table food meals. have a line of plates for toddlers and big kids. So those are ready to heat meals. And then we have a

a whole line of snacks, baby cereal, baby puffs, smoothies to go alongside that. So we launched our baby blends. And then right after that, we launched our line of plates, which are a line of toddler meals. But we were seeing that our customers weren't transitioning from blends to our plates. There was kind of this gap between. The plates were just a little too advanced for kids coming right off of baby food. So we took a step back, and we really did

did a lot of research, talked to our customers, tried to understand what was this gap that needed to be filled. And that is when we launched our line of vitables, which we launched those a couple of years ago. And those are little cut to size, little dice pieces of protein, vegetables. And it's really like the perfect transition to table food. So now we have, know, people come to us for the blends and we were seeing them stay on our platform and carry through from.

Angela Vranich (44:58.161)
biteables to plates and then up to our big kid meals, lunches and adding along our whole host of snacks and smoothies with that.

Rose (45:07.116)
That's so good, it really is.

Now, and I think another question when you think about scale as you're building and scaling and have over the last few years. I've been in rooms when scaling brands hits the moment of absolute friction, when legacy employees feel like the soul slipping away and it's really hard. It's important to build connective tissue between a brand's early magic and long-term viability. And it really does sound like you've operationalized your core beliefs just as carefully as your logistics and

That's rare. How have you gone about doing that? What are lessons to be learned there?

Angela Vranich (45:44.624)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think just the same way we do with our customers, we do with our team, building trust through transparency. So we're a very transparent company. We have our weekly stand-ups where we're talking about sales for the week. We really make people, we bring people along the journey with us and make sure that they're living our mission that way.

We have a really strong culture at Little Spoon. I mean, what else would you say? Yeah, no, I think it's all those things. mean, think that the people are shocked when they, like to your first point, like join Little Spoon and, you know, they get.

calendar for an all-hands meeting and sit and see that we're talking about every single thing. How many customers we gained, how many customers we lost, what our revenue was, know, how many, you know, what we gave out in discounts, how, you know, how we're performing on this metric or that metric.

even as the company has gotten in now with 100 plus employees, we are still doing that ritual every week. And it's more than just the metrics. mean, there's a whole sort of softer side of that, which is equally, if not more important. the level of sort of, like Angela said, bringing them along the journey with us, as we just have, you know.

hired some really incredible people, really talented, passionate people and given them the tools to be successful here and grow and, you know, trust in them and like vice versa. you know, it's been, you know, pure magic. We... Many of them have been with us. We have people that have been with us for four, five, six, seven years. somebody had this last week, seven year spoon-iversary, which is what we call it, spoon-iversary.

Rose (47:45.74)
that.

Angela Vranich (47:46.308)
Yeah, I mean, that's the first and only seven year anniversary. It's not much less than us.

Rose (47:55.318)
Yep, yep. Well, and as we start to wrap up here and you look ahead, what are you most excited about for this next chapter of Little Spoon? What are the things you're watching today that get you inspired?

Angela Vranich (48:09.84)
I think just creating more solutions for our customers, going deeper and wider with our customers. We've seen a lot of success with some of these baby and toddler products that we've launched most recently. So creating new innovations to really grow with our customer and keep them on our platform for as long as we can would be. Yeah, I think to that point, it's like we like to say that we're building a business around a consumer, not a category.

And we're building around the parent, not the product, right? Any version of that statement is like, how we think about it. And so when you think about what that means for the strategy and it's what's gotten us to this point, it will continue to be our playbook in the future. We believe that Little Spoon has a right to win in every single need and occasion with respect to...

you know, a child's food or nutrition needs. And so we're here for the parent and we are listening to their needs. We're creating solutions to those needs and, you know, continuing to just create kind of a stickier experience with them and just building more, you know, more trust. It's just really a lot of like doubling down on the things that we know have worked and

and not being afraid to kind of also pull back and pivot on things that don't. we're just, it's a very, I think, it's a lot of just that, it's a lot of that. Just continuing to listen, continuing to respond, and continuing to do the things that have made Little Spoon what it is.

Rose (49:59.02)
Let's end with this. Success for us looks like what in the next, call it decade?

Angela Vranich (50:08.62)
one sentence. I can talk, I don't know how much more time we have, but there's a lot, I mean, we have very ambitious plans. mean, we...

team I get made fun of by some of our team for just saying, we're just getting started. I say that line all over and over and over again. It was funny, you know, even five years ago now, I'm still saying it. I genuinely believe that that is true. mean, we are seeing, like we're growing faster now than we were a year ago in some parts of the business. We are seeing

so much momentum and we are getting better and better at everything that we do. So success, think it's again, not kind of backtracking, but success looks like building a household name in this space. It looks like building something that has never existed before, which is a...

a real platform, an end-to-end platform that is catering from a baby's first bites all the way through to school age. How do we serve that consumer effectively through that entire journey? If we can look back and say we did that, then I think we're very... That's success.

Rose (51:44.248)
It's amazing. Well, Angela, Ben, thank you. Thank you so much for your time. And as someone who works with founders navigating very similar growth challenges as you in this landscape, I think your story is just very special and more people need to hear it.

And it reflects something I wish more brands understood, which is that building consumer trust through operational choices and really truly values driven leadership allows you to build something that's not only successful, but deeply meaningful. And that's what I hear coming out in this interview and the time that we spent together. So much of what Little Spoon has built is what every parent is looking for, which is ease, integrity, transparency, and loving care. And I just love the specialty of the personal written notes on

Mother's Day, think that that's precious. Thank you for sharing your incredible story. Thank you. You too.

Angela Vranich (52:36.39)
Thank you, Rose. Thank you so much. Great talking to you. Appreciate it.