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Many parents would likely agree that having a child is a life-altering experience. In Peninsula resident Nichola Buckley’s case, motherhood inspired her to shift her priorities, start a business and become an advocate for access to high-quality food.
“Having Lilly basically changed my whole world,” Buckley said of the arrival of her first child. “I went from this super career-driven person to really starting to want to know more about the world around us, and in particular, food.”
Buckley’s company Bebe Bitez delivers organic, farm-to-table, ready-made meals for babies and young children and is headquartered in San Mateo. She launched it in part to help families mitigate some of the stress that can arise around feeding kids.
As Lilly (who’s now a preschooler and older sister to brother Jack) grew, so did Buckley’s curiosity about food and childhood nutrition. She became concerned about diet-related diseases and allergies, and about ingredients in many foods marketed to children. She also noticed how many of her fellow parents felt overwhelmed when trying to make the best choices for their families, particularly when it came to introducing their babies to solid foods.
“I was like, ‘This shouldn’t be this way; this should be an enjoyable moment where we feed our children, it should be exciting to see their faces,'” she said, “but people were stressed.”
Introducing allergens early, safely and tastily
Buckley and her husband Adam White, Bebe Bitez’s co-founder, love cooking at home but, as busy working parents, sometimes want the convenience of ready-made meals. When they looked at the baby food commercially available, they found some brands’ offerings had additives and sweeteners they weren’t comfortable with, while many options were sound nutritionally but excluded common allergens.
While conventional wisdom used to be that allergens should be avoided for the first year of life, “all the research now shows that we need to introduce allergens early and often, and preferably the ‘big 9’ (peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, dairy, soy, shellfish, wheat, sesame and fish) before kids are 1 year old in order for them to not develop an allergy later in life,” she said, citing findings including the LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) and EAT (Enquiring About Tolerance) studies.
“The research is undeniable in this space, especially when it comes to peanuts and eggs,” she said.
Buckley decided to take matters into her own hands.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to make my own baby food and give it out to my friends and see what they think. And then I’ll start my own business. How hard could it be?’ Turns out, very hard,” she said with a laugh. “But that’s how we got started.”
Over the next few years, she went through the rigorous process of getting approvals from the FDA and USDA and coming up with meal plans. She brought on pediatric dietician Jenny Janov to be chief nutrition officer.
“She’s strongly passionate about the same things I am,” Buckley said of Janov. “She’s a big part of the team and makes all our recipes happen. I have the recipe ideas and she makes them healthy, nutritious, etc.”
Bebe Bitez offers staged meals for children from about 6 months old (or when they’re developmentally ready to start eating solid foods) to 6 years.
“It helps the parent safely introduce (allergens). We do it through real foods, we don’t have the powdered version; it’s all the food that you would find at home but hopefully it just gives parents that ease and peace of mind,” she said.
Bebe Bitez’s “Marvelous Mac and Cheese” Stage 1 meal (for 6 months and up) consists of just a few ingredients: broccoli and cheddar cheese (which introduces dairy) in a smooth puree with low-sodium vegetable broth. Stage 2 (for ages 8 months and up) adds wheat, plus additional nutrients like cauliflower, baby spinach and hemp seeds, and is a chunkier blend. The final stage, for ages 10 months and up, is a “real meal,” featuring pasta and whole veggies, plus tofu mixed into the cheese sauce (adding creaminess as well as introducing soy).
Other products in the direct-to-consumer line include “Remarkable Risotto,” “Cheery Chow Mein,” “Scrummy Salmon Pasta,” “Lovely Lasagna” and “Fabulous Fish Pie.” The goal is not only to introduce allergens safely, but also expose babies to new textures and savory-first flavors.
Occasionally, “we’ve actually had some parents say that they steal them for their own lunches,” she said.
The ingredients are sourced from farms in the Bay Area and Central California and prepared at Bebe Bitez’s San Mateo facility. The meals are frozen immediately after preparation and delivered to customers in packaging that keeps the food frozen for up to eight hours.
Bebe Bitez began selling its direct-to-consumer products in January and now also partners with day-care centers and preschools.
“We were hearing from our parents, ‘We basically heat up your meals and send them to day care. Could you not just cut out the middleman and go to day cares and preschools?'” Buckley said.
The company is currently serving several child care providers, from small in-home ones to centers with over 100 children.
“At the end of the day, I’m a mum myself, and I know how great it is to not have to think about lunches,” she said. “(It) takes one thing off the parent’s plate but also the child care provider’s plate.”
Expanding the mission
“The mission grew even further, from introducing allergens to food as medicine as a whole to really making access to the best-quality ingredients as possible for all children regardless of their demographic, because food really can nourish the whole child and their development,” she said.
