Tiny Sprouts: Thoughtfully crafted nutrition for a child's growing brain and body. Tiny Seeds. Big Health. Peace of Mind.
- KLS
- 3 minutes ago
- 18 min read
For the 261st feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Tiny Sprouts and Co-Founder, Kim Pabla. Tiny Sprouts Foods Inc. is a children’s nutrition company that helps parents make every bite count through their nutrient-rich Organic Superseed Boosters™, which can easily be added to any food to boost its nutritional content to support a childs development and daily health needs. Leading with a transparent and simple approach, Tiny Sprouts Foods strives to reduce mealtime stress by helping parents & caregivers navigate children’s nutrition from as early as their first bites, enabling little ones to sprout, grow and thrive to their best potential.
"Together Talks" feature 261: Tiny Sprouts presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
What separates you from your competition? What have been the biggest challenges? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur? Share a decision that you made that was detrimental?
Story of how it was created?
Let me start by giving you a little more background about myself. I grew up at a time when kids ate everything. It was the ’80s and ’90s; everything went. You never really understood the health implications of diet or what would manifest later in your life.
So, when I was in my early 20s, I struggled with really severe digestive issues. I could go eight days without passing a stool. It was pretty tough. I was overweight, I had acne, and just a multitude of issues, all tied to these digestive issues.
I went to see various GI specialists, and I remember one had said, “I need a new colon.” I was 21 years old, thinking, “A new colon? I’m 21 years old. This is not happening.”
It was a wake-up call for me. I started taking my diet seriously and exercising seriously. I ran into this one dietician, and her name was Dr. Joey Schulman. She was radiant at the age of 40, just a bundle of light, and I purchased her book and started following her protocol. One of the key things that she was promoting was flax seeds.
I started incorporating those flax seeds into my diet daily, and I’m not even kidding when I say that within six months, I was pretty much regular. So, I became obsessed—like, obsessed—with seeds, to the point that at this time I was now living in the U.K., and I was like that weirdo with a bag of seeds on my work desk. I would put them into my smoothie, put them into my yogurt bowl or my oatmeal every single morning. I would even travel with them.
So, when I did become a mother in my 30s, I never really thought twice about adding them into my daughter’s first foods because, if they were good for me, they were going to be good for her. I never thought to look into, “Oh, are the seeds safe for kids?” or anything. They’re a natural, high-fiber food, and I knew they would be beneficial to anybody who consumed them.
Fast-forward six or eight months later. It’s COVID, my daughter is 13 months old, and just before COVID hit, I had made a trip to Canada with her. I saw this really cute bag of chia seeds in our local grocery store, and the size, everything, just looked like it was made for children.
So, I grabbed a bag thinking, “This is so cute. It looks like it was made for my daughter.” I took it back to the U.S. and started using those chia seeds in her foods daily.
Then about a month later, she picked up the bag of chia seeds and dumped it all over her playmat. I was so angry. First of all, there was a big mess on my playmat. Secondly, I was like, “My God, it’s everywhere. I can’t get these chia seeds out.”
I was in the shower a little bit later, and I had this “aha” moment. I was like, “Wait a minute. Why are there no seeds for kids? Why does this not exist?”
It was literally like a light-bulb moment, and it was coincidentally Mother’s Day of 2020. My best friend Tina had called me, and I said “What do you think about starting a business around seeds for kids?”
And I’m not even kidding when I say she didn’t even hesitate. She was like, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.” She’s very health-conscious and a mom as well, a mom of two. It just made sense to us.
So, that’s how the idea materialized on Mother’s Day of 2020. Two best friends of 25 years building a business together with passion and purpose.
What separates you from your competition?
I wouldn’t say there’s any direct competitor. There’s no natural food product for children that is marketed to act as their multivitamin or boost their nutrition.
There are some products that we do consider our competitors, which are vitamins and multivitamins in powder form. So, a similar concept: easy to mix and hide, flavorless and tasteless. But our key differentiator from anything else on the market is that we’re real food. You can’t compete with real food.
