The right ingredients

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Starting a business is, in some ways, akin to becoming a parent – sleepless nights, learning new tricks and, sometimes, simply trusting your instinct. For Paul Lindley, that gut feeling – based on his experience as a parent – was the belief that baby food could be different: healthy, convenient for parents, and fun for children.

It was the starting point for Ella’s Kitchen, the range of puréed organic fruits and vegetables – named after Lindley’s first child – that would go on to become the top-selling baby food brand in the UK. His daughter Ella is now 18, but the brand is celebrating its 12th birthday on the day of our conversation, having come a long way from its early days in Lindley’s kitchen.

Though brands have more data at their fingertips now than when Ella’s Kitchen was born, Lindley is still an advocate of following your nose. “Big data is vital, and algorithms tell truths, but gut feel still plays an important part,” he says. “That human-ness of the business – being able to express itself not in a cold, calculating way, but in a human way – resonates. I think that’s growing at the same time as the importance of big data and algorithms.”

This can be a tricky balance to master for start-up founders, with an increasingly large array of insights and potential avenues for exploration – particularly if those insights challenge human intuition. Lindley believes, however, that good entrepreneurs don’t ignore their instinct when they grow more established and gain insights from research and data; instead, they use these to support it. Consumer brands that can gain customer trust through both sides of the equation – “by quant and qual, if you like; by the data and the gut feel” – and that understand how people live and “the emotion of why they make purchasing decisions” will succeed, he says.

Before launching Ella’s Kitchen, Lindley spent nine years at Nickelodeon, first as financial controller – moving to strategic communications and marketing – before becoming deputy managing director. He gave himself two years to get the brand to market, with the proviso that he would find a job if things didn’t work out. “I thought ‘I’ll regret not trying this, even if it fails’,” he says. “We didn’t fail, but – along the way – we’ve learned from things that haven’t gone right the first time.”

Lindley spent most of the two years ahead of launching the brand planning and understanding, conducting what he terms “amateurish” ad hoc market research with no budget – mostly with friends and acquaintances – to gain insights on the needs of parents and test his ideas.

His vision for Ella’s Kitchen as a playful sensory experience for infants went against the convention for baby food, notably through its use of pouch packaging, which had never been used in the category. “The professionals were saying ‘You’re trying to put baby food into pouches – you won’t be able to see it. It’s always been done in glass jars.’ I’m thinking, ‘as a parent, I find it really convenient, toddlers get excited about holding it, and our focus groups thought it was a good idea’.”

Mixing fruit and vegetables was also unheard of at the time, and Lindley admits he was nervous about using recipes that paired “odd ingredients”, such as sweet potatoes and blueberries. “I knew my baby and our test babies liked them, but would a random stranger shopping for their baby like them?”

When Ella’s Kitchen launched in 2006, brands were still in broadcast mode, communicating a one-way stream of messages with little interaction with their audiences. Today, the rapid rate of technological change has shifted the balance of power, and it is consumers who determine what brands stand for and how they are perceived. “For good companies, there’s two-way traffic,” says Lindley.

This two-way communication between the brand and its audience is essential to making sure Ella’s Kitchen is validating or questioning itself – and that’s where market research and customer feedback come into play.

As the brand has grown, the ad hoc customer insight gathering of the early days has become a more established aspect of how the business is run. An online community of 300 core consumers, managed by market research agency C Space, collects feedback on new products, design, markets and consumer behaviours, and has generated around 61,000 ideas submitted by parents. “We’ve got to be constantly thinking – what does a family look like in 2018? How do they live? Where are the stress points?”, Lindley says.

People and purpose

These days, Lindley is chairman of the business, and no longer as involved in its day-to-day running after its sale to US firm Hain Celestial in 2013 – a move that could have threatened the company’s position as an organic brand with its own purpose.

When Lindley handed over responsibility to the management team and current chief executive Mark Cuddigan in 2014, he realised the culture and values the company had carved out over the years would be sustainable – in part because Hain understood the brand is successful not simply because of churning out new products.

Lindley believes the success of Ella’s Kitchen is rooted in the company having a purpose beyond profits – and that is to improve children’s relationship with food. Bound into this is the importance of people. The best businesses are not about simply making money, he says, but about understanding and investing in individuals. Internally, that means motivating staff to understand the company’s wider mission and their role within that. Externally, it’s about building trust with the consumers whose lives you are trying to touch.

“You need the trust of the people who are willing to buy your food for the most precious person in their lives; trust that it will deliver not only what’s inside the packaging but also buy into that trust of why you exist – that it’s not a faceless corporation, and it’s not just making money to go into shareholders’ pockets.”

