From The January/February 2003 Issue of Natural Grocery Buyer

What's Best for Baby?

Parents go to four corners of the store to shop for their pride and joy

Lisa Everitt

Josie Ingall will eat most anything. But her mother feeds her organic. Barely a year old, Josie favors Cascadian Farm's frozen veggies sautéed in olive oil with red wine and cheese, reports Marjorie Ingall, a columnist for the weekly New York newspaper Forward. Josie turned down cheesecake at her first birthday party in favor of pickles from Russ & Daughters, a Lower East Side gourmet shop.

To supply her little foodie, Ingall shops several stores near her Manhattan home, including the Key Food supermarket, two gourmet groceries, Healthy Pleasures organic emporium and the corner market. "We end up buying fresh food in one place, organic and wheat-free and baby food in another and conventional stuff in a third location."

This kind of effort is worth it for most parents who worry that they may be exposing their children to icky chemicals. No food segment is more sensitive to concerns about pesticide residues and genetically modified ingredients.

Why Organic? Pound for pound, babies consume two to four times more fruits and vegetables than adults, and the average child receives four times more exposure to eight often-used pesticides. That risk may be where you least expect it. For example, bananas are produced using benomy, which is linked to birth defects, and chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin. In Costa Rica, bananas are grown on about 5 percent of the country's farmland but account for 35 percent of pesticide consumption. Source: Earth's Best, The O' Mama Report.

Baby and children's foods are often the first organic purchase a consumer makes, and even if parents aren't feeding themselves organic foods, they are likely to purchase organic products for their children, according to Bellvue, Wash.-based market research firm The Hartman Group. And the new organic baby food customer is especially valuable to retailers—a mom who buys formula spends, on average, $25 more per store visit than the average head of household, estimates Nature's One Inc., the Westerville, Ohio-based maker of Baby's Only Organic formula.

The baby food age doesn't last long—most American parents start their babies on solid food at about 6 months old, and most children have migrated to "people food" by 18 months—but it's a critical time for food marketers.

That's because new mothers are on a fact-finding mission that can result in buying habits that last for years, says Maria Bailey, consultant and author of Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Share of the Trillion-Dollar Market (Prima, 2002).

Provided the quality is good and prices are fair, "a mother is extremely loyal to brand," Bailey says. "Eighty-five percent of all mothers will continue to buy a brand once they've chosen it."

Marketing wisdom has long connected buying with major lifestyle changes like marriage or empty-nesting. But having a child beats them all, says Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder of cleaning and paper products company Seventh Generation. Parents "re-examine the products they're using," from the food they eat to the car they drive.

Burlington, Vt.-based Seventh Generation recently launched a line of baby wipes made from organic cotton and moistened with aloe. From there, Hollender reckons, it's a small step to Seventh Generation's other products, which include hypoallergenic laundry detergent and nontoxic surface cleaner.

"From the point of view of the retailer, it's a perfect and unique opportunity to introduce items that are healthy and kind to the environment," Hollender says.

Mothers, as a group, are concerned with three things, Bailey says: ensuring the health and safety of their children, providing "enrichment" for their families, and finding products that will simplify their lives.

To the fast-moving mom whose eye is caught by bunny-shaped pasta in a purple box, Annie's Naturals may get the nod over Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, shelved right next door and only a few cents cheaper.

Marketers like the Hain Celestial Group, of Melville, N.Y., hope that parents who start their infants on Earth's Best baby food will stick with Hain brands through the childhood years, including Arthur cookies and Earth's Best whole-grain bars. Freemont, Mich.-based Gerber's organic Tender Harvest line recently added "first foods" in single flavors and "third foods" in toddler textures. Both Tender Harvest and Earth's Best are free of genetically modified ingredients.

And Fran's Healthy Helpings, of Burlingame, Calif., positions its Dino Chicken Chompers and Twinkle Star Fish in the gap between healthy products that kids deem yucky and kid-oriented products full of additives, fat and sodium.

Total U.S. formula and baby foods sales were about $4 billion in 2000, and of that about $3 billion was formula. U.S. sales of organic baby food, not including formula, increased to $240 million in 2000, up 26 percent from $190 million the year before, with about $100 million logged in the mass-market channel, Nutrition Business Journal reports.

Still, U.S. consumers lag behind their European counterparts in their purchase of organic baby foods. In the United States the organic baby food category has only achieved about 4.5 percent penetration, compared with nearly 100 percent in Germany and more than 50 percent in the United Kingdom.

The lack of penetration may reflect a lack of choice in the organic baby food segment. There are only a handful of organic brands in the United States. The category is dominated by conventional giant Gerber's Tender Harvest organic line. Tender Harvest had $30 million in supermarket sales in 2000, up 9 percent from the year before, and was growing at about twice the rate of all other Gerber baby foods. The Hain Celestial Group's Earth's Best is the second-largest U.S. brand, with about $11.4 million in supermarket sales in 2000, NBJ reports.