How the Ocado generation is turning to healthy food delivery services for children
Six o’clock in the evening is the hour I like to call feeding time at the zoo. It's not an actual zoo, you understand, rather my kitchen - but the biggest difference here is that zoo animals don’t turn their noses up every time they’re fed. My four-year-old son says no to just about every meal I put in front of him, unless I happen to serve one of the two he’ll agree to eat: cheese on toast, or pasta with tomato sauce.
His two-year-old sister will devour almost everything in sight, and what doesn’t make it into her mouth will be merrily smeared across her face, the walls, the furniture and the floor. But getting my son to touch his food is like trying to coax a cat to stand up and perform a jig. It’s just not going to happen.
So when I heard about Wild Child Kitchen, the latest in a rising number of food delivery services for little ones, I was intrigued - could their promise of ‘colourful dishes influenced by cuisines from around the world’ transform my own kids’ mealtime misbehaviour? I don’t know many toddlers who request lentil ragu or lamb and sultana meatballs with quinoa - dishes on their menu - for supper, but if there’s a way to steer kids away from beige banquets and towards nutritionally balanced food early on, that can’t be a bad thing.
Though our awareness of the importance of our children’s dietary needs has increased, the time we can devote to cooking our children delicious and nutritious homemade meals every night of the week has diminished: the number of working mothers with dependent children in England has grown by more than a million in the past two decades, ONS figures showed last year, meaning that almost 75 per cent of women with young children are either in full-time or part-time work. And, on top of our busier work schedules, modern mums now want to know where their food comes from, what it contains and whether it’s sustainably packaged.
It’s into this gap between our high aspirations on the one hand and lack of time to properly manage our children’s diets on the other that food delivery services such as Wild Child Kitchen have appeared, aiming to provide what many of us can’t or won’t: healthy home-made meals for children that cater to our concerns about provenance and ingredients, delivered direct to our homes. For families who rely on the likes of Ocado for the rest of their shopping, it’s the obvious next step - not least since research earlier this year published by the journal Public Health Nutrition found that half of the food now bought by UK families is “ultra-processed”. Our growing reliance on factory-made products, from sugary cereals to reconstituted meat, is higher than any other country in Europe, in spite of the fact a recent study of the eating habits of 105,000 adults undertaken by researchers at the Sorbonne found a link between high consumption of such foods and elevated risk of cancer.
The brainchild of Natasha Lee, a 29-year-old former City worker turned entrepreneur, Wild Child Kitchen, which offers individual meals from ￡4 - ￡6, or three-meal bundles from ￡20, seeks to encourage “a healthy curiosity in children about what they eat and where it comes from”. There’s no denying their offerings - sweet potato gnocchi, ratatouille and borlotti bean pasta stew and jammy chia slices - are a world away from the turkey dinosaurs and potato smileys that primary school-aged kids would likely pick out for themselves.
“I’d become increasingly interested in health and wellness and how that industry had exploded and I couldn’t understand why so much was being spent on fixing problems retrospectively rather than fostering healthy habits in childhood,” says Lee when I ask what gave her the idea. “I didn’t feel enough was being done to encourage a healthy attitude to food.”
Although not a parent herself, Lee was shocked by the UK’s child obesity rates - a third of two to 15-year-olds are overweight or obese - and had watched as her busy friends had children and struggled to feed these children good food. “They didn’t want to use the normal supermarket brands and were worried about ingredients,” she says - a fair concern, given Froot Loops cereal, a firm children’s favourite, contains 41 per cent sugar, while Kellogg's last year promised to cut the amount of sugar in its three top selling children’s cereals in the UK by between 20-40 per cent in 2018. “I said, ‘ok, if we could cook fantastic, sustainably-sourced, fresh food and deliver it to your house, would that help?’ The answer was ‘yes.’”
Set up in a small rented kitchen in Battersea in summer 2016, Lee’s business has delivered 80,000 chilled and frozen meals around the capital since it launched, including to nurseries and schools as well as households, and has plans to extend its reach beyond London.
Her other philosophy is that children’s food need not be a whole separate genre to that of adults’. “My father is Malaysian, and in the East we don’t really have this concept of children’s food,” she says. “The kids eat what the adults are eating and just have it without salt or sugar. Overly ‘kiddifying’ kids’ food so it doesn’t look like the original is quite a western thing.”
To that end, there are no “all-singing, all-dancing packages” around her food. No cartoon characters either. “It’s all about the food itself. We can tell you, for instance, where our fish comes from and who scaled it, and that’s something [people increasingly want to know].”
So how will it fare with my own fussy eater, who notably prefers to see Thomas the Tank Engine on his yoghurt pots than information about the yoghurt’s sustainability? I try him on some Wild Child Kitchen rainbow daal and rice (priced at ￡4) and apple and cinnamon energy balls (￡3.75).
“I’ll eat the meatballs,” he offers, picking up an energy ball. And he does eat them - the energy balls, that is - because he likes sweet things, and at least this time it’s not a gingerbread man or a slice of toast and jam. He doesn’t manage much of the rest, but then, that’s par for the course. Perhaps he just needs more time to learn to love quinoa.
Still, if he’s yet to become the “little foodie” the company targets, the demand among busy parents for healthy food deliveries for children is growing. Wild Child Kitchen was only covering four south west London boroughs until January; now it covers the whole of the capital and has brought on board a health coach and nutritionist, and a handful of other companies have sprung up to provide a similar offering. Piccolo Plates sells “nutritious and delicious homemade child-friendly dishes delivered straight to your door,” while Ratatouie exists likewise “to help every family eat well, grow strong and live more by putting fresh wholesome, delicious meals on their table in minutes.” Cook, which has 87 shops around the UK, also does a children’s range.
“As much as people want to cook, they don’t always have the time, and there are at least two or three days of the week when you’re too busy to think about meal planning and meal preparation,” says Lee. “We are the generation that’s pushed the boundaries of our expectations around the sourcing of food, what goes into it, and its quality, and as we become parents we’re going to be wanting that for our kids.”