Real food, unlike any of our indirect competitors, is already combined with the natural cofactors that are required for the body to absorb it. When you take a synthetic isolate from any type of multivitamin, regardless of the form it’s in—whether it’s liquid, powder, tablet or gummy—you lack that bioavailability by the body. We’re naturally packed with antioxidants and natural cofactors.
It’s the way the body would recognize something it would want to absorb into its cells. So, that’s our true point of difference: we are a functional, real food.
What have been the biggest challenges?
I would say we entered the market in a white-space opportunity, which is amazing, but that comes with its own challenges.
So, educating parents that you can use real food. It’s actually really funny because we’ve definitely trained parents to believe that nutrition comes from a bottle. That’s what we’ve done.
I think, you know, before Flintstones is probably the earliest that people think of vitamins, but before Flintstones, there’s one called, like, Chokers or Chalkers or something. I think that started in the 1950s.
So, if you look at that—from the 1950s to now, we’re talking about 70 years—we’ve been training parents to think nutrition comes from a bottle. You can count on the bottle for your kids to meet their nutrients.
It’s about us now taking that habit and retraining parents and saying, “Actually, your kids need nutrients from real food.” Why are 42% of kids still on a multivitamin, yet over 90% of them are still not meeting their nutrient needs?
Vitamins aren’t working. There’s a disconnect here.
I think that has always been our biggest challenge because a lot of the questions we got initially were, “People don’t really understand what we are. We’re food, but what do you do?”
We add nutrients. We boost up the nutritional intake of anything your kid is eating. Whether it’s something healthier, like yogurt, oatmeal or a smoothie, or something not as healthy, like ketchup, mix us into ketchup. Mix us into pasta sauce. Pasta is still healthy, depending on how it’s made. Sprinkle us on pizza.
You can add us into ice cream. You can literally add us into everything, all day and every day, effortlessly, and usually without your child even noticing. If you sprinkle some into a PB&J, suddenly you have a fiber-rich PB&J full of probiotics and all these nutrients.
It’s about getting them to build that habit, untraining their conventional thinking and training them back into the way food should be leading any health conversation.
So, that, I would say, has been our biggest challenge. And we have tried so many ways to overcome that challenge using pediatric influencers and mommy influencers. They all understand our product.
A lot of the questions we got initially were, “Are seeds even safe for kids?” Or especially with our hemp hearts, “This has hemp in it. Does it have THC in it?”
So, the education aspect was probably one of our biggest challenges.
If I think about it from an operational point of view, some of our biggest challenges were probably in the beginning. A lot of it came from that post that I made about our biggest mistakes.
Tina and I are ex-CPG marketers. We came in and thought we were doing everything the proper way, forecasting our demand, establishing our market, and saying, “Okay, we’re going to take 1% of that.” And 1% amounts to, like, this many million moms.
And, man, our first run was huge. The runs we started doing last year were huge, and there was just a lot of lost inventory due to expiration dates.
We tried to do everything the right way. So, I think the biggest mistakes we were making in the beginning, or the biggest challenge, was really trying to do things right, which is not always a mistake, but sometimes it can become a costly mistake.
If we had maybe engaged with other entrepreneurs from the beginning, networked with other founders and understood what entrepreneurship is about, we could have probably avoided a lot of the mistakes that we made.
We didn’t reach out to our community or a community of founders. We kind of were like, “Okay, we’re CPG. We know what we’re doing.”
Between me and Tina, we’ve worked at L’Oréal, Hershey’s, Unilever, P&G, J&J. It’s, you know, we have a track record. But that track record actually didn’t work in our favor.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
Our goal for the next 12 months is retail expansion. We are currently in Whole Foods, and we’re in 135 locations, and we want to go national.
We’re performing very well in Whole Foods. Our velocities are almost double category expectations. So, yeah, it’s proof of concept.
That, for us, is proof of concept. And so now we want to expand. We’re having those conversations with Whole Foods now.
We also recently launched in Fresh Thyme Market. That was in June. So, it’s about proof of concept there as well and getting into new, more organic, more naturally led retailers.
That is where we want to start. That is our goal for retail expansion, and then moving on to conventional when we’ve conquered those stores and we know that we’re selling out in those stores.
