When Heather Stouffer was doing research for her son's transition from soft to solid foods, she learned that she was running out of time. By age two, she says, children have developed the palate they will have for the rest of their lives. “It’s a window of opportunity to get them real food, real tastes, real textures rather than over-processed food, which is, especially with baby food, oftentimes older than babies who are eating it.”
This knowledge lent urgency to a task towards which she was already inclined: preparing fresh fruits and vegetables for her son so he would have a healthy, natural diet.
Stouffer had a demanding job as a marketing director for a technology company. On Sunday nights, she would puree foods like apples and sweet potatoes, then pour them into plastic ice cube trays. For the rest of the week, she would defrost the number of cubes her son was capable of eating. “Working full time and then putting food on the table for me and my husband and then purees for my son, it was just a lot of work.”
One October night, when Stouffer was in the middle of preparing another batch of frozen baby food, she had her idea. How many busy families would pay to have the ice cubes without having to do the rest? The idea stuck in her head. She and her husband had wanted to start a food business for years, why not baby food?
Stouffer spent the next few months researching her idea. Last May she quit her job to work full time on her new business: Mom Made Foods. “I knew I wasn’t the first person to come up with this. She later referenced the Diane Keaton movie “Baby Boom.” And I’m certainly not the first person to make homemade food for my son. But I did know that there were very likely other parents who were in the same position I was, who wanted a fresh alternative.”
STOUFFER SOLD HER FIRST batches of Mom Made “scoops,” (3.5 ounce containers of organic apple, pear, sweet potato and broccoli purees) at the Del Ray Farmer’s Market. Now they are being sold in 18 stores, from Charlottesville to Baltimore, including Whole Foods, Wegmans and Balducci’s. Stouffer said sweet potato is the strongest seller.
Mom Made shares a kitchen with a catering business in Alexandria’s industrial cooking district off Duke Street. She and a staff of six to nine people can make up to a thousand pounds of puree at a time. Stouffer buys her apple, pears, broccoli and sweet potatoes from local growers when they are in season, and from organic distributors when she can’t find them locally. She buys her sweet potatoes from a farmer on the Eastern Shore.
She said the jump from ice cube trays in her own kitchen to industrial equipment and professional packaging was made a lot easier by helpful staffers at the State Department of Agriculture, who gave her a guide to starting her own business and answered all her questions about meeting regulations. To market herself as organic, she had to have a visit from an organic inspector. Virginia doesn’t have one she said, so she paid for someone to come up from North Carolina.
Whenever Stouffer goes grocery shopping, she comes home with products she bought solely because she liked the packaging. “Every time I go to the grocery store now I dissect the store, dissect the packaging and the marketing. You realize how you are marketed to as a consumer.” If she likes something, she’ll find the manufacturer and call them.
STOUFFER’S BROTHER DAVID ROGERS is a chef at the Balducci’s grocery store in Bethesda. Stouffer gratefully calls him her “culinary consultant.” Both he and his sister credit their parents for their passion for food. They grew up eating fresh vegetables. Sodas and sugar cereals were banned from the house.
Rogers said the jump from stovetop to industrial steamer requires perseverance. “The whole process is amazing because you have to find the packaging, you have to source the product, you have to get a truck, to hire a staff. Just trying to balance the time between your personal life and doing all that is probably the hardest part.”
Mom Made is nine months old, and still growing. They are developing foods for older infants and toddlers. “The whole vision of Mom Made is that it’s a line that grows with the child,” Stouffer said. When a video about Mom Made appeared on a recent episode of Oprah, Stouffer said, “our website got over 2,000 hits in the first minute that the show started.” Asked about her businesses potential for market expansion, she replied that it’s “not anything I can share specifics on. You can say exponential growth.”
Growth that is not dissimilar to her son’s. He is now two, and “a great eater,” Stouffer said. “His favorite vegetable is a whole stalk of asparagus and he just rams it into his mouth. But he also loves pita with hummus. He likes fish. He doesn’t like meat. And we’re carnivores so we think that’s kind of strange. He loves fruit: apples. I’m not sure if that’s his favorite food right now or his favorite word.”
Tracey Summers has just started her son who is six months old, on Mom Made.. “He’s really just kind of shoveled them in,” she said, adding, “It tastes like when I puree the food myself.”
Two four-ouce containers of Mom Made organic purees cost $3.99, which Summers says is comparable to canned organic baby foods. “It’s worth it to me to have him eat something that’s not processed and very fresh and organic. These are the first foods that he’s getting in his life so I like to keep it as natural as possible.”