Ever worked for someone or on something that goes against your principles and goals? That was exactly the factor that brought about the creation of 2019 NEXTY’s Best New Natural Kids Product lil’gourmets. In this episode, Founder & CEO Shibani Baluja talks about their mission to not only offer baby food that is safe and nutritious but to influence kids’ eating habits as well. Tune in and find out about the challenges of starting a brand and creating a new category and their strategies to bring their product to the forefront.

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Lil’gourmets: Baby Food With A Purpose With Shibani Baluja

Before I kick it over to Shibani and let her introduce herself, her brand and her story, and have a cool conversation, just a few reminders. I’m going to be talking about this for most of the episodes. The first is for those interested in learning more about the TIG Collective, our advisory collective where brands have the opportunities to work with a cool cadre of advisors and get support at a completely different level than has been out there, please reach out to me or to Jenny, whose email will also be included in the show notes. I’m also going to be doing some episodes on funding and funding in a new way, which we’re trying to do as we introduce the concept of a venture community. More to come on that. If you’re interested in learning more about the TIG Venture Community, please reach out.

Shibani, this is cool. We’re going to sit here, talk and explore what entrepreneurship is like from your perspective, especially a perspective of leaving the corporate and abandoning the corporate world to do this crazy thing. Before we go any further, I’ll let you do your own introduction. Share with the audience a bit about you, your background, and Lil’gourmets.

I’m the Founder of Lil’gourmets. It is a fresh, veggie-focused, globally-inspired baby food company. We’re all about getting kids to learn to love veggies and diverse flavors, making them healthy and adventurous eaters. I didn’t set out to start Lil’gourmets, but life experiences led me here. Pre Lil’gourmets, I was at Kraft Foods for a little over a decade. I was in strategy and mergers and acquisitions. I enjoyed my time there but also became a mom during that. Towards the end of that time at Kraft, I started to see baby foods, and I felt like there was a lot of room for improvement. I decided to leave my corporate job and take the plunge into entrepreneurship.

You make it sound like, “I just thought about it.” You were in the throes of a very successful high-powered corporate career. You chopped it to start Lil’gourmets. You get out there. You lean in and take this risk. Why? I asked this question out of curiosity. It took me a long time to accept this. My wife was pushing me to acknowledge that I was miserable in my corporate world.

Even though on paper or to those looking, I had reached successes, I always felt like I was the pariah because I was an entrepreneur within a corporate setting. Entrepreneurs inherently break things. They want to change and fix things. In big companies, that’s a threat. Breaking things, changing things, and making mistakes is scary to them. Did you have an undercurrent of being unfulfilled? What drove your willingness at this stage to walk away from a decades-long career?

I thought of being an entrepreneur. I enjoyed my time in corporate, and it’s probably because I was in such a small and challenging role where there were only at most six of us in the mergers and acquisitions group. We were doing billions of dollars in deals. Every deal was different, and nothing had a playbook. It was such a challenging career with so much learning.

I had such supportive bosses and mentors through it. I loved most of my time at Kraft. The impetus to leaving was on the personal front. I was struggling in trying to get pregnant. I was going through years of infertility treatments. During that time, I’m seeing different specialists. I started to understand food as medicine more, and the impact of processed foods on my body and health.

Through that, I started questioning my passion and purpose at Kraft as a big food company. I didn’t leave initially through that because I was in mergers and acquisitions. I tried to move the portfolio a bit to more natural organic, but it’s hard to move a ship that big. I then became a mom. I had my son. I was standing there, ready to feed him a jar of baby food. The irony hit me that this processed food that I had cut out of my diet to have him, now I was about to feed it to him. It hit me that something wasn’t right.

When I started doing that, I was still at Kraft. I started cooking all of his meals. My background is Indian. My parents were entrepreneurs. They had restaurants. I always grew up with food with a lot of flavors. When I started cooking my son Jayden’s meals, I cooked with a lot of veggies and spices. He became a toddler who loved vegetables and adventurous foods or flavorful foods. He shunned bland and processed foods.

As I started seeing that, it got me more curious as to what was happening. I started doing medical research. I found that there’s a high correlation between our early foods and our future eating habits. If we could introduce kids to vegetables and flavorful foods, we could shape them to be these healthier eaters and get them not to be dependent on chicken nuggets and hotdogs.

