YummyTummies

Location

Advertisements

Yummy Tummies are just what busy parents have been waiting for. These nutritional complete meals, designed for children 2yrs plus, are preservative and additive free and delivered to your door. The meals are delicious home cooked recipes frozen into children's portions, ready for re-heating in the microwave or oven. All meals are served with vegetables.

These are a lifesaver for times when you don't know what to feed the kids.

Yummy Tummies is a privately owned New Zealand business, owned and operated by Fran Hume and a fabulous team of part time parents. Our humble beginnings found Fran cooking home based recipes in her own kitchen to support her husband with the challenge of cooking young children’s meals in a busy household.

The concept was simple enough; Fran was a busy mum, (2 children her son, Benjamin 6yrs, and Olivia 11 months). It all began from making complete little meals, freezing them and having a convenient dinner for the children when time was at a premium. Fran also offered a few to her friends, and, before long, thought there must be a market for such a meal, the feedback confirmed this.

To be serious about competing in a completely new industry, Fran’s most important issue was to create a point of difference with the product. It was also a key factor, to ensure the recipes were prepared as you would make these at home, therefore to make them acceptable to challenging little taste buds – and, of course, they also had to be as healthy as possible.

When we decided to sell our little meals as a business, our Yummy Tummies Web Site was created, and we encouraged on line ordering, which subsequently took off with word of mouth. We purchased a restaurant to have a commercial kitchen, and applied for a license to manufacture the meals for home delivery. It was not long before, we had additional enquiries from other major centres in New Zealand, and we had to decide whether to try and also capture this market.

On creating our recipes, we used only fresh, lean meat cuts, fresh potato, and only fresh natural stocks with milk and cheese for flavouring. This has been the draw card, and has us standing out against highly processed meals which children typically do not enjoy the taste of. More importantly, we included 3 vegetables so parents do not have to add anything.

Of course, this exciting time, also presented many challenges. We changed the recipes and our packaging four times, at great expense. We hit a lot of brick walls in researching avenues of distribution with a frozen product, not to mention the high cost of financing such a new product – with every chance we could fail miserably.

However, our positive feedback, and initial supporters told us we should keep going, so digging our heals in, it was time to commercialise our concept. We approached a food manufacturing company who began manufacturing to our recipes, and our first production was started with much excitement. The most enjoyable part was designing our packaging. Creating characters and ensuring it was attractive to both parents and the children was our main aim, and our feedback tells us we have achieved this.