Expanding Product Portfolio: A Major Strategy for Organic Baby Food Manufacturers

Giving enough nutrients through food to a baby is significant in mental and physical development. Parents are becoming anxious about sugar, salt, and nutrients content in food with increasing rate of obesity. Organic baby food providers are ensuring that a baby grows healthy by including nourishing ingredients in their products. They are including ingredients such as quinoa, kale, lentils, chickpeas, and spinach instead of salt, sugar, or other preservatives. The focus is providing healthy, nutritious food along with taste. The preference to organic baby food ensures minimum exposure to synthetic pesticides.

Various organic baby foods including cereals, soups, grains, meat, and others are preferred across the world. Porridges and broths are soups with high fibers that are served to babies in Vietnam. It contains thinly sliced shrimp, vegetables such as butternut & carrot, and potatoes. In Sweden, baby food includes mashed up fruits & vegetables and a wheat-based cereal containing palm oil and powdered milk. In China and East Asia, porridges made from milk, banana, and green beans are given to babies. While fruits and fruit blends made from custard apple, papaya, naseberry, and others along with a teaspoon of honey is fed to babies in Jamaica. Cultural practice and environmental condition are major factors in organic baby food preferences in various regions.

Expanding a product portfolio helps manufacturers in expanding their business with availability of wide array of options to consumers. Piccolo, an organic baby food manufacturer expanded its portfolio with launch of six new products. These products extend Piccolo’s portfolio to 12 stage one products based on Mediterranean family recipes. “We are excited to introduce six new products and will be unveiling our stage two collections next month,” said Catherine Gazzoli, Founder of Piccolo. Northern supermarket booths included Piccolo’s products and excluded products of big brands such as Heinz and Hipp Organic. Ready-to-eat organic foods help parents in saving their time to prepare food from scratch without compromising on health of their babies.

Entrepreneurs are determining emerging markets to start their businesses. Eying the lack of availability of organic baby food in the Nigerian food industry, Debo Adebayo founded Tomi’s Treats that manufactures fruit and vegetable purées for children. The company is in its infancy in Nigeria and building a manufacturing facility. Though they face challenges in the beginning from educating people about benefits of organic food to convincing retailers to sell their products, positive feedback from users and loyal band of customers have helped them to expand their businesses successfully. 

Adebayo emphasized on the fact that their products are premium and every family cannot afford it, so the company is striving to reduce prices of their products without compromising the quality. Exchange rates and financial policy changes are some of the challenges he needs to overcome while operating in the African region. Commenting on the vision of his company, he said that they are planning to expand product portfolio by adding new flavors and organic products. Business growth of manufacturers is largely dependent on exploring emerging markets and grabbing expansion opportunities.

Analysts studying the industry have revealed detailed information on changing market dynamics and trends. Big Market Research has added a report, titled, “Global Organic Baby Food Market 2016-2020.” The report offers an extensive analysis of current market trends, detailed segmentation, drivers & opportunities, and vendor landscape.