When I looked at the baby food industry, I saw everything was fruit-focused and overprocessed. It was lending itself to create these toddlers who wanted sweet and salty foods. It probably took me another year or two. The idea was nagging in my mind. It felt like everything in my life was leading me to try to do something about this. I had to finally give into it.

I’ve used this analogy before but sometimes when that idea gets stuck in there, it’s like the drums in the movie Jumanji. You hear it no matter how hard you try to put it aside or say, “This is crazy. Why would I do something like this?” It’s almost like you no longer have free will. Your manifest destiny is to do this.

The other thing that I heard in what you said was also something that struck a chord with me because I recognized it then and certainly recognized it more now. I almost do so with a bit of embarrassment. I certainly didn’t at the time, but I feel I’m awakened now and I recognized that I spent several years of my career working for the equivalent of big tobacco. It was good people and so forth, but the products we were making and the things that we were doing did more harm and inflicted more dietary and metabolic diseases than anything.

It was a hard recognition because when I was in the midst of it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t think that way because you’re drinking the Kool-Aid a bit. You’re surrounded by people who are giving you the information. When you step away, you start doing your own research, you start digging, and you start your own personal health journey for you as you work through the fertility issues, all of a sudden, you have this awakening like, “Maybe what I’m doing and what I’m putting my energy for isn’t aligned with what I want to be putting for that.” That’s a hard thing to accept.

I realized that I didn’t have the passion to stay at Kraft. Kraft was acquired by 3G Capital at that time. It became apparent to me that it was time for me to go. I can’t say that I immediately jumped into launching Lil’gourmets. I still had those doubts, but I went and interviewed. I was like, “This is not what I want, sitting in these high cubes.” I knew I had such an incredible opportunity now to try to go after this. If I didn’t do it, I would regret it always. I naively thought it would be a year or two. I figure out that either this is a great idea that has legs or I go back to my corporate life. That was probably several years ago. I’m still trying to figure it out.

I remember having a call with my wealth manager, financial counselor or whatever you call. I said to her, “I’m terrified about this but I’m going to give it a good six months. If it doesn’t work, I’m not afraid of going back and getting a job.” About two hours later, the chairman of the firm, who I had only met one time, called me out of the blue.

He said, “Elliot, this is Tim. I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to interject here. I heard you say to your wealth manager that you’re going to give this a good six months. You’re going to fail if that’s your mindset. Either you do it or you don’t do it. You do it and accept that there is no alternative. There is no plan B. There is no, “I’ll give this a good six months. If not, I can dust off my resume.” If you have that in the back of your mind, you will automatically move towards that. It was important advice to hear.

Let me ask a unique question because I think you have the opportunity to put a unique lens to look at your own business. Putting on your M&A lens and as somebody who would look and analyze M&A opportunities, from that perspective, what do you see in Lil’gourmets? What do you see as the opportunity?

It’s hard not to look at it with that lens in most of the decisions I make. I know the things that caused consternation when we were looking at small brands. So much of it was unclear ownership of IP. Who owns the formulas and the brand? Can the brand stretch? IP has been something I always try to protect. Path to profitability, can this business get to gross margins of at least 40 because you can’t support it under that? Is there a path to get there? That has always been on my mind. It doesn’t have to be there now, but can we find the synergies to make sure we get there?

The whole supply chain and the consumer we know with some brands either are dependent on certain channels, which customers may not be as favorable to being owned by bigger companies or consumers that might not be building that brand strength. When I look at Lil’gourmets, a brand like this is not the most efficient and is owned by just a founder. There were cold packs or cold products that have to be shipped around the country. It’s much better to be in the hands of someone who has those supply chain capabilities so that we could lower our price, make this more accessible, and still have a sustainable business.

I look at that as probably the most efficient place for a brand like mine to end. It’s small and unproven right now that big food has not incentivized us to try to create categories like we’re trying to create. We have to prove that there is a consumer need for this and that the brand is strong enough. I do think as long as we are thinking about our supply chain and thinking about our brand and IP, it can transfer over and then it’ll make sense.

It’s interesting because working with many entrepreneurs and many founders, I always find it intriguing to see how they put a lens on their business. This isn’t a commentary on right or wrong, or anything along those lines because it’s not, but many of them are doing this out of passion. It’s hard for them to separate and take a clinical look at their business. They’re doing this because it has to be done. It’s so forth. They try to do the clinical.

