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For decades, the baby food aisle has been dominated by big players like Nestlé, which makes Gerber brand products, and Danone, whose brands include Happy Family. Angela Vranich and Ben Lewishigh school sweethearts turned entrepreneurswanted to change this. Even though they didn’t yet have children, they believed that millennial parents were looking for new sources of food for their growing families. “Millennials had spent their twenties drinking fresh-pressed juices and eating salads,” Vranich says. “When they started having kids, they were looking for food that was more nutritious than what they grew up eating.” [Photo: Little Spoon] In 2017, the pair launched their direct-to-consumer startup, Little Spoon. They used their previous experience in the food industry to develop a line of baby food that uses organic, non-GMO ingredients, and abides by EU standards of quality, which are higher than those in the United States. Customers could order products on the brand’s website and have them delivered, saving them regular trips to the grocery store. According to the company, since that launch Little Spoon has delivered 80 million meals to families across the country, and now feeds more than 3% of babies in the U.S. It has expanded beyond baby food, creating developmentally appropriate food all the way into preschool, including a large selection of products for toddlers that are designed to be nutritious and fun to eat (like nuggets in the shape of spoons to better scoop up sauce!). Little Spoon’s full-plate meals and school lunches have been particularly popular. [Photo: Little Spoon] As of September 30, the brand is available at Target locations across the country. The brand’s 23 products will be spread out across five aisles, from fresh baby food in the fridge section to shelf-stable snacks in the grocery section to frozen chicken nuggets in the freezer aisle. Little Spoons redesigned packaging provides more insight into its products nutritional content. “While some parents love getting food delivered, many others prefer shopping in stores,” says Lewis. “As we grow, we want to make sure we’re meeting the needs of all our customers.” Vranich and Lewis believe that for Little Spoon to scale, its crucial to go beyond the direct-to-consumer model. And they’re not alone. [Photo: Little Spoon] Designing for Retail Little Spoon is among a number of food startups that got their start in the DTC boom of the mid-2010s and are now graduating into grocery stores to reach a broader market and tap into customers shopping habits. In their effort to appeal to millennial consumers whose tastes are different from those of their parents, these innovative companies are beginning to change the food industry (think Brightland and Graza olive oils, Fly by Jing and Brooklyn Delhi sauces, Magic Spoon cereal, and Olipop soda). All of these brands offer a fresh take on the category, using more nutritious ingredients than their incumbent counterparts. Some have incorporated more protein. Others have focused on more diverse, global flavor profiles. [Photo: Little Spoon] Much like Little Spoon, these brands connected with consumers on social media and grew slowly at first, but expanded production as they started to scale. Building a food brand involves complex logistics and extensive quality-control checks. “It’s not just about developing a really compelling product,” Lewis says. “We needed to find factories that we could trust and that would make our food up to our specifications.” Nearly a decade after the DTC boom, many startups realize that the direct-to-consumer model can only take a brand so far. Only 3% of U.S. shoppers get their food exclusively online; the other 97% shop in a physical store at least monthly. That’s why you can now find Graza and Fly by Jing at Whole Foods, and Daily Harvest, Magic Spoon, and Olipop at Target. [Photo: Little Spoon] Hitting a new target Launching at a major retailer is no small task. While many DTC food brands have grown large customer bases through their e-commerce websites, stocking shelves at a national retail store involves producing at a much larger scale. And for startups, this involves working closely with their network of suppliers and factories. Lewis says revving up Little Spoon for the Target launch involved a substantial increase in production. “It took us a long time to get our production up to the scale that Target requires,” Lewis says. “We had to work with our existing factories and find new ones so we could deliver trucks and trucks of food to meet Target’s demands.” Vranich says they also had to rethink the companys packaging for retail. For one thing, many customers will not be familiar with the brand. So to increase brand awareness, Little Spoon made its logo much bigger. [Photo: Little Spoon] Then there’s the issue of what’s inside each package. When customers visit the Little Spoon website, they can scroll through images of the food; when a package arrives at their doorstep, its not covered with images of food but rather cartoons that will appeal to kids. For instance, in Little Spoon’s line of toddler school lunches, the website features images of chicken nuggets and sauces, but the exterior packaging has a funny picture of a cartoon nugget wearing sunglasses and getting dunked in sauce. “Shopping for food in store is a very different customer experience than shopping online,” Vranich says. All of these food startups are still a fraction of the size of the larger incumbents, but their growing popularity is sending a jolt to the food industry, prompting larger players to create similar offerings. For instance, Trader Joe’s has been accused of ripping off startups, creating copycats of Brooklyn Delhi and Fly by Jing sauces. And Little Spoon appears to have prompted other baby food brands to focus on reformulating their products to make them organic and more nutritious. For Vranich, the key to staying ahead is to continue innovating on every aspect of the product. For example, she says shes very proud of being the only kids brand that makes squeezable yogurt and smoothies in packages with fun ridges on the edges that are both pleasant to look at and easy to hold. Little Spoons food development team also works hard to create fun meals that kids will actually eat, like a “brunch lunch that features little chicken maple sausages, crunchy granola, a zucchini muffin, and an organic smoothie bowl. “We’re constantly coming up with new products,” Vranich says. “It’s a way to keep our existing customers coming back for more, but it also means we’re ahead of the rest of the market.”