Another one is that we’re kind of at the stage of our business where we’re always running out of cash.
I mean, our last production run, which we just finished and which was one of our biggest, we weren’t even sure if we were going to make it through. We were counting our pennies every day. “Can we pay the supplier this?”
So, that is now opening the question: Do we want to start fundraising?
To date, we have been a fully bootstrapped company, and we’ve just been living off our profits. It’s worked really well, but now we just can’t handle the level of orders coming our way.
I feel like we’re doing a production run every two months because we don’t have enough cash to produce in greater quantities.
So, whether it’s fundraising and going down the route of fundraising and investors, or whether it’s doing something by taking on debt, we need cash.
That’s kind of the next stage of our business in order for us to be able to scale. And then Amazon is the third priority for us for next year. It’s really about scaling our Amazon business.
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business?
Everything just kind of perfectly aligned. It’s just really strange when I think back at it. I ended up taking a sabbatical from L’Oréal for an additional year, and Tina ended up resigning at the end of the year from Hershey’s.
We were very lucky. We both have supportive families, and our husbands were both working full time.
So, yeah, we’ve had to really downsize and downgrade our lifestyles in many ways to make this happen, and we invested a fair bit of money each into the business to get it off the ground. But, you know, there’s never been a time where we’ve sat down and had a discussion saying, “We can’t do this anymore.”
How did your previous experiences impact your initial decision making?
The CPG space, because we worked for big CPG giants, and giants are very slow. So, it’s like, you know, research the hell out of everything and put together a presentation.
I’m not even kidding. For the first few months, I was just researching, researching, researching, putting together presentations that no one was going to read except me and Tina, spending time on who’s our target market and all these things I was trained to do.
Because it felt comfortable, and it felt right. And then, based on that as well, we decided to hire a food incubator to help us launch and create our recipes.
I mean, our recipes are not rocket science, Sean. They’re a mixture of blends of seeds, adding in some probiotics and vitamins. Really, we could have done that in our own kitchens very easily.
We did source all the suppliers ourselves, which took a very, very long time. They did help us with some suppliers. But most of that work was done by us. Same with finding the co-packer.
But the recipes, we worked with food scientists and a pediatric dietician. In hindsight, I’m glad we did it because it gave us some credibility as a business.
We worked with food scientists and a pediatric dietician, which was an integral part of our strategy because we’re creating a new category for kids: seeds for kids, nutrition boosters, real food boosters for kids.
Working with that pediatric RDN was a pivotal strategic move, not only from a marketing point of view, but also from a safety and efficacy perspective.
She helped us determine serving sizes because there was none listed by the FDA for children. She helped us determine the right level of nutrients, how much probiotic we should add, how much vitamin D we should add to make it safe and effective for children.
And especially because, if you look at a lot of multivitamins for kids, they contain, like, 100% of the RDI for children.
I mean, that’s assuming kids are not eating anything all day. Why would you put 100% into a vitamin? Are kids seriously consuming nothing all day? It’s like, it’s unsafe, especially when it’s a synthetic isolate. Food will still—you can’t overdose on food. You can’t do it.
So, anyways, it slowed us down a lot. And I think that was a way it didn’t help us, but a way it did help us. I don’t want to completely disregard everything I’ve learned in my career because I love my career, and it has been absolutely instrumental in this business.
Our marketing was spot-on from the beginning. Honestly, anybody we worked with to help us with either packaging, messaging or marketing, they just didn’t want to work with us anymore because we knew what we wanted to do.
We just needed someone to execute it. We didn’t need any strategic advice. We needed someone to literally sit there and say, “No, we want that there. We want this here. We want this here.”
We worked with some packaging designers, and they were like, “You know what? We just can’t work with you guys because you don’t give us any creative freedom.”
So, I mean, that’s our background. That’s what we’ve done. We know what we want, and because of it, we never needed any support in the marketing aspect of having a startup, which is one of the biggest, most important parts.
Right off the bat, after we had prototypes, we started, a good eight or nine months before we even launched, an Instagram page. We made it about education, about educating people.
We knew what to do in terms of getting the awareness out there, brand awareness and brand integrity, building up a brand. It was a zero-cost initiative for us, and our background really supported us in getting that off the bat.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
What have I not learned is the question?
