The right ingredients
Pip and Pear Chilled Baby Foods has achieved a nationwide retail presence and is very much in touch with its target market
The idea for Pip and Pear Chilled Baby Foods came to Irene Queally when she was weaning her daughter Tilda and couldn’t find a healthy alternative to home cooking. She started trialling her own recipes in her husband’s restaurant, No 9 Barronstrand Street in Waterford, in 2014.
Encouraged by the reaction from customers there, she entered the 2014 Blas na hEireann Irish Food Awards and won gold, silver and bronze medals for her Spiced Apple & Pear, Banana Blue and Chicken Lickin products, respectively.
The company started out with nine products suitable for babies from five months up to ten months.
“We found early on that our full meals made of multiple ingredients really appealed to mums going back to work,” says Queally. “There was great strength in meals for older babies so we introduced a toddler range in 2016 which has been hugely successful.”
Finding the right manufacturing partner was the leg-up Pip and Pear Chilled Baby Foods needed to gain a decent foothold in the supermarket channel. “The key thing was to find buyers who believed in the product as it doesn’t fit in with the ambient baby food section of the store; it sits with the yoghurts in the dairy aisle,” says Queally. “I started to meet buyers who just got it and gave us a go. Things have grown from there.”
The products were launched in SuperValu and Aldi stores in 2016. A small trial began in Dunnes Stores last year, which is being rolled out further. BWG
came on board in February and the brand will launch into Tesco stores around the country in May.
Because of the nature of the target market, the team of four at Pip and Pear Chilled Baby Foods have to constantly engage with new parents to sustain and grow the business.
“Around 60,000 babies are born every year in Ireland. Our customer base becomes an empty bucket that has to be refilled every year and a half. We have found that mums are heavy users of social media and this really helps to spread the word for us,” says Queally.
“We communicate a lot with customers through online chats and emails. Sampling in-store is a big part of what we do to create customer loyalty,” says Queally. “The Pregnancy and Baby Show in the RDS twice a year is a super way of getting to talk to mums and grandparents.”
Queally plans to take on a couple of new staff members and start selling into Europe this year.
“We found early on that our full meals made of multiple ingredients really appealed to mums going back to work”