A lot of entrepreneurs pontificate about giving birth to their start-up. Sophie Baron relaunched her homemade baby food business while giving birth.
It was the start of December 2020 and Baron, the founder of homemade baby food brand Mamamade, recalls: “The atmosphere in the UK was heavy.
“Christmas was cancelled. And I was overdue with my second baby. We had a huge relaunch scheduled for December 7 that was still weeks off of being ready, and a website that didn’t work.
“I’ll never forget that feeling of praying the baby stayed in so I could sort everything out — and at the same time desperate to give birth, because the end of pregnancy is torture.”
In the end, Baron’s “very overcooked” 10lb (4.6kg) baby was born three days after Christmas — the same day Mamamade’s new website went live “with a slew of errors that meant my husband was working as customer care on his laptop in the hospital while I was in labour”.
The duo’s, er, labour of love paid off though: as Mamamade turns into a toddler and enters its second year of trading, it is selling £1 million-worth of baby and toddler food and on track to record annualised revenue of £10 million in 2022.
Today Mamamade’s product range spans 40 vegan dishes, from chickpea fingers to spinach and kohlrabi porridge.
Fourteen organic, plant-based meals cost around £30. Baron’s idea came about when the entrepreneur, who was then working as head of operations for an employee benefits tech company, had her daughter in 2017.
“I found the transition to parenthood extremely difficult, and no one was talking about it,” she explains. When Baron returned to work, her baby was six months’ old and starting weaning, and she struggled to fit everything in.
“I had a really good idea of what kind of eater I wanted to raise, confident around all kinds of food, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to cook everything myself. It didn’t seem fair that the only other food available was offering long-life purée pouches.”
Baron spent every weekend “playing around with meals in my kitchen, looking into different packaging options, and then I bought a ton of veg, started combining it and getting the product into hands to get feedback. Eventually I had something good enough to sell.”
The 31-year-old invested £10,000 of her savings and started cooking from her Finchley kitchen, making up to 30 boxes of weaning meals each week (“our spare room had six huge freezers in it”).
She delivered everything herself for the first year. “In the meantime I started to put a lot more effort into my Instagram presence — and saw a nice community start to percolate around the product and what it represented to busy parents.”
Soon she saw Instagram as a route to growing the business.
“I got a lot of pressure from people saying the only way to make it work would be retail, but I knew that’s not how the modern parent shops or gets their information anymore, and I felt really strongly that subscription-based, direct-to-consumer, was a really important element to the service.”
Around February 2020 — “good timing!”, Baron chuckles — the entrepreneur started to professionalise operations.
She was still working part-time, but just as the first lockdown kicked in, she hired two chefs (who’d just lost their restaurant jobs), plus a social media manager, and moved Mamamade out of her house.
A £285,000 fundraise paid for the professional chefs and packaging, and within a month the company was making 2000 meals a week.
Mamamade expanded at the same time as Baron’s second pregnancy and that Christmas company relaunch, some of which took place in the labour ward.
Now Mamamade cooks 8000 meals a week from a 2000sq ft kitchen near Brent Cross, north London.
Customers sign up to weekly or monthly subscriptions, with many still enrolling via Instagram, where celebrity mums like Lucy Mecklenburgh, Millie Mackintosh and Rochelle Humes have shouted about feeding their kids Mamamade dishes.
Baron has just fundraised a further £1.5 million from crowdfunding site Seedrs as well as founders and executives from Allplants, Made.com and Heals — giving the company a valuation of £7 million.
Like a parent disbelieving they made a human, Baron still can’t believe she built her business.
“It still sort of shocks me that we’re selling recipes that I made up in my house, based on combinations I liked or wanted my daughter to try,” she says.
“Obviously since refined by chefs and approved by nutritionists. But still!”
MAMAMADE
Founded: 2020
Staff: 12
Turnover: £1m year to February 2022
Headquarters: Staples Corner kitchen, White City office
