Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    CLAD in light-colored shirts and jeans, Piers Buck and Taslim Ho breezed into an office in Tian’an Cyber Park in Futian District on a Tuesday morning. It’s rare, according to them, for the married couple to be at the office of their startup at the same time. Their fledgling company produces organic baby food.

    “We’re on business trips most of the time, either he or I,” said Ho, 32. “I fly around China meeting customers and Piers flies to and from Europe for sourcing ingredients, meeting farmers and supervising production.”

    But the fast-growing business, Little Freddie Organic Baby Food, involves more than just the two. Piers’ father, Tony, a veteran manager at renowned food businesses, as well as Piers’ two young children, Amelia and Freddie, all have a role to play.

    Piers gets his father’s opinion on a daily basis. The elder Buck has more than 40 years of experience in food management, ranging from working with U.S. snack producers to European retailers.

    To spend some time with his children while juggling his busy work schedule, Piers cooks regularly with his 4-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. He also videos and photographs the recipes they make to show other parents how quick and easy it is to prepare healthy meals for their babies. The children are always the first to try new Little Freddie products. Even the brand is named after one of them.

    “I set up Little Freddie in December 2013. At that point our two children were still both very young,” said Piers, who worked as a director at a foreign investment bank in Hong Kong. He had worked in investment banking in some of the world’s major financial centers for 13 years.

    “Having children really opened our minds to different ideas and new opportunities. I’ve always been interested in food as well as businesses and I was keen to start something on my own,” he said.

    Dissatisfied with the baby food on the market, Piers, who developed his passion for cooking at an early age, decided to quit his high-flying job to set up a baby food business dedicated to making organic, tasty and nutritious products. Ho, a Hong Kong native, who worked with her husband at the investment bank, quit to help him.

    “It was a difficult decision for us as we both quit our jobs at the same time and decided to invest all our life savings into the business,” said Ho. “It took a lot of courage to make that decision. But, looking at what we have achieved, it was the right decision. It is a lot of hard work, however, we are enjoying ourselves now more than we have ever done in our previous careers.”

    They spent one and a half years searching for the best ingredients, visiting more than 100 organic farms across Europe. They met farmers and learned about the supply chain, while refining recipes and working on branding.

    “From Irish organic salmon to British organic grass-fed beef, to organic strawberries from the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius in the south of Italy, to Brazilian organic bananas, we highlight the provenance of our ingredients knowing they withstand scrutiny,” said Piers, who has interned at Michelin-starred restaurants during every college vacation and reads cook books for fun. The 41-year-old, born in Australia and raised in five European countries, said he has a large collection of cook books and still buys 10 to 20 cook books a year.

    “I traveled a lot and met a lot of different people. I have to say, for me, that is the part of the business I enjoyed the most. I particularly like learning where food comes from and why food from certain places is better. The reason for that is the climate, the soil and the knowledge of the farmers.”

    “What I learned through my travels was that, in consumers’ minds, typically organic just means no pesticide, no fertilizer. But actually it’s much more than that,” he said. “If you work there, you’ll think to yourself: how can I not use pesticide and how can I not use fertilizer? You’ll very quickly begin to understand you have to have a much bigger picture and a much deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem.”

    James Brown, a U.K. farmer at a farm called Polybell Organic, which supplies vegetables to Little Freddie, told Piers his secret to grow good leek is to drown a specific species of fly. The fly is killed by flooding the fields and draining them later.

    Brown even employs a person full-time to monitor when the flies are hatching. On-site observation led Piers to decide to procure all farm produce from Europe except bananas, which come from Brazil.

    “The EU organic standard is the highest standard in the world and that’s why we follow that standard,” said Piers.

    He also noted that every single batch of little Freddie product is tested by Geneius Laboratories, a leading U.K. independent food safety testing provider. Customers can access the test results by scanning the QR code on the back of each product for their peace of mind.

    The first batch of Little Freddie pouches, containing fruits, vegetables, meat or grain, debuted on the German and Hong Kong markets in mid-2015. They went on sale on the Chinese mainland in November. The products were first available on JD.com and later on Tmall.com.

    One month after Little Freddie products were launched on Tmall.com, it became the most popular baby food brand there.

    “Mainland mothers’ buying habits are quite different from other markets. In Hong Kong it’s offline retail, but on the mainland it’s mainly online,” said Piers. “We like it that Tmall gives us a lot of feedback from the customers. It’s quite a brutal place to sell products because if you sell something which is not right or people don’t like, they leave comments. We live or die by these comments and we take them very seriously.”

    Online sales encouraged the couple to expand to brick-and-mortar stores on the mainland. Piers expects Little Freddie food will soon be available in Shenzhen’s high-end supermarkets, including Sam’s Club and Ole. Little Freddie is also selling well in the United Kingdom and will debut on the Singaporean market soon.

    Two years after creating the brand, Piers said he is still investing. “We can make the business profitable at any time we want. But we want to grow it and invest in it,” he said. “I can give a very simple example: the cap of the pouches has our own color. To get this cap we have to make a large number of them just for us. The company making the caps for us offers about 15 standard colors. Everyone else uses the standard colors. We have our own color because we want our packs to have some designs and some features. But those sort of things cost money and you don’t get that money back immediately. It takes time for people to feel that. So we’re happy to continue to invest to build the brand, build the product, and build the supply chain. I think we can make a profit at a later time.”

    Piers said he has a simple goal for the business. “When parents want to find healthy, nutritious and safe baby food, I want them to think of Little Freddie,” he said. “We want parents to trust the quality of the product. That’s why we go to Europe to visit our farmers, we take videos so that our customers can see for themselves where our ingredients come from.”