You solved a real problem for you or a visceral problem or something you recognize that was bothering you. It sounds like it’s easier for you to assume the clinical look at the business. Maybe you don’t give yourself as much permission to lean in or fall prey to the passion because you think that takes away from the clinical.

I think you’re probably correct. When I was launching the product, I had the choice of, do I make this in a certified kitchen, try to prove and take it to scale or do I go to the co-packer? I know that if I’m going to make a big difference and if I’m going to try to institute a change in baby food, it has to be on a bigger scale. That’s probably because of my background that I recognize that.

It took almost three years to get to launch because of the difficulty in scaling at a co-packer. Had I not had that knowledge, I maybe would have been producing it at a local certified kitchen and going to farmer’s markets and trying to prove the business that way. It has taken a different path because of that recognition that if we’re going to institute change and push the baby food industry to be better, we have to get to something sizeable.

I want to again go back and say that I’m not on one path versus the other. It’s not all right and wrong. It’s always interesting to me how different people and mindsets choose different paths. That’s important. You have to choose a path that’s aligned with the way you’re thinking and the way that feels good, not the way you’re being told and so forth. It probably would have been harder for you to lean into a commercial kitchen and farmer’s market because it wouldn’t have felt as structured or as linear, and that’s fine.

My background also made me hyper-focused on food safety. I was like, “Do I know what I’m supposed to do in that kitchen and have it refrigerated?”

I’m switching gears slightly. When did you wake up and recognize, “I’m an entrepreneur?”

I never thought about that.

Has it even happened yet?

It happened. It would probably be maybe after I launched it into a retailer that it started to feel real. You see your product on the shelf and you’re like, “I created that.” I honestly never thought about that. It was always such a project for those first few years where we were trying to get to launch. I would say it probably was seeing it on the shelf, being able to start introducing yourself as the founder and having that tangible product to show people.

It’s an interesting thing when you recognize, suddenly, you’re an entrepreneur. When most people start to realize it is when there is no predictability in the day. Yesterday things were going great and today, things went terribly. You couldn’t predict it and you couldn’t do anything about it. All you can do as an entrepreneur is adjust to this moment and control the moment that you’re in because you can’t undo what has been done. You can’t change what is yet to be.

That’s different from corporate, where you spend a fair amount of time forecasting and predicting the future, and analyzing the past. In an entrepreneurial role, it’s like, “That ship has sailed. I’m going to set that aside. I don’t know what’s going to happen a week from now. I’m just going to focus on right now.” Recognizing that is critical.

When I think back to my big food days, the thing I laugh about the most is I spent so much time telling people how they should manage their businesses. Being in strategy, it’s so much of what we did, whether we were doing a deal where we had to find growth opportunities to present to buyers if we were doing a divestiture or at acquisition to present to senior management.

When we weren’t in the throes of deals, I was often working with the different business units on the problem in businesses and what things we could do. When I had to try to do it myself, it was so different. When I got past that stage, I did my consumer research and my market research and established there’s a need and a white space here, it was like, “What do I do now? I’m past theory.” I had to start executing, and that was such a different skillset.

To a degree, in corporate life, we get institutionalized out of our gut. We have to almost disavow the relationship we had to the instinctual intuitive things. We have to rely upon theory, analysis, and consensus. You’re backing down entrepreneurship and it’s like, “Forget that stuff.” You got to trust your gut. You got to intuitively know what’s right or wrong. That’s hard to switch that switch.

Jenny has a question here. She doesn’t pull any punches. She wants to know what you do to remind yourself that you’re a badass and that what you’re doing is badass, and I agree with her. She is a badass founder herself who weather the storm for over eight years. It’s incredibly important to have that internal dialogue with yourself when things are hard. What do you do to tell yourself that?

I try to look back at all we’ve accomplished. I had a partner who had me do this exercise when she joined the company where you say it has been three years and you haven’t made progress. Write out the timeline. Write out everything you did and remind yourself that you started from nothing and where you’ve gotten.

Admittedly, this is not an area that I am great at, but I have surrounded myself with great mentors and advisors, yourself included, that remind me of that. It’s an area that I have to be reminded of. As we talk to new retailers or new partners and they get excited about the idea, that helps me, but it should be more internal. We’re so busy. I’ve got two little kids. If I’m not in the business, I’m with them. You forget that whole self-care.