I think one of the key things I’ve learned is not waiting for perfect. Just go.
On top of that, I worked for the world’s largest beauty company, and at L’Oréal, one of our brand values was perfectionism. The métier was just so ingrained in us. So, if you would ask any of my colleagues, they’d be like, “Oh, Kim is a perfectionist.”
Let me tell you, I am not a perfectionist. I am just like, “Down and dirty. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
And there’s a balance. You don’t want to move so fast that you make mistakes.
My co-founder and I have an interesting story there. We’ve been best friends for 25 years, and we are yin and yang. We’re polar opposites in the majority of ways you could think of.
And it works so beautifully and brilliantly. I would call her a turtle, and she would call me a coyote, you know what I mean? And we meet in the middle.
We have a really nice balance that helps us stay profitable, yet still get to market.
So, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is, A, speed. B, you don’t have to do everything the right way right away.
You don’t have to do everything the right way right away. We started and signed up with ShipBob, which is a huge fulfillment partner. Like, why would we do that? You don’t even know if you have demand.
We did our first production run shipping into ShipBob. No, we should have been shipping out of my house. Really. We should have.
Next thing you know, it’s eight months later, and we’re like, “Why aren’t we making any money?”
You look at your P&L, and everything is going into shipping and fulfillment. The fees were astronomical. Plus, there were so many mistakes.
And we also not only opened up with ShipBob in the U.S., we decided to open up with ShipBob in Canada because we’re actually both Canadian and Tina was based in Canada.
We knew we were going to have a big Canadian community, but you forget Canada is smaller than California in terms of GDP. So, did that really make any sense?
There were a lot of learnings that we went too big too fast, and you should never do that. You should always start small, prove demand, prove scalability, and then scale.
So, what did we do? We pulled out of ShipBob, and let me tell you where all that inventory ended up: my house.
Suddenly, my basement became the fulfillment center for Tiny Sprouts, and only for DTC orders, because at that time we were also on Amazon and growing. Our co-packer, thankfully, also had a fulfillment leg. They would fulfill our B2B and Amazon orders, but all our DTC orders were being filled by me.
Share a decision that you made that was detrimental?
There have been a couple of decisions that I wish we hadn’t made. Some of them are smaller, and I’ll share them anyways because it would be useful for people.
It’s one of the things that I spoke about in that post as well. We worked with a lot of crappy agencies. Really crappy.
I remember our first website. They were a Shopify partner, and they had great reviews. We started working with them, and it was just terrible. We lost all of our money because they couldn’t deliver what we wanted, and we started seeing this consistent theme.
Even our packaging supplier—absolutely, our initial packaging supplier was terrible. I’m talking about there were holes in our bags, the quality was crap, and there was so much lost inventory because of the integrity of the bag.
We did such strong research into our actual ingredient suppliers, but we didn’t do strong research into our service providers or our packaging supplier.
We should have done more. We made every decision based on price. You’re bootstrapped, so every dollar makes a difference, but sometimes you need to disinvest into something else and reinvest those funds into something better if they’re going to move the needle for your business.
So, it is really more about researching more people. We now don’t work with anybody without reviews. We talk to people. It is an integral part of our business where we speak to at least three references on the phone to ensure that any money and time we do invest in these service providers is not going to be wasted.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
I would definitely say when we got into Whole Foods, it was one of the best times of our lives.
We got into the Whole Foods LEAP program. When we initially built this business, we built it for the Whole Foods customer right off the get-go. We knew we weren’t going to be mass market straight away. We knew that we were going to be a more premium, considered purchase.
The mom who is more health-conscious, cares about ingredients and cares about what her kids eat. I’m sure all moms care to a certain degree about their kids, but if you go to a school and you look at their lunch boxes, I would say I beg to differ.
If you truly care about what your kids eat, you take the time and effort to find them the best-quality products and ensure that they have a balanced meal, et cetera, et cetera.
So, there’s just a lack of education. I don’t think it’s any mom’s fault. I think there’s a lack of time, education and support.
