1 The Story of Ella’s Kitchen

The Story According to Ella’s Dad

I set up Ella’s Kitchen because I passionately believe that Ella, my daughter, along with her generation, should have the opportunity to eat better food and also to discover that healthy food can be fun, tasty and cool.

From my experience with Ella and her brother Paddy, we think it’s important to always approach things from a child’s point of view. So, we took simple, natural ingredients that ooze goodness and created baby foods, and packaging, that really connects with little ones – with flavours, colours, textures and even names that will appeal to all of their senses.

Here at Ella’s Kitchen, we try really hard to be good in every sense – not just through the good food we make, but also by doing good stuff for our environment and giving stuff back to our local communities. We’ve done research with parents, little ones, psychologists and supermarkets to understand the very important role that all 5 of the senses play in developing healthy eating habits that last a lifetime. Head to stuff for the senses to find out more.

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Why we are good in every sense

Our Products Stuff for the senses

The good stuff we do

We make tasty, natural and healthy 100% organic food for babies and kids in handy pouches. From very First Tastes at the start of the tiny taste bud journey, right through to lunchbox snacks.

It’s really important to all of us here at Ella’s Kitchen that we make our food as good as it can be, but also that we try to be as environmentally + socially responsible as possible.

We believe that, babies eat with all of their senses, so it’s not just the texture or taste that’s important. That’s why we make sure all our scrummy, 100% organic baby food appeals to all their senses.

What drives Ella’s Kitchen

We want our food to be as good as homemade:

We Want to make life easier for parents:

We know a love of good food is created by mealtimes that are tasty and fun:

- We don’t add extra salt or sugar.- We don’t use additives, or bulk up products with added water.- We only use organic ingredients. We don’t use Genetically Modified (GM) ingredients.- We use fruit and vegetable purees, avoiding concentrates.

- Our labelling gives clear guidance for nutritional needs at every stage of your baby’s development.- We offer a wide range of foods in handy packs.- We believe weaning should be a fun experience, not a scary one, for parents + little ones.

- We’ve made the tiny taste bud journey fun to explore through different flavour combinations.- Our bright, shiny and sometimes squidgy packaging is designed to stimulate all the senses.

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Working with the senses

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At Ella’s Kitchen, we believe that little ones’ 5 senses are key in developing healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime.

We really wanted to explore this idea, so we made friends with the University of Reading, giving us the chance to investigate further with some of the country’s leading academics. We part-funded innovative research into how children interact with food using all their senses.

It can take 10-15 attempts before a little one will try a new food, so we’ve been exploring how we can make that easier for parents by getting little ones to want to try new foods.

Our research has shown that by exploring new veg with all their senses outside of mealtimes, little ones are more likely to eat their greens. Yum!

We’ve always thought food should be fun for little ones and we know how stressful mealtimes can be. So to make mealtimes fun you can try putting our research findings into practice at home. Have a peek at the fun sensorial activities and Tasty Tunes we’ve created, and download them here to get your little one’s taste buds tingling.

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Meet the Professionals

Dr Sarah Schenker Dr Carmel Houston-Price

Claire Basely Sally Luckraft

Dr Carmel Houston-Price is an experienced developmental psychologist who works with us to understand the role of the 5 senses in developing healthy attitudes to food. She’s a mum, too, and is very, very clever.

Parents and Little OnesWe love hearing what real mums, dads + little ones think of our products. Their thoughts and opinions have really helped us make yummy new stuff + help us make mealtimes fun.

Claire is a consultant infant nutritionist who knows an awful lot about baby food. She helps us make sure all our new foods are really good for tiny tummies and all the info we give to mums & dads is correct in every way.

Sally Luckraft is our very own food developer and mum to two children. She makes all Ella’s yummy new stuff, spending lots of time in the kitchen trying out her new recipes with mums + little ones. She always listens to what they have to say, to make our yummy stuff even better!

Dr Sarah Schenker is a children’s dietician and mum of two. She helps us understand the role of all our good ingredients in little ones’ development and advises mums at Ella’s events.

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Here at Ella’s Barn where we all work, we try to ensure we are as ‘green’ as we can be. This includes the electricity we use, the recycled paper we print on, buying as many eco and organic products as we can to use around the office, composting our food waste and recycling all our rubbish. We’re actually all sitting in two old farm buildings: ‘The Shippon’ - the cowshed, and ‘The Threshing Barn’ - which was used for threshing corn. Not many cows around now, but we do have Amos and Mabel, the farm horses,who pop their heads over the stable door most mornings snuffling for a carrot!We’ve also planted some native British trees to protect and enhance the lovely countryside surrounding Ella’s Barn.

To keep Ella’s Kitchen environmentally friendly, we follow these rules in Ellas Barn: - Minimise energy and water use, and waste within Ella’s Barn by buying energy-efficient equipment, separating rubbish, minimising printing, reusing packaging, carrying out regular audits and maintaining awareness among everyone at Ella’s Barn.

- Continue to buy green electricity, sustainably sourced stationary and other eco-friendly products.

- Encourage biodiversity by planting native British trees on the land surrounding Ella’s Barn and keepingour already planted, existing ones happy and healthy.

Our Barn

Working with our Suppliers

We work closely with all our suppliers, looking at ways in which we can all ‘protect our playground’ and ensure we are running an environmentally and ethically responsible business. When we choose who we are going to work with, we always try to ensure they share our beliefs and commitment to being ‘Good in every sense’. Suppliers complete our ‘Helping Us to Give Stuff Back’ form and we then work together to ensure we are constantly making improvements.We have recently worked with Forum for the Future to carry out a Streamlined Life Cycle Analysis (SLCA) of one of our bestselling pouches. This has allowed us to explore the journey one of our products takes, from growing the ingredients and filling the pouch to being eaten by baby and the ‘end of life’ of the packaging. It’s given us a really useful tool to make further improvements and develop our sustainability strategy.

Other good things we, and our suppliers, have done include:- The boxes our Stage 1 and Stage 2 products are packaged in have been reduced in size, saving over 6 tonnes of packaging material per year.- We have also moved to lower-weight FSC card for our boxes, which gives us a further reduction in weight of 15 tonnes per year.- The bakery that makes a lot of our snacks has been awarded the ‘Green Mark’ in recognition of its commitment to the environment.- A couple of our suppliers have installed solar panels to generate power, while another has been working with the Carbon Trust to reduce its carbon footprint.- We collect all waste packaging from our suppliers to send to TerraCycle, to be upcycled. So far we have saved more than 1 million pouches that would otherwise have gone to landfill.- In 2012, we made some changes to some of our packaging, which will save approximately 6.8 tonnes of card material per year!

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Good to tiny tummies

All Ella’s Kitchen products use organic ingredients. We passionately believe that not only do organic products taste yummy, but they’re also more nutritious and guaranteed to have no nasty chemicals or pesticides.

Did you know?In the last 50 years, the world’s chemically based farming techniques have so far managed to degrade up to a third of the Earth’s agricultural soil? That’s why it’s good to know that, by only using organic fruit + veg in our products, we’re helping to ‘give back’ to the Earth’s soil.

Since we first started making Ella’s Kitchen products, we have managed to forge our beliefs and dreams into a real business with an ethical outlook and a passionate core. In creating and refining our organic baby food products, we have always prioritised health and nutritional value, but never at the expense of either taste or convenience.

From the beginning, we have worked closely with, and taken advice from, lots of experts – such as nutritionists who specialise in children’s diet, along with retailers, manufacturers and other organic baby food experts. But most of all, we have listened to real parents and drawn our inspiration from real kids.

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Good to each other

As we grow as a company, it’s very important to us that we give something back to benefit both the kids in our local community and those further afield.

Little ones said that to be a good friend we need to share and help people. They also talked about the fun they have exploring the outdoors.

How Ella’s Kitchen helps out:- We send our products to Kasisi Children’s Home; a charity located in Zambia. - We regularly donate our products to Fareshare and Feed the Children. - We are also part of the Consumer Forum, a forum set up for like-minded, entrepreneurial UK companies.

We give little ones from local schools and nurseries the chance to spend a day exploring the farm and the market garden. They get to enjoy a day of discovery and smiles as they experience the sights, sounds + smells of the countryside, get to know the animals and taste some scrummy fresh food. Learning about healthy food has never been so much fun! Plus, all the children get to take home an Ella’s farm box and, of course, lots of treasured memories of a fun day.

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Good to our planet

RecyclingAll Ella’s Kitchen cardboard is Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) approved and is, of course, recyclable.We use both recycled card and card made from trees that come from well-managed forests. Ella’s mum wanted to find out more about how the forests are looked after, so she visited the paper mill to see how it all operates. She was really pleased that the forests and trees are really well cared for, and that for every mature tree they use another 4 are planted in its place. So we are, in fact, helping recycle the trees!

TerraCycleThe one question we have faced, is the recyclability of our packaging. Currently, most councils in the UK will not recycle our pouches. We have worked hard to find a solution and this is why we have teamed up with TerraCycle, who help us ‘upcycle’ our pouches and transform them into new products. They will also upcycle all our snack wrappers.

InksFor all our Smoothie Fruits and snack boxes, we use vegetable inks and water coatings to print the boxes. We’re also really proud that the printing plates our printers use are all chemical free!

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