With the day care and preschool menus, the company can be more flexible, with customized orders and more incorporation of seasonal produce, she said. Bebe Bitez’s meals meet the guidelines for federal and state regulations and programs, including for the National School Lunch Program, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the School Breakfast Program, and California Department of Education Nutrition Services Division.
“Schools can actually get subsidies from the USDA for foods meeting a certain criteria, and what we found is we were exceeding that criteria,” she said. “So we’ve started to service more lower-economic schools so we can really support all children and reach more people that might not be able to necessarily afford our foods otherwise.”
On the direct-to-consumer side, a batch of a dozen Stage 1 meals costs $72, while a dozen Stage 3 meals is $120. (Customers who want to order fewer than 12 at a time can do so via meal delivery services such as DoorDash.) Subscriptions can be delivered on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis.
“It’s really important that we are supporting farms, but I also have the mission of making sure this is accessible to everybody. What I’d eventually like to get to is to offer a 1:1 program: You buy one and we donate one, and things like that. Or that we get it covered on HSA (health savings account), FSA (flexible spending account), so people can actually use those dollars to pay for this food,” she said.
Buckley is originally from England, where she grew up on a beef cattle farm. Part of her own aims as a parent is making sure her children understand where their food comes from.
“We’re so lucky where we live with so many great farms along the Coastside and around the Peninsula,” she said, recalling a recent trip to a Pescadero farm, where Lilly was thrilled to pick tomatoes right off the vine.
This passion extends to her work with Bebe Bitez.
“We actually take our farms to the schools – and eventually we’d like to take the schools to the farms – but we take the raw ingredients, and we show the schools what’s included in the meals. We really educate the kids from an early age on, like, ‘Try a raw carrot’ or ‘There’s a tomato’ to really show them the importance of the ingredients,” she said. “And then we tell them how those ingredients have an effect on their bodies. ‘They’ll make you jump higher or run faster,’ things they understand.”
Bebe Bitez has enlisted local “tiny taste testers” to sample the foods, and Buckley said they’re a customer feedback-driven company.
“Even when my kids are grown up I never want to lose sight of what’s helpful to parents because that’s why I started this,” she said.
Advocating for better ingredients
She’s also passionate about public policy in regards to child nutrition.
“The other thing we’re getting more involved in is the lobbying side, so really trying to advocate for the eradication of harmful ingredients in foods targeted at children – the dyes, the pesticides, all the things that are hot topics at the moment,” she said.
Recently, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law banning certain synthetic dyes from foods sold at schools, following a law passed last year to ban several food additives from products sold in California.
“There are products like Doritos made in Europe without any of the harmful ingredients, so why can’t we also have that?” Buckley said. “That really frustrates me because I know that those products exist, and so one of my main issues is to make sure that we bring those here, too.”
Supporting families
Since becoming a mother she’s also realized how much of a struggle it is for many to balance careers and parenthood.
“The reason for starting the business was the food aspect, but since I’ve done this more and more and realized how flexible I can really be, and be there for my kids, I realize that the system is really broken and this needs to change. It’s just not sustainable for parents,” she said.
She supports her team putting their families first, whether that’s staying home with a sick child or prioritizing attending their soccer games.
“Because I’m like that with mine,” she said. “The most important thing is that we’re there for our children.”
To that end, she’s also started a “Chief Mommy Officer” program.
“We take on stay-at-home mums or mums that want a side hustle on a commission basis so they can work around looking after their children at home,” she said. “They can call preschools and day cares and get them signed up, and we give them a 5%-10% commission based on that.”
Building healthy relationships to food
While Bebe Bitez is committed to providing healthy food options, its mission also includes helping families build healthy relationships to food and eating. She recommends that children get involved with family food preparation as much as possible. And as her own parenting adventure unfolds, Buckley said she’s learned that caregivers can — and should — only control so much.
“The biggest surprise to me is how quickly a child can go from loving something to hating something; it can be in the space of the same meal!” she laughed, reflecting on her experiences feeding her son and daughter. “That’s the biggest piece of advice I pass on to parents. We put so much pressure on ourselves as parents, especially when it comes to food and nutrition, because it’s so important for our kids, but I think kids know their bodies better than we think that they do, and they know to listen to themselves when they’re full. We don’t know that as parents because we’ve been told, ‘Clean your plate and you’ll get something sweet.'”
Some days, “I don’t feel like eating cheese or broccoli so I don’t eat it, but we expect them to sit down and eat it, and we’re so stressed if they don’t,” she said. “All we can do is serve them the plate; they should have the choice of what they eat off it. And if some days that’s the pasta and nothing else, at least they ate.”
More information is available at bebebitez.com; Instagram: @bebebitez.
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