Hungry for Growth
An Interview with Yumble Co-Founder and CEO David Parker
As many parents will tell you, mealtimes can be hard. Shopping, cooking, and cleaning take time, and many children resist vegetables with heroic dedication.
Parents need healthy, no-hassle meal options that their kids will consistently love — and Yumble has found the recipe to deliver just that.
Yumble ships wholesome, kid-friendly, and ready-to-warm meals directly to homes each week. Families’ appetites for Yumble’s prepared meals continue to grow, and last month, the company raised a $7M Series A round from LaunchCapital and other investors.
In this interview, Yumble Co-Founder and CEO David Parker tells us why so many families love Yumble.
Can you tell us about your vision for Yumble?
We’re focused on providing healthy food that kids want to eat. Period.
Our top priority is to make sure that kids will absolutely love the food we create. After all, the healthiest food in the world can’t do any good if kids won’t eat it. But in addition to that, our food also needs to be filled with great ingredients and prepared in such a way that parents can feel proud of feeding it to their kids. If we can keep doing those two things, we’ll nail it.
We have a huge opportunity to build a brand that parents trust and kids love. We’re already doing that with direct-to-consumer prepared food.
Ultimately, we see an opportunity to expand our product line horizontally from just dinners and lunches to breakfasts, snacks, and even beverages — all by offering better-for-you options created specifically for kids.
We’re going to get there by building a world-class product. We’ve always been focused on this, and our recent funding round has allowed us to invest even more heavily in our product.
What did investors find compelling as you raised your Series A?
Investors understand very well — many of them firsthand — the need that we’re addressing for parents. We were very fortunate in that regard.
They think the direct-to-consumer prepared food space is going to be huge, and they’re aware that the kids-focused niche is very large and untapped.
We’re not a meal-kit company. We’re in a completely different product category.
We’re solving a problem specifically for parents. They just don’t have time to spend 30 minutes cooking and another 20 minutes cleaning up pots and pans.
Some parents aren’t even able to always be home when their kids eat dinner, and so they don’t have the time in the morning to create a healthy lunch.
Yumble solves these problems and allows parents to get more done without feeling guilty.
Most of all, our investors think we’re the best in the game, and they’re really excited to back our team.
What makes Yumble’s product and customer experience unique?
In Yumble’s earliest days, when we first started exploring this space and talking to VCs, they would often ask, “Does there really need to be a direct-to-consumer prepared-meal company for kids? Why can’t Blue Apron do this?” At the time, we didn’t think that investors understood how different Yumble is.
Meal-kit companies like Blue Apron offer their customers an activity — preparing a meal. They may save customers some time on grocery shopping, but they don’t solve the problem of needing almost an hour to cook and clean.
We’re not providing an activity — we’re solving a very painful problem that parents face every day. With Yumble, parents don’t have to worry about cooking, or waking up early to pack lunch, or rushing home to make a dinner that they can be proud of feeding to their kids.
We’re building long-term relationships with customers.
We see an opportunity to be the first to market with a completely differentiated product that specifically speaks to kids. And if we can deliver a world-class experience for the kids and parents alike — where kids are finally excited to eat healthy food — we know our products will be super sticky.
If your kid is finally eating healthy food, you are not rocking the boat — you are sticking with that brand! That gives us an enormous opportunity to have great retention.
Has your focus, and the focus of your team, shifted since raising your Series A?
Before the raise, we had a very strong team of only six or seven people. We’ve always hired very selectively and deliberately, and we intentionally built an operational infrastructure that wouldn’t require a large team.
From the beginning, our strategy has been to stay small so that we can focus on our core competencies and the things that truly differentiate Yumble. We’ve been very deliberate in deciding where we need to develop barriers, and we’ve focused on those areas.
That has meant investing heavily in our product, our brand, and our marketing infrastructure.
We’ve chosen to outsource everything that falls outside of our core competencies — including producing food and managing hundreds of cooking and packing personnel — to the best third-party partners who have special expertise in those functions.
We’ve only been able to stay so lean because of the strength of our team. It takes someone like Dan Treiman, our COO and co-founder, to gain access to and manage such an intricate system of outsourced infrastructure.
Our team has grown a lot in the past month, although we’re still small compared to many other companies. Directing this growth has been one of my biggest challenges, recently. I’ve basically taken all the energy that I was putting into the fundraising process and redirected it into hiring and scaling the team.
We needed to grow to execute against the opportunities in front of us — but we’ve been very careful to maintain the caliber of the players we recruit.
We have a very clear vision of where we want to go. We also have a lot of great talent to take us there. Now, it’s about executing.
Interested in learning more? Find Yumble on Twitter @yumblekids or reach out by email to help@yumblekids.com.
