Why our meals cost what they do

If you've compared us to a supermarket pouch, you'll have noticed we cost more. That's a fair thing to ask about, so here's an honest answer.

Rather than talk in percentages, we've laid it out with Duplo. Each stage of making a meal gets a pile of bricks, and the bigger the pile, the more of the cost it accounts for.

1. Ingredients and cooking

This is the biggest pile, and deliberately so.

We use whole ingredients with real texture and flavour, because a toddler's palate is being built right now and bland food teaches bland preferences. Our meals are cooked by hand in large Bratt pans; the same way you'd cook at home, just at a bigger scale.

We don't add any sugar or salt and definitely nothing that's artificial.

2. Freeze-drying

This is where we differ from every other toddler meal on the shelf, and it's the second biggest stack for a reason.

Most ambient baby and toddler food is retort processed: cooked at high heat under pressure, usually in minutes. It's quick, it's cheap, and it's why so many pouches taste the same and have the same soft, uniform texture.

We freeze-dry instead. The meal is frozen, then water is drawn out slowly under vacuum over 24 hours. It's a full day of energy per batch, which is expensive. What you get for it is food that keeps its structure and its flavour, without a fridge, and comes back to life with hot water in 5 minutes.

That 24 hours is the single clearest reason our meals cost what they do.

3. Packing

Every meal is portioned into its own pouch, so you're not guessing at quantities or storing half-used packets. It's a separate step with its own labour and its own line time, and it's what makes the meals genuinely portable rather than just shelf-stable.

4. Packaging

The pouch has a harder job than it looks. It has to keep the meal completely dry for 18 months, then take hot water poured straight into it without failing.

That's a technical laminate, not a standard film. It's also recyclable at supermarket soft-plastic collection points.

5. Distribution

The smallest pile and where freeze-drying pays us back.

Our meals don't need refrigeration at any point, which takes chilled transport and chilled warehousing out of the equation entirely. They're also light, because the water's gone. Compared with wet pouches, moving our meals around costs a fraction of what it otherwise would.