After Seven Years DTC, Little Spoon ‘Matures’ With Target Debut

Organic baby and kid food brand Little Spoon has grown up, today announcing its first-ever move into brick-and-mortar retail with an “unprecedented” launch at Target that will see the seven-year-old brand enter seven categories with 23 products, co-founder and CEO Ben Lewis told Nosh.

“We wanted to make sure that when we showed up at retail, we were showing up in a way that allowed us to be able to play across many different age segments, need states and categories to do something really bigger and more meaningful [in a brick and mortar setting],” Lewis explained.

He said Target did not need “any convincing” on the scale of the debut, while adding that the retailer claims no other food or beverage brand “has launched in such a significant way with such depth and breadth.”

The new retail partnership will keep Little Spoon exclusively at Target stores for the next year, after which co-founder and chief product officer Angela Vranich said the company will begin looking at other strategic retailers. According to Vranich, internal research conducted by Little Spoon found that 80% of the brand’s DTC consumer base indicated that Target was the No. 1 store they shop at.

“We’ve been really lucky that with the digital piece of our business, we’ve had that one-to-one relationship, and really able to speak to [our customers],” Vranich added. “We have their phone numbers, and we can text them and tell them to go into Target. It’s a very unique relationship.”

That community also includes over 2 million followers between its newsletter and social media channels. According to the brand, it currently feeds “more than 3% of U.S. babies,” selling about 2 million meals per month and over 80 million meals since its founding in 2017.

Alongside the rollout, Little Spoon is debuting its first-ever frozen multiserve products, a 3-SKU line that includes some of the most popular components of its kid-positioned Plates, such as Super Chicken Dippers, Chicken Veggie Sliders and Mini Turkey Kale Meatballs. Additional launch products include yogurt pouches, smoothies, bars and snacks.

Lewis said the retailer has been a true “innovation partner,” and the teams are already in conversation about launching additional items during the next reset period in addition to being in conversation with buyers from other categories about where to innovate next.

“We are really having greenfield conversations with Target around gaps that they see and then mining our DTC audience essentially to help inform future innovation opportunities,” he stated.

The launch at Target, though broad in scope for a DTC brand’s first retail debut, encompasses only a small portion of Little Spoons’ product portfolio, which now totals over 130 SKUs spanning eight categories, Lewis emphasized. He said that the products launching at Target will also be complementary, rather than cannibalizing, to its online business.

“Our three biggest categories in terms of revenue and new customer growth [online] are remaining exclusive to littlespoon.com We’re bringing a lot of our proven hit products [to Target], but they are still, for us, definitely smaller categories relative to our core business DTC,” he said. “These are [items] that function more as add-on products in the DTC world, but in retail, they are huge categories.”

The debut at Target eliminates barriers to trial inherent in a DTC model, “you can’t just buy one [product],” Lewis said. He believes the company, which began with a focus on baby food and has “grown our business by growing with our customers,” through toddler and kids meals, is still in its early days of building brand awareness.

“We’re not building a business around a category. We’re really building around this modern parent,” said Lewis. “We had this hypothesis that if we got our foot in the door early with a family when their baby was having their first bites of food, and we earned their trust, delivered a good experience, and created the right brand affinity that we could be the go-to brand as their child grows… We see ourselves as kind of a one-stop shop online when it comes to your pilot’s food or nutrition.”