Latest news with #HillaryGraves
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The secret to Little Dish success? 'Our 200 children tiny tasters'
Healthy children's food brand Little Dish founder Hillary Graves experienced a full circle moment last month when her son Monty texted her on the way to the library. An early 'tiny taster' for the British-based firm, Monty happened to spot an advert on the London Tube for Little Dish's spaghetti and meatballs product, which was originally named after him when the company launched in 2006. After nearly 20 years of lean marketing budgets, Little Dish is now reinvesting into the brand and recently launched its first advertising campaign, costing £1m and underpinning its rise as market leader in chilled and ready meals for kids. Read More: We sold a hand cream every 36 seconds after appearing on This Morning Graves had previously relied on parents in the pre-social media age. 'We had a kind of a community-based marketing initiative,' she says. 'We had many mothers who would call us. They would host tastings for us with their friends and would go into stores to make sure we looked great on the shelf. 'We now have a big industrial kitchen where we make the big batches, but all of our recipes start in somebody's kitchen. That ended up allowing us to perfect the recipes over the years, because you want to be able to give parents assurance that it has been tested.' Hailing from New York, Graves arrived in the UK in 2000. A marketing vice president of women's website she came on a two-year assignment before meeting her future husband, Dean Brown, that summer and has been a UK resident ever since. Brown later joined as Little Dish CEO in 2014. Graves notes that chilled food for pets is more common in the US than in the baby food aisle. Her business acumen started to take shape when she made her own baby food after her first child was born and being taken aback by supermarket jars and pouches offering with a two-year shelf life. "It was older than my own baby and I felt there was a gap in the market for what parents were making in their own kitchen: fresh, healthy food, natural ingredients, no salt, no sugar but critically meals that were kept in the fridge and not the cupboard." Read More: The boss who has found 'nature's answer to plastic' Having met food technologist John Stapleton, co-founder of the New Covent Garden Soup Company which pioneered fresh cartons, the duo conceived a focus group of friends and family and developed recipes using herbs and fresh ingredients. Graves says she spent hours in a business library collating data on the meals market sector in a bid to convince retailers of the Little Dish concept. 'It was good to go into this with a certain amount of naivety around how hard this could be and the answer was that it is really hard,' she adds. From an initial trial in Waitrose stores to full national distribution in all the UK grocers, the brand has been added to meal subscription services such as Gousto and Hello Fresh. With more than 250 million meals sold, Little Dish is now a £30m brand sales business. Challenger chilled brands have also come and gone, with Little Dish having a near 90% market share for Graves' company. 'I think the opportunity is for the retailers to give this category more space as it's doing phenomenally,' she says. 'In the early days, I would say we were a fresh, healthy, nutritious meal that your child would love. But what we've realised over time is that what we really represent for very busy parents is stress-free pre-meal times.' According to Little Dish research, 53% of parents feel pressured to cook a hot, homemade meal and feel guilty when they can't, while recent NHS government guidance stated that parents shouldn't be relying on baby food pouches as everyday meals. This followed a BBC Panorama investigation which found pouches from six brand leaders failed to meet key nutritional needs and parents being "misled" by their marketing. Read More: Meet the company that finds 'must-haves' to make everyday life easier 'I think parents are definitely searching for healthy solutions,' adds Graves. 'If I think about when we started in 2006, the ready meal aisle had more scepticism in some ways as there were a lot of additives and preservatives. 'We've always been a beacon of nutrition but I think the rest of the category in the aisle has really cleaned up over time.' Meanwhile Little Dish, which has introduced recyclable wood fibre trays, continues to innovate. Last year it launched its Big Dish range tailored for children aged five to 10. This year, 20 years after Jamie Oliver's campaign to ban turkey twizzlers from school dinners, Graves oversaw the launch of Superstars, a product offering healthier chicken nuggets with 'hidden' cauliflower and less salt. Little Dish had ambition to launch in the US before COVID forced the firm to scale back. Graves still hopes to take the brand stateside in the future, with the focus now on the UK and Europe — and the 200 children's tasters who are key to the brand's recipe approval. 'It gives parents confidence that their children will eat it,' notes Graves. 'We've now got lots of parents on the team and would never make anything that we wouldn't feed our own children. That was sort of the real authenticity from the brand from the beginning." Donating as a company One of the best things we've ever done was a multi-year partnership in 2023 with the Felix Project, the food distribution charity, where we've done a Buy one, Give one campaign. People can't really visualise what '10% to charity' actually means. With this, they knew by buying this meal they were actually feeding a child in need and it has helped us donate over half a million meals. Being a female founder We belong to a great organisation called By Women Built, but when I started in 2006 there weren't many female founders and all my investors were men. But I felt like I was really representing the consumer that we were making the product for. And that's one of the reasons it's always been so authentic. Keeping consumers It makes logical sense that you've got a range of meals for three-year-olds and then to be able to give them a bigger portion as they get older. This does two things: it either keeps them in the brand longer so you keep your customer longer, or it gives you a whole new customer acquisition point in time where you can maybe acquire people who didn't know about our meals. Read more: Meet the 'jokers from London' who sold 100,000 blocks of butter in first 10 weeks Britain's 'king of billboards' who sold his business for £1bn 'Reformer pilates is the top-searched fitness trend — and we're reinventing it'Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Secrets to Little Dish success? 'Never compromise on your ingredients'
Hillary Graves is the founder of kids' meals company Little Dish, the market leader in fresh healthy foods for kids, with £30m brand founded her British company in 2006 after spotting a gap in the market for what parents were making in their own kitchen: fresh, healthy and natural ingredient foods which could be kept in the fridge and not the discusses pioneering a new food category, brand innovation, how children are leading their tasting panel and how to strengthen growth success.