But that Whole Foods period of getting into the LEAP program, which is how we got into Whole Foods initially, and then getting onto the shelf, was one of our highlights, for sure. Without a doubt.
Another one I would share is something that happened pre-revenue, and I think this is where we felt really like, “Okay, we’re onto something, and we have something really special here.”
Before we even had a physical product, we had applied for the Natural Products Expo in Philadelphia for their Pitch Slam competition, and we became a top-10 semifinalist.
We got invited to pitch on stage with nine other brands, and we were the only pre-revenue brand. It was such an exhilarating experience. Being pre-revenue, it was just such a validation of the concept that we were presenting, and the feedback—everything that we got—was amazing.
And that was our first pitch ever.
Piece of Advice
I think it all depends on who you are because everyone’s lives are so different. And I had to build a business during a very challenging time in my life.
I was on a high when the idea first came. And then, within less than a year, it was a massive low. My husband had a life-threatening situation that lasted for almost two years.
I was his caretaker. Within that time, I had another baby. So, I was dealing with pregnancy, a toddler, being a caretaker to my husband, birth, postpartum. It was insane.
But I kept building. It was kind of like a non-negotiable in my head. And if I think back to why it would have been non-negotiable, I think it’s because I had a co-founder. So, I had a sense of responsibility.
My co-founder, as I mentioned, is my best friend of 25 years. So, we had heritage. We had history before we even formalized this business.
We had a pact that we would never let this business impact our friendship, and the second it started to, we had to call it quits. Because we have years and years of history, and it’s just not worth it.
So, I guess it’s a bit of advice, or learning, or whatever, but I would always recommend, if you have an opportunity to work with a co-founder, it is a wonderful experience.
It is something where you have somebody to always share ideas with, navigate challenges with, celebrate the good times with, and somebody who understands what you’re going through on a business level like nobody else can.
Nobody can understand the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. It’s very personal. And, like I said, it’s a very lonely journey. So, having this person by your side makes it so much easier.
And then, also, if you’re navigating personal issues through it, your business doesn’t die because there’s somebody there to pick up the pieces or to help get over the hurdles when something in your life prevents you from doing so, whether it’s for a day, a few days or whatnot.
I mean, I never wanted to put that burden on her. I had a C-section and within, like, an hour, I’m sending an email. There was no “nap when the baby naps.” It was impossible.
But I think if you can do that, you build a community in that way. It’s just a great way to enjoy the journey.
If I didn’t have a co-founder, I think I’d still have the business, given everything I had to endure. I’m somebody with a ridiculous amount of grit. I don’t give up. If you ask anybody, they’re like, “If there’s one person that can do it, Kim can do it.”
And that’s for anything. I’ll always see something to the finish line, whatever comes my way.
But would I have enjoyed it? Probably not as much.
Would I have cried more? Probably, you know, enough to fill the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know.
It would have been—it would not have been easier.
Would I be where I am today? Absolutely not.
Where I am today, it’s a team effort. There’s no way I could have made it this far in the business without Tina by my side.
So, two heads are better than one, and that’s a great head that I have next to mine.
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Community Callout
Whole Foods Forager I recommend any entrepreneur who's in the CPG space, especially the natural space, to find a way to meet a Whole Foods Forager and take a risk and try to get into that LEAP program.
It's incredible. It's life-changing. Not only do you have an opportunity to get on shelf, it's not a guaranteed opportunity, but you have an opportunity to get on shelf if you're an elite brand, but the education and university they put you through with the mentors. It's just fantastic, I highly recommend that.
Startup CPG is a Slack community.
It's a big community. host events, pitch events. They've been instrumental to our business. There's so much opportunities through them.
We got into Fresh Time Market because I went to one of their their events in Naperville in Illinois. So what a fantastic resource for any CPG brand to be a part of that community. Definitely shout out to them.
They're an Amazon agency. As we were taking off our Amazon channel, I've never met somebody with so much intellect and skill and grit all combined in one. She just really helped us get to the next level where we wanted to be in our Amazon business. We parted ways with her earlier this year, but she's still one of the most brilliant people I've worked with.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Tiny Sprouts and Co-Founder, Kim Pabla, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
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