You also forget at times the internal bolster, the internal narrative or the internal confidence. I’m a worrier. I’m always have been. It’s the same thing. It’s hard to stand in front of the mirror and say, “Don’t worry about it. You’re a badass. You got this.” You worry. I was talking to someone who’s a life coach randomly. I said, “One of my great regrets is that I waste and spend so much time worrying. I find that counterproductive, and I get angry at that worry.”

Her comeback, which is brilliant and has helped me redefine that is she said, “You can be angry at that worry, or you can think it because it’s your guard against complacency. It won’t let you slow down. It won’t let you be satisfied or comfortable. In another way, it’s a protection to make sure you remain a badass.”

Instead of trying to convince me that I was that great entrepreneur and so forth, I found it easier to thank myself for the worry that I give myself, and yet the outcome is similar. My advice to everybody is don’t give yourself a false narrative. Don’t stand in front of a mirror, whether literally or figuratively, and give yourself a pep talk that is disingenuous because you’re not going to internalize it. It isn’t going to change it.

Inherently, every one of us who has been an entrepreneur for more than a day has already been knocked to the ground, has got back up, dusted ourselves off, and moved forward. There’s something in every one of us as an entrepreneur that is forcing us to do that because most people would just lay there. They wouldn’t get back up. They turn around and go home. There’s something there that makes us inherently more resilient, stupid or a combination of the two.

If that is still a struggle for you, get that external affirmation that all of us need. We all need to be cared for, valued, heard and respected. That’s universal. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anyone who says they don’t is not being truthful to themselves. If you can’t be your own internal champion, try to be the champion of the traits that are serving you well. That’s my advice.

My biggest professional challenge, and from a personal perspective, it’s such passion and purpose. I love to make my mark on this industry and improve it for families. Personally, I like to show my kids that. Professionally, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m less of a worrier. It’s just challenging and I just have to problem solve them.

Worry is my thing. I’m not saying that it’s your thing. There you go, problem-solving. It may be easier for you to accept that you’re a uniquely good problem solver than it is for you to say to yourself, “I’m a fantastic or a badass entrepreneur.” Whatever it is, those traits are serving you well, remind yourself that they’re serving you well and let the other people externally be affirmational.

We talk about a lot of these things on this show because I feel like these are the things that we don’t discuss openly enough about entrepreneurship. The reality is we have such a comparing mind. We hear about the entrepreneurs that have raised a bunch of money, show up in a bunch of industries and podcasts, and are darlings and so forth. We’re going, “Why does this seem so much harder for me? Why is it so much tougher than me?”

The truth of the matter is that 95% of those, it was just as tough for them. They just happened to be in their season or moment right now. They’re not any different or better. They are just in their moment. Because we hear so much of that narrative and we compare, and so much of the activities that we’re doing are in isolation, this can be a lonely depleted process because things can be hard. You can have 3, 4 or 5 a week of great days stacked upon each other, then something hits the fan. You feel like your knees got cut out from you, and it’s disheartening.

It’s critical to talk about this and acknowledge that it is something that’s a shared part of this journey for all entrepreneurs, and figure out ways to manage, vocalize and nourish that so you don’t feel like it has to be swept under the rug. It’s an important thing that all of us as entrepreneurs owe ourselves and all of our community of entrepreneurs the willingness, openness, and admitted vulnerability to discuss it because it’s a tough journey.

I’m going to say it in the form of a statement but turn it into a question as well. When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s sometimes even more difficult to lean on your family, your spouse, and your kids for that support because they don’t understand entrepreneurship in the same way. How is that with you? It’s home. You’re working from there, but how much of it do you take home with you, and how much of it do you try to keep separate from them?

I probably take a good amount of it home. My husband was an entrepreneur years ago. He gets it and that support. My kids will be like, “Mom, why do you have to work so much?” One of them will say, “If mom didn’t work so much, we wouldn’t have Lil’gourmets.” They put their own support, which is helpful to see. This is a plug for you, Elliot. This community you’ve created has been incredibly helpful to me. What I’ve been searching for the last few years is people who understand, not just to vent but to help solve problems and find improvements. That community is important. I don’t think I could take it all home because it would be too much. Finding an external community of entrepreneurs is so important.

Thanks for that. First of all, it’s something we’re all building. Not just Jenny, Raven, Charity, Juliet, and myself, but all of you and all of us. It’s about everyone being lenient, giving and so forth. I stumbled across the importance of community by accident. Two things. One, I was at a mastermind group where we were supposed to talk about what our highest value activity was. I walked in with some idea. Everyone looked at me and said, “No, that’s not your highest value activity. The highest value activity is you have this ability to create community and support entrepreneurs.”

