“Baby food.” Even the phrase itself brings to mind mushy, tasteless, pureed, prepared food. While that may have been true of the old-fashioned prepared baby foods, it certainly doesn’t apply to today’s offerings of fresh, organic, foods for babies. Today, new parents are turning to delivery-based meal services to help them save time on meal preparation, but still provide healthy, nutritious, and delicious foods for their families.
Meal preparation is a topic for all stages of family life. According to Pew Research, both parents work in nearly two-thirds of all U.S. households. And, with so much time spent at work, time in the kitchen is at a premium. This has given rise to a number of meal delivery services such as Home Chef, Blue Apron, Plated, and more. But all of these are focused on adults. What about meals for the babies? Meals for babies present a somewhat unique problem– babies can eat only a small amount at a time, meaning that the potential waste of food is quite high.
A number of start-up companies have entered the baby food arena. These companies offer a variety of prepared products including flash-frozen food pouches which contain portioned, chopped, ingredients to meet a baby’s nutritional needs. Other companies deliver cold-pressed fruit and vegetable food pouches in temperature-controlled packaging. And yet another provides tubs of cold-pressed baby purees, including a spoon and packaged in a reseal-able container.
Food matters.
Group Activities and Discussion Questions:
- Discuss the use prepared, delivered meals. Have students had an experience with these?
- Review key aspects of developing a product positioning map, including determining the axis labels for positioning.
- Divide students into teams and have each team review a baby food product company with respect to product, price, place, and promotion.
- Examples include:
- Raised Real: https://www.raisedreal.com/
- Once Upon a Farm: https://onceuponafarmorganics.com/
- Little Spoon: https://www.littlespoon.com/
- Gerber: https://www.gerber.com/products/baby-food
- Have each team develop a positioning map.
- Have each team draw their map on the board.
- Debrief exercise.
Source: Painter, K. (29 September, 2018). When the jar isn’t enough: Baby food innovators are on a roll these days. Minneapolis Star Tribune.