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E-Commerce
Experts are warning that tariffs on pharmaceuticals are likely to increase shortages of essential medications. The governments ongoing investigation into the national security implications of importing pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients is widely understood as a precursor to sector-specific tariffs, which a White House advisor has said are likely. On the other hand, the administration recently issued a new executive order laying the groundwork for tariff exemptions for some pharmaceutical products imported from countries that reach trade agreements with the United States. As a result, manufacturers, pharmacists, doctors and patients are in limbo. Digital health companies that make access to prescription medication simpler are also at risk. But I already know firsthand what a drug shortage looks like. I am the CEO of Oar Health, a company that helps people struggling with alcohol misuse get access to prescription medication to drink less or quit. And naltrexone, the recommended frontline medication for treating alcohol use disorder, has been in shortage for more than a year. Heres what Ive learned: Patients suffer when essential medications are unavailable Throughout the naltrexone shortage, I have heard from patients who have found medication critical to their recoveries. But instead of celebrating and building upon their progress, they were worried about continuing their treatment. Retail and mail order pharmacies alike told patients that they could not refill their prescriptions nor provide a reliable estimate of when they would. Patients documented their experience and concern in social media posts. As someone who took naltrexone for more than five years, I can relate to their unease. When a medication is proving helpful in ones recovery, the last thing a patient should be forced to do is remove that tool from their toolkit. Beyond alcohol use disorder, direct-to-consumer telehealth companies like Ro, Hims, Nurx, and Cove have increased patient access to safe, effective medications across a broad range of health conditions. But access depends on availability. Tariffs on generic medications could harm patients who rely on everything from anti-depressants to birth control to migraine relievers to erectile dysfunction and hair loss treatments. The generic drug supply chain is fragile Americans often assume that generic medications will always be cheaply available from multiple manufacturers and at every pharmacy. This assumption is incorrect. In the case of naltrexone, a shortage of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient meant that manufacturers had to slash production. Coupled with an increase in demand for the medications used to treat alcohol problems, shortages spread and prices went up. But input shortages are not the only vulnerability in the supply chain. Manufacturing complexity, quality concerns, and geographic concentration have contributed to an increase in the number and duration of generic drug shortages according to the research organization U.S. Pharmacopeia. 253 drugs are in shortage in 2025 according to the American Society of Health System Pharmacists after reaching an all-time peak of 323 in 2024. Because generic drug manufacturing, distribution and pharmacy dispensing all have very low profit margins, a cost increase including from tariffs at any point in the supply chain is likely to be disruptive. Facing even marginally higher costs, a manufacturer may decide that producing a generic drug is no longer economical. And, as our experience shows, the industry lacks the redundancy to make up the difference. Industry can adapt, but not overnight I am proud to say that we have kept medication in hand for every Oar Health member throughout the shortage. But it has not been easy. Many of our members worked with us during the most acute phases of the shortage, shifting from shipments of 90 tablets to 30 tablets at a time out of concern for others who needed access to the medication. We also drastically reduced marketing budgets and briefly stopped accepting new patients, meaning that people who could have benefited from treatment did not. Over time, we have seen API availability improve and manufacturers increase or restart production. But regulatory bottlenecks, manufacturing setup costs, and uncertainty about demand mean that bouncing back after a supply shock is a process measured in months and years, not days or weeks. More than 18 months after the FDA officially declared a naltrexone shortage and almost two years after patients and pharmacists first began reporting problems, naltrexone remains in shortage. This is unfortunately common. The average shortage lasts 18 months and can span as much as 15 years. Similarly, industry participants agree that reshoring manufacturing, a potential goal of tariffs, would be timely and costly. The bottom line I started Oar Health so that more of the 28 million Americans with alcohol use disorder could get access to safe, effective, FDA-approved medication proven to help them drink less or quit. Our more than 10,000 members and the millions of Americans who rely on essential generic medications are counting on policymakers to remember them.