I read a book by Jono Bacon. I’m sitting there and I’m like, “We got to lean, codify, formalize and build it.” Everything that we’re doing is with that community. We have our programs. We have a venture community, The Collective, which is a community of advisors. We have our Tardigrade and eTardigrade and those types of things for that reason. You’re also lucky that you are able to bring some of it home and keep some of it home.

It’s such a great lesson for kids. It’s such an amazing lesson when they look at their parents, and see their parents chasing a dream, grinding it out and willing to put in the hard work and do it, being self-sufficient and all of those things. It’s a fantastic lesson. I also think it’s a fantastic education for all of us. I would put actual entrepreneurship, starting a company, and running a company over any Ivy League MBA program all day long. I look at my years in graduate school and business school compared to my years as an entrepreneur. I asked, “Where did my knowledge come from?” I know 1,000% came from entrepreneurship.

My education gave me a framework for compartmentalizing it and putting it in a usable form. It helped me set up my filing system, but it’s the real world. It’s such a valuable education regardless of the outcome. What has been the most surprising part of this journey that you’re spending time doing and working on? Has it been such a steep curve? Has it been sales, marketing, manufacturing, or capital? What has been the most like, “I didn’t anticipate putting this much energy and effort against this activity or this thing?

Getting to the launch was so much harder than I ever anticipated. When I look at the products, we’re putting vegetables and spices, and some healthy fats to cut. From a technical point of view, we had many operations experts that say, “You can’t do what you’re trying to do. You can’t do it in a clean label way.” I was adamant that all that would go into this product were things that were in a kitchen. These were going to be things that you would make at home because we’re trying to help recreate that home cooking experience and save parents time.

I had an R&D advisor. The number of people we go to and how much we had to bring in and solve on our own because there were many people who said, “You can’t do this. You’re going to have to bump some apple juice in it, grape juice, or something. You need more acidity.” That piece and we had a lot of issues with our packaging, so solving all those inner dependencies was more challenging than I ever anticipated. That’s probably the first one.

You and I have talked about this. We’re not just building a brand. We’re building this category and placement. It’s such a challenge. We’ve launched into retailers that we know our consumer is shopping at, but they’re not shopping where our product is because it has to be refrigerated. That’s probably the bigger challenge. They have both been challenging, but this idea of how much is impacted by the fact that there wasn’t a category, and now it’s becoming a category, but not having that frame of reference for consumers was much more challenging than I realized.

On my Kraft days, we crafted and tried to launch a few different brands. The learning was, “Never launch a product that consumers don’t know that they’re looking for. If they are looking for it, they have no idea where to find it in store.” I knew I was doing both those things, but it still has been a lot of challenges.

That’s such a great thing. In some ways, you defined what the difference is. Big companies were like, “Let’s not take the risk. We’re not going to do something that people don’t know what they need. We are not going to put it where they don’t know where they’re going to find it.” Entrepreneurs do that all day long.

Steve Jobs said that on the iPhone or iPad. Henry Ford said, “If you ask consumers what they wanted, they say a faster horse.” Somebody has to disrupt and change it. That’s what we do, but it’s not easy. If you could go back to when this seed was first germinating in your brain, and you were thinking about making this leap, it was there, and tell yourself something that you would have liked to have known then, can you think of what that would be?

Had I known how hard it was going to be, maybe I would have stopped the challenge. I don’t think so. Each of the mistakes we’ve made has been learning. I’m sure there are things that I could think through that would have been less painful. Had I been thinking so far ahead, those challenges would have probably weighed me down more than they did versus like, “I’m facing this challenge and I have to solve it. Now that that’s behind me, I have to keep moving forward.” Every little step made me have to keep pushing forward because I kept getting deeper. I’m sure there are things but things happen for a reason. We’re still standing and I believe so much in the product that may be the challenging journey we’ve been on has been for a reason.

I can attest it has been and it will be. I will ask a question about overall what you’ve learned thus far. What advice can you give about educating the consumer about a product that’s different in a category that’s different?

One mistake that we’ve made, and it’s a learning, was we felt like we were so much better than baby food. We didn’t want to be called baby food because baby food had this negativity associated with it. Consumers needed to better understand what we were. We didn’t call ourselves baby food. We didn’t have our look like a baby product. That probably made it a lot harder. Consumers need a frame of reference. We weren’t sitting next to baby foods and went to this more premium adult-looking product that we made it a little bit harder.