The company became B Corp certified in 2016, which means it meets rigorous standards relating to social responsibility and financial transparency. One of the stipulations for certification is changing the company’s articles of association to value the interests of all stakeholders and maximise benefits to society as well as shareholders.

Ella’s Kitchen has already had its first job applicants who want to work there because of its B Corp status – something Lindley attributes to the changing priorities of younger generations. As these people become employees and entrepreneurs, he believes the whole nature of business will undergo a seismic shift. 

“Whether they are future employees of businesses such as ours, or consumers of our products, they expect the values in a company they work for, or buy from, to overlap with their personal values. If enough consumers are making those decisions over baby food, before long they’ll be making those decisions about pensions.”

This, believes Lindley, will lead to inexorable change in how business is conducted. Far from companies attaching themselves to a modish ‘brand purpose’, the B Corp model is about redefining success in business – and that means redressing its short-termism. By focusing on maximising profits for shareholders on a quarterly basis, business leaders are failing to invest in long-term growth that has a wider positive impact on society.

“It’s not about maximising profits this quarter,” says Lindley. “It’s about making profits over a long time, having an idea of what you’re going to do with those profits, and motivating people to work for you and buy from you under that mission. Minimise the bad you do, maximise the good that you do, and build a sustainable business.”

The most successful companies of the future will be those that recognise this, he adds. “Capitalism needs to evolve hugely in this next generation – in the next five or 10 years – otherwise there’s going to be some sort of revolution. There are too many people not winning from it and not trusting it. From 2010 to now, the UK economy has grown by 12% GDP [gross domestic product], yet average wages have fallen by 6% – so there’s an 18% gap. 

“Where is that money? It’s in the balance sheets of big companies that aren’t doing anything with it because there’s an uncertain macro system in our world. It’s just sitting there and that’s not doing anything for the economy or for people’s daily family lives – and the most successful businesses will realise that.”

In Lindley’s view, businesses should be offered tax breaks for consumer excellence, to incentivise them to invest in research, knowledge and improving systems to better understand consumers. Essentially, this would allow them to spend money on things that don’t have an immediate return, but that equip businesses for the future, such as improving customer care.

The interplay of social responsibility and business has influenced much of Lindley’s non-executive activity outside of Ella’s Kitchen. He is currently on the board of trustees at Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organisation behind Sesame Street, and is part of the board of advisers for craft beer Toast Ale, a start-up that brews beer from surplus bread. He’s also involved with the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights organisation. All are centred around the idea of business – both individual corporations and the wider ecosystem – heading towards inevitable transformation, Lindley says. “Our economy should serve our society – we should create prosperity, but have an idea of what to do with it.”

What would a two-year-old do?

The current Brexit-related uncertainty, however, risks pushing innovation down the list of priorities for British businesses. In a society in which our education system, parenting styles and business teach us to conform, how can individuals at the heart of businesses think differently? 

The answer, according to Lindley, is to think the way a toddler would – and this premise is the subject of a book he’s written on adjusting our mindset. By rediscovering old behaviours and being playful – “growing down”, as Lindley terms it – people can unlock greater potential for new ideas and solutions to society’s problems.

“There’s no more resilient, ambitious, determined person than the person you once were when you learned to walk,” he explains. “None of us learned to walk when we decided we wanted to; it took 500 times, yet we all did it – we all had that high ambition.”

Bringing in solutions that were tried and that failed in the past will fail again – but, Lindley says, corporations paying bonuses based on short-term financial gain are short-sighted, because they don’t incentivise experimentation. “If it fails this year, they’re not going to get their bonus. If it fails and it only needs to be tweaked to succeed for next year, they don’t have the incentive to do it next year.”

Another challenge in today’s entrepreneurs, he observes, is that some have been conditioned to expect instantaneous gratification. “Building a business takes time; building a brand takes time; building trust with everybody you work with takes time – so the mindset of the entrepreneur has to be longer term than perhaps many of the things in this generation are pushing them to do.”

It’s a lesson Lindley knows all too well: while he took his time to build Ella’s Kitchen and understand the needs of its target market inside out, it wasn't quite the same story for Paddy’s Bathroom, the natural toiletries brand he created two years ago, named after his son, Patrick. The business is now closed, because it could not find a way to make profits sustainably – partly because of launching too quickly, he says.

The brand was offered the opportunity to launch with an American retailer before going to market in the UK, and Lindley admits the challenges of this were underestimated. Part of the issue, he concedes, was assuming American and British consumers were the same.

Lindley also thought that the consumers who were buying Ella’s Kitchen products would also want to buy a Paddy’s Bathroom product. In reality, he says, “some of the things they cared about with their food, they cared less about with their toiletries and personal