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E-Commerce
Remember CDs? Theres a new company betting that, if you dont already, youre about to. Jewel is a Norwegian company specializing in manufacturing high-end display cases for CDs. The brand recently soft-launched online in Europe and is planning to expand to the U.S. in the coming months. It offers products that range from an $130 freestanding case that fits four CDs to a $300, 16-slot case designed to be mounted directly onto the wall. Launching a CD-based brand more than 20 years after CDs hit their peak feels like a counterintuitive prospect. After all, how many people even own a CD player these days? But Marius Brandl, Jewels founder, says the brands thesis is simple: Vinyl records have had their renaissance. CDs are next. [Photo: Jewel] Are CDs on the rise? Retro tech and physical media have experienced an undeniable comeback, in part driven by young consumers looking to cut back on social media. Gadgets like iPods (yes, those are considered retro), Game Boys, film cameras, and even pagers have seen a resurgence. And, as Brandl notes, that applies to the music industry, too. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), vinyl posted its 18th straight year of growth in 2024, generating $1.4 billion in retail revenue, its highest share of physical format revenue since 1984. Meanwhile, CDs may have fallen out of fashion in the mid-2000s, but theyre not a dead medium. In 2024, the RIAA reports, 33 million CDs were sold in the U.S., up 1.5% from 2023. [Photo: Jewel] For some fanbases, theyre becoming a more popular collectors item: Taylor Swift, for example, has a longstanding partnership with Target and tends to sell several versions of her albums in the format, including the upcoming Life of a Showgirl album, which will include three exclusive CDs. Charli XCX also gave the CD an injection of instant cool last summer, when her brat CDs sold out almost instantly. What’s interesting is the generation born before and after the year 2000, especially in Europe, have really, really been collecting [CDs], Brandl says. My feeling is that CDs will have a comeback. [Photo: Jewel] The making of a CD brand in 2025 Brandls idea for Jewela brand name inspired by the plastic jewel case that most CDs come inactually started back in the 90s, when he was in college. Brandl remembers attending a party where he saw a table strewn in CDs, and wondering to himself whether there might be a better way to organize and display them. [Photo: Jewel] At the time, Brandls concept of a grid-based display case received lots of positive feedback from his professors, who saw the CD as a promising new medium. He only made it to early development stages, though, before realizing that he couldnt find a way to both display the CDs and open their cases without damaging them, and the idea fizzled out. [Video: Jewel] When Brandls close friend convinced him to revive the idea in 2023, Brandl spent more than half a year developing the right blend of rubber to hold each jewel case inside his display prototype. The rubber, which lines two sides of each square-shaped slot,needed enough grip to keep the cases from sliding, but not so much that the cases would break when opened. The rubber was the biggest challenge, and also how to be able to make it not to be too expensive to produce, Brandl says. He adds that the acrylic, aluminum, and hardware that serve as the backbone of the displays are all premium materials sourced from European manufacturers, which has bumped up the brands price points. Instead of making it as cheap as possible with cheap materials, we thought, The ones who will buy this are probably the ones who like music so much that they have a nice Hi-Fi system, and they want new design solutions. Given that Jewel just launched, Brandl says its difficult to measure sales numbers at this stage. From inside his street-level office in Oslo, though, he talks with interested customers every day who stop by to take a closer look at the product. The people are from eight, nine yearsold to 82 years old,” Brandl says. I think the ones between 17 and 25 show the most interest. And I tell them, Your parents and grandparents and great grandparents listen to LPs. But the CDthat’s your generations physical connection to music.
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E-Commerce
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