We probably should maybe swallow that pride a little bit to say, “We think we’re a lot better than baby food but we’re still baby food. Let’s make it obvious that we are.” That would have helped our early on consumers understand that better and maybe need a little bit less. We probably would have improved our discovery in stores. We’re working to address that now, but that’s probably one thing.

Branding is an activity and it’s an exchange. We forget that. Ultimately, it is the activity of aligning what we want consumers or shoppers to believe about our product with what they actually believe about our product. We have a choice as marketers, and we can bring them all the way up to what we want them to believe. Oftentimes, that is a lot of work and it’s untenable. It’s a fool’s errand.

We can let go of it a little bit, let go of our pride, let go of that sense, and move closer to them and acquiesce a bit and go, “We don’t want to call ourselves baby food but everybody else wants us to be baby food. We could continue to fight and drag them up this hill to see it their way, or I could dump it and see it their way.” That’s branding. We have to listen. Sometimes our pride, our ego, and our personal vision get in the way of being clear-minded that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we think and want. What matters is what our shoppers think and want. We can meet them a little bit closer and it’s not as big a struggle. Once we have them in, we can begin to do it.

I was talking and watching it with Wefunder. Everybody’s talking about crowdfunding. They want to rebrand it. They want to have it called a community round, which I think makes a ton of sense because that’s what it is. It’s not some random crowd. It’s your community that’s funding it, but good luck to them. It’s hard to change the lexicon and so forth.

I would encourage everyone to think of branding in that manner. It is the activity of aligning what you want your shoppers to believe with what they actually believe. You guys, as the entrepreneurs, can determine how much you want them to travel towards you and how much you’re willing to travel towards them.

It’s like they didn’t call themselves a bar. They said, “We’re the more perfect bar.” Some learnings there for me.

We see it all the time with FormFactor. We see it all the time with that, but it’s tough. You have these visions for things. It means silly things. When we did our brand refresh and we moved to the TIG brand, I wanted everyone to call it TIG but still, people call it T-I-G. For a while, I was like, “No, it’s TIG.” Now, I’m like, “Call it whatever you want. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Whatever works.” It’s that pridefulness or your vision of things.

When you think about the future for Lil’gourmets, let’s say you’re back on the show. It’s five years from now that puts both you and I waving well into our 60s at that point, which is frightening. You’re there already, but I’ll be there with you then. Where are you? What has happened with the brand?

At that point, we hope we have shifted what parents expect from baby food. We want to say, “We owe our kids more than what’s there.” I hope we’ve disrupted this industry alongside some of the other players that are working to do it, have elevated it, and are setting kids up to become healthy eaters who love vegetables and flavors, and aren’t dependent on processed food. We know the long-term impact that’s having on the helpless country. I hope we’ve made a huge amount of progress in that. We’ve created this category, and it’s now normal to find perishable baby food in all stores.

I know you can’t control this, and it’s probably thinking way too in advance. As you think about a potential acquirer or so forth, is it important that the acquirer is committed to not trying to bend the guardrails that you’ve established for the brand to meet the efficiencies that are always the motivation behind bigger brands? In other words, start over-processing, start adding preservatives, and things like that. Are you going to fall on the cross there? Are you going to take this as far as you can take it and hope that whoever takes it from there stays true to it?

We’re trying to institute change. There are certain tenets to the brand that I would always want the brand to hold to stay true to. The clean label and the delivery of nutrients, vegetables and flavor are core to the brand. I was the queen of diversity in Kraft foods. I vested a lot of brands that we acquired and tried to Kraftize. It generally leads to failure.

There have been learnings on that on big food and you see it with most of the big companies and trying to protect the secret sauce of these small brands. Finding that right strategic acquirer, if that’s the point we’re at, is going to be important. They’re out there. There are people who are already heavy into refrigerated that could fit nicely into. I’m assuming we get to that size.

It’s such a challenge because oftentimes, these companies want brands that bring accretive category growth or new people in, their efficiency teams, operations teams, and all of that. They start looking at, “I need longer shelf life to make it work and our supply chain. All those innocuous, small things start becoming slowly pervasive in the brand, and the brand loses its compass. The same holds true with culture, and we’ve seen that a lot.

