How Aunties Shape Us

One of the reasons we started Folly was to share what is making our lives easier. Not to glorify or vilify any form of parenting, but to simply share what is helping us get through our days. Perhaps the best example of this are the supportive women in our lives, who in turn become the aunts in our kids’ lives. They could be blood-related or not, but they are helping us raise our babies, and that makes them family. We also are huge proponents of convenience, so we are here for healthy, pre-made baby food and any form of exercise that doesn’t require us to leave the house. Our take? Life is hard enough, so let’s leave pride at the door, and graciously accept any help and shortcuts that come our way.

By Mona Holmes

When I was still married and struggling to conceive, I realized I would have to start thinking about motherhood differently. I’m a Gen Xer, and raising small humans into adulthood was something I always thought of as a guarantee. That was until my doctor said my ovaries had failed and, without expensive fertility treatments, bearing children would be next to impossible. 

Suddenly, I was faced with the reality that I wasn’t destined to give birth. Though I always thought that adoption would suit my personality and beliefs, the realization still stung. There’s the inevitable spiral that follows, the thoughts of grief and inadequacy: “Did I do something wrong in my past?” “Maybe motherhood is not meant for me.” And, “Do I really want to have children?”

I’m a natural nurturer. Without any prompts, I’ve always thrown as much love as I can on my nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, and neighborhood children. Since my 20s, I assumed that this characteristic would be part of being a mom. But redefinition accompanies adulthood, something that I embraced throughout my decades.

What I realized is I didn’t need to start from scratch. I became an auntie at age 15, when my sister gave birth to Christine. According to her, back then I was a “novice auntie” who had one thing in mind: to show up. When I returned home from college, Chrissy and her younger sister, Simonne, piled into my car, and I took them everywhere. 

I didn’t ask for guidance on what to do when they were hungry or tired, or even what they liked to do. My only intentions were to relieve my big sister of single parenthood and connect with these toddler humans on the beach or at a museum. I would introduce them to my friends, new languages, or musical artists blaring from my car speakers. Or we’d just hang out at my home, immersed in a project, movies, or the art of being silly.

How I’m slowly but surely building an at-home gym

I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I must start strength training. Not only because I have two 90th-percentile children that I am expected to carry around, but because, after two consecutive pregnancies in three years, my body has lost any ounce of muscle, core strength, and essentially hope it had left. My husband and I decided a change of environment might do the trick (and also trick ourselves) into getting back in shape. We moved our Peloton bike into the garage and got a few other things to make it easier for us to sneak in a workout during nap or at bedtime. It's by no means the perfect space yet, but man, what good a little fresh air and sweat will do ya. Disclaimer: I am not a fitness expert, so in no way are these items the “best” or for those who lift for real, bro. I’m new here. I’m just a girl standing in front of the mirror asking to love myself again. —Lauren Bell Martin

Meet Angela Vranich, the co-founder and chief product officer of Little Spoon

For the last century, Gerber has dominated the baby food space with very little, if any, competition. When Angela Vranich and her husband-turned-business partner, Ben Lewis, realized that, they knew they had to fill that gap. The two grew up together in Pittsburgh before attending college in Philadelphia and finding their way out to San Francisco. There, Vranich began testing recipes in her small apartment, where she also developed the branding, strategized the packaging, and came up with the name Little Spoon.

Since its founding in 2015, Little Spoon has built a baby food portfolio of more than 100 products, including purees, finger food, toddler meals, on-the-go lunches, snacks, and smoothies. Over the years, the brand developed meal delivery subscriptions plans (think Factor but for babies) and its products are available in Target. Next year, the team will launch a “starting solids” kit with hard goods like spoons, plates, and bibs. From her New York City office, Vranich showed us the Little Spoon test kitchen, shared the brand’s best-selling ingredients, discussed the science behind baby taste buds, and reminded us why we need to let go of parental guilt. —Jess Mayhugh

Let’s go back to the early days. How did you first start testing out recipes?
I started working on Little Spoon when I was 24 years old living in San Francisco. I had identified an opportunity in the baby food space to create a fresh option and the entire thing was bootstrapped to start. I did a ton of research on what was in the market, what types of ingredients were being used, and did some surveying of parents and what ingredients they would want to see. Obviously, there was a big shift toward fresh and organic happening in the natural products industry at that time. But, yeah, we had no food scientists or chefs, so I was the one doing all the initial product development myself. In my little kitchen in San Francisco, I was just chopping, blending, steaming, drying, and making all the food.

What kind of ingredients were you playing around with at that time?
When we started the company, there were no fresh baby foods on the market. So if you wanted that, you were making it at home yourself. Luckily, I grew up cooking and it was always just a fun hobby for me. I had never made baby food before because I didn’t have any children. I wanted to make sure the initial set of products that we launched with had a really wide variety of ingredients for parents to introduce to their kids—everything from super basic things like apples, pears, and bananas to more exotic and interesting varieties like purple carrot and dragonfruit. The early days were experimenting with everything. It was helpful to be in California to have some of the best produce out there. 

I noticed your products don’t have quite as long of a shelf life as other baby food. 
Everything on the market was shelf-stable jars or pouches, which are highly heat-pasteurized. They’re commercially sterile, and they’re designed to sit on a shelf for a few years at a time. To make those foods shelf-stable, you’re cooking them at super high temperatures, which cooks off a lot of the valuable nutrition, as well as the taste, color, and texture. You may have tried shelf-stable baby food at some point and it really doesn’t taste anything like what the original food is supposed to be. Like, the color isn’t even quite right. And that was so crazy to me—that the first food you’re feeding children is so processed and different from the real food they’ll end up eating. They should develop a taste for the real thing.

Right when we started, there was this emerging food technology referred to as cold pressure or cold pressed. People are probably most familiar with it when it comes to cold-pressed juice. The final container actually goes into this big chamber, and then gets filled with water and pressurized for three minutes, typically around 87,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. So after it goes through that treatment, it kills off a lot of the bacteria that can cause early spoilage, but retains the color, texture, taste, and a lot of the vitamins and nutrients that are found in fresh food in the first place. That’s what we’ve used from the very beginning. 

How does your testing work now? I’m picturing a panel of babies. 
We have a test kitchen in our office, which we moved to about a year ago. So we do all of our product development work in one place now, which is really nice. We also now have a massive customer base that we can tap for feedback. So it’s a lot of looking at what’s working, what people are really liking, doubling down on that, doing a ton of surveying, and understanding what people want to see from us.

For example, last year we came out with functional Babyblends: immunity, brain, and gut. That came out of understanding that our customers wanted those health benefits for their babies. Or oftentimes, we’ll hone in on a set of recipes that we’re interested in launching and we’ll send some test products to customers to get feedback. Also, now we have a large team and many of them have kids that are squarely in our demographics, so we can gather feedback that way.

Have you gotten any other unique requests from your customers?
Parents are looking for fiber. So fiber-rich foods, like pears, are great for digestion. We see a lot of demand for food that maybe your local grocery store doesn't have, like Japanese sweet potato. Some of our most popular flavors have herbs and spices. Right now, our third-most popular flavor is honestly, a little bit of a head scratcher: apple, sweet potato, red bell pepper, and turmeric. So it seems that these super savory flavors with textural variety are popular. Also things like chia seeds and hemp really rise to the top, too. 

What did your research reveal about how babies eat food differently from adults?
Baby taste buds are definitely far, far more sensitive than adults. When we’re adding an herb or spice, our first instinct is always like, “Oh, we could punch it up with more basil” or whatever because, to our palate, we need more. But we really have to keep in mind that babies taste things at a different level. And, of course, being mindful of how we’re introducing thicker textures to babies as well. We put a lot of thought into our Puffs because, obviously, dissolvability is paramount since you want to mitigate choking. We actually worked with a speech-language pathologist on developing that product. They helped us come up with three different shapes that help with oral motor skills, learning how to gnaw, figuring out pinching and grasping. We call it skill-building snack time. 

What advice do you have for those just starting on the solids train?
Don’t pressure yourself into making everything from scratch. There are options and Little Spoon exists for a reason. We really want to try to make it easy for people to introduce solids to their children. Talk to your pediatrician about early allergen introduction, too. There is so much emerging research on introducing things like eggs and nuts that is so important. And then just let kids explore and get messy. I think baby smocks are fantastic, especially if you’re feeding something like beets or purple carrots where it’s going to stain. There are also really great feeding mats that you can buy to put under the high chair. Or that’s where your dog can really come in handy. 

What’s one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to baby food?
Solids don’t have to be boring. There are a lot of brands out there that are offering really basic flavors and the same ingredients. Introducing children to a variety of foods at a young age is so important and it’s fun, too, to try new things. Also, convenient food can be healthy. There is a lot of parental guilt around buying something that’s pre-made or ready to go and there are amazing, healthy options on the market today. Little Spoon is one of a handful of healthy baby and kid food companies that have cropped up and it’s wonderful to see. Convenience doesn’t equal compromise. It should feel like a fun, messy, educational journey. I hope to have kids one day and, I feel like when I do, I’ll know exactly what to feed them.

“I kept blaming my kids for tearing the towel rack out of the wall. Turns out it was my husband.” —Folly reader Karen K.