Consumer VC: Venture Capital I B2C Startups I Commerce | Early-Stage Investing · Mike Gelb

How They Scaled to Deliver Millions of Baby Food To Families Each Month with Angela Vranich and Ben Lewis, Founders of Little Spoon

·58 min·4 clips

Why would 10 companies sell fresh pet food but zero sell fresh baby food?

Mike Gelb opens the conversation by asking how the company came together. Angela Vranich says she and Ben were both around food and saw a clear gap in the market. Ben notes that they do not have kids, which makes starting a baby food company feel a little ironic, but also intentional. They talk about how their backgrounds in food and consumer brands shaped the business, and how their skill sets balance each other inside the company. They frame the early vision as a shared belief that the category was missing a modern fresh option for babies. Angela points out that baby food has deep historical roots, but not much had changed in the basic consumer experience. The team looked at adjacent categories and noticed that fresh pet food had more options than food for babies, which sharpened the case for building something new. The company began with fresh blends as its first core product. From there, it expanded into plates for toddlers with more global flavors and ready-to-heat meals. The menu grew to include chicken tikka, chicken dumplings, and a wide set of toddler plates. They explain that the business found success, but it also revealed a second gap. Parents were dropping off when babies aged out of the blends and before they were ready for plates. That led to the biteables line, which bridges the transition with tiny pieces of fruit and animal proteins. The product is meant to help children develop motor skills like pinching, grasping, chewing, and gnawing. Angela says the goal is to keep families inside one ecosystem as children move through stages. The company also offers smoothies, shelf-stable snacks targeted more toward school-age kids, and build-it-yourself lunches. The conversation keeps returning to how the brand tries to follow the customer through each stage instead of forcing one product to do every job, and by the end it leaves a clear picture of a company building a broader path instead of a single aisle winner.

As heard by us

A founder interview about spotting a gap in fresh baby food and building a full product ladder around it.

Angela Vranich and Ben Lewis trace how a consumer brand identified an opening in fresh baby food and then extended that idea into a wider product ladder.

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Why you'd press play

See how a baby-food company turned a clear market gap into a progression from blends to biteables to plates.

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