I agree with you. There have been companies trying to think around that differently, trying to leave those companies as self-operating and stuff along those lines. I’m curious if you have been thinking about it. As you continue this journey and move forward, what are you hoping for or what do you feel is a space that you want to spend more of your energy digging into learning more, proving your professionalism and your personal development?

I’m starting to bring in a team and give that team the support and autonomy. I’ve had a lot of strong mentors who’ve taught me so much, specifically a lot of women mentors. These are areas that I would love to do more. I would love to start building a team and getting more ideas in the business. I love to spend more time probably on sales and less on operations. I spend a lot of time in operations now, managing distributors and such. I would love to pass some of that along. I would love to have more time to get in front of the customers and consumers than a lot of the backend stuff that takes a lot of our focus now.

In general, going back to the beginning, will you do it all again if you know what you know now?

I don’t know how the story ends yet. Assuming the story ends positively, and maybe even if not, I know there is so much learning. I always tell myself, “I was going to do this.” It’s like your pep talk about your six months. I knew no matter what, this would be a resume builder. I’ve learned so much that I suppose even if Lil’gourmets doesn’t work out, I know I can make an impact elsewhere. I wouldn’t have learned as much and I wouldn’t have had these challenging growth experiences without Lil’gourmets. I wouldn’t change it.

I believe fully that you’ll be successful, but that’s the right attitude. The reality is I don’t think it’s a choice for most entrepreneurs. I’ve talked with hundreds and hundreds. The reality is that most normal human beings see the risk in action, and entrepreneurs see the risk in inaction. If they don’t take action, they’re going to always have that, “What if? Why didn’t I?” It becomes something that you can’t cast aside and do. Regardless of the outcome, the lessons you learned, the confidence you built in yourself, your resilience, and your problem-solving are skills that will serve you for the balance of your life.

Two points to call out on that. You said that it’s a good resume builder. I don’t always find it to be a good resume builder. Don’t freak out because I think the more time you spend as an entrepreneur, the less hireable you become because you can’t ever work in an environment that institutionalizes your gut instinct out, being a creator or a problem solver. It’s hard for people to reemerge. What I find is that they find other entrepreneurial opportunities. I will just call that out there.

The second is you’re teaching your kids an incredibly important lesson. Our kids and family members, regardless of their ages, are natural watchers and emulators. There’s an understanding when they see especially a strong woman entrepreneur standing up and doing these things, challenging an industry in a category. Those lessons that you’re amassing are 10X the lessons that the kids are amassing that are going to serve them well. In many ways, that is worth the fight in and of itself. If folks want to learn more and reach out to you, how best to do that?

You can email me at Shibani@Lilgourmets.com. I love collaborating. Feel free to reach out.

Thanks for sitting with me and having this conversation. Thanks to all those in-studio audiences who joined and asked questions. If this show is resonating and helping you as an entrepreneur, investor or retailer in understanding other perspectives, this has nothing to do with trying to be promotional. This has to do with trying to get good conversations out in the universe. Do me a favor, take five minutes and give it a positive review. It helps the algorithm move it up so more people find out about it. That’s what our hope is. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• TIG Collective

• TIG Venture Community

• Lil’gourmets

• Tardigrade

• eTardigrade

• Wefunder

• Shibani@Lilgourmets.com

About Shibani Baluja

Experienced strategy and M&A professional with nearly two decades experience in the Food Industry. Results-oriented professional recognized as a strong business partner, analytical, creative, and a tough but fair negotiator. Extensive experience distilling insights from consumer and financial data and translating insights into actions to drive growth.

Now, Founder and CEO of lil’gourmets, an innovative baby and toddler food brand that launched fresh & refrigerated, veggie-first, complex global meals. Based on the research that shows there is a high correlation between first foods and future eating habits, lil’gourmets strives to cultivate lil’ones curiosity by exposing them to unique tastes, textures, and cuisines from an early age to help them fall in love with vegetables and diverse, culturally-rich foods for life. We imagine a world where kids become curious about Morocco, because they love their Moroccan Butternut Squash…and one where they request the complex flavor of a vegetable curry more often than mac & cheese!

Specialties:

Mergers & Acquisitions • Divestitures • Joint Ventures • Partnerships • Deal Negotiation • Project Management • Financial Analysis • Valuation • Forecasting • Market Research and Analysis • Market-Entry Analysis • Board and Stakeholder Communications • New Product Launch

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