Focus on Entrepreneurship

Oh, baby,

Organic baby-food business launches in Whitefish

By Tess Wiley 
Flathead Business Journal

Red lentils, brown rice and kale with Indian yellow curry and coconut milk. Quinoa with peaches, mangos, bananas and cinnamon.
These mouth-watering combinations might sound like tonight’s dinner and dessert, but they’re actually ingredients in locally produced organic baby food.
“Cravin’ Curry” and “Rise & Shine Quinoa” are two varieties offered by Wee Chef Baby Organics, a line of baby food founded just over a year ago by Flathead Valley residents Becky and Todd Horning. 
The Hornings, who own Amazing Crepes and Catering in Whitefish, value the importance of fresh and nutritious food, particularly when it comes to raising a child.
“When you have a baby, you have this pure little being that you want to keep pure,” Becky Horning said.
When she gave birth to their son, Otto, almost two years ago, they were especially concerned about keeping him healthy. Otto was six weeks premature and weighed only 4 pounds, 15 ounces.
“I wanted to do the best I could to give him the best start,” she recalled.
Through extensive reading and help from a friend who’s a registered dietitian, Horning learned the importance of natural, fresh ingredients and flavor for babies. While the limited spare time between raising a newborn son and managing the crepe shop sometimes forced the Hornings to reluctantly buy jars of organic food from the supermarket, Becky sometimes would experiment in the shop’s kitchen by mixing her own baby food. Producing large batches was easier than small ones, she said, so the excess food gave her the idea to begin making it for other people — the roots from which Wee Chef eventually sprouted.

Wee Chef products are made from nothing but organic, local, fresh, sustainable and healthy ingredients and are free of potential allergens such as dairy and gluten.
And this is no standard-issue Gerber baby food. Curry, quinoa, millet, huckleberries and Flathead cherries aren’t ingredients typically found in the baby food on the supermarket shelf. 
“Otto loves it,” she said. “Todd loves it [too].”

Yes, babies aren’t the only ones who can eat Wee Chef products. In fact, Becky recommends mixing it with pasta or spreading it on a quesadilla. 
 Besides, she added, why should children be fed something their parents wouldn’t dare take a bite of?
And if run-of-the-mill baby food looks unappetizing, there’s probably a good reason for it.
The label of a traditional baby-food jar with nothing but green beans and water listed under its ingredients may boast that it contains no preservatives, provides a full serving of vegetables and supports healthy growth and development. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing you would get if you used the same ingredients to produce it in your own kitchen, the Hornings said.
If it were, it would look more appealing — like the vibrant green color of Wee Chef’s “Eat Your Greens!” (spinach, broccoli, kale, peas, zucchini and parsley) or the rich purple of “Blueberries, Hucks, Apples & Oats.”  

The list of ingredients on some commercially sold baby food jars may be short — a characteristic that usually is considered a good sign — but the process that turned a fresh carrot, for instance, into the faded orange puree inside the jar is far from simple.
Since jarred food is manufactured to sit on the supermarket shelf for an extended period of time (as Becky points out, it’s “older than your baby”), it must first be heated to extreme temperatures to destroy microorganisms that cause it to spoil. However, this preservation process is counterproductive because it also diminishes the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients its packaging label advertises.      
Heating also significantly depletes the flavor of the food, which is why in some cases the ingredient list also may include flavor enhancers such as salt, sugar, artificial color, hormones and long words you may not even recognize. Many of the additives manufacturers tend to sneak into baby food, such as autolyzed yeast extract, maltodextrin, whey protein concentrate and thiamin hydrochloride, are controversial and have been blamed for a plethora of adverse reactions.
As journalist and food guru Michael Pollan puts it: if a food product contains ingredients that a third-grader couldn’t pronounce, then you probably shouldn’t eat it.
And, of course, neither should your baby.
“I’m excited that there’s the prospect of the kiddos getting to eat good food,” Todd said. 

Wee Chef vegetables and grains are cooked with minimal liquid to ensure that the resulting servings are as chock-full of nutrients as possible, not diluted and watery. The vegetables are lightly steamed in filtered water until they are just tender enough to be easily digestible, and the grains are cooked with rice milk to add vitamins.
Once the food is blended to its age-appropriate consistency, it is poured into silicone muffin molds and quickly frozen through a process known as flash-freezing, which captures the essential nutrients that are lost through overheating.
Becky admitted that over the past year, the process of developing their business has been “one step forward, two steps back” due to the difficult and costly processes of obtaining the appropriate licenses. But once they receive their certified organic and wholesaler licenses within the next two weeks, they’ll move forward with plans to expand.
Wee Chef future plans include gluten-free graham crackers, teething biscuits, animal cookies and “baby’s first birthday cake.” They also hope that down the road they can offer cooking classes for children as well as classes that teach parents how to make their own baby food.
“We’d [also] like to take our baby-food concept and move to an adult soft-food branch,” she added, explaining this would be beneficial for adults in a variety of circumstances, including people recovering from oral surgery or patients undergoing chemotherapy.
 Wee Chef baby food is available at Amazing Crepes and Catering at 123 Central Ave. in Whitefish and at the Whitefish Downtown Farmers Market every Tuesday. For more information, call 270-5917 or visit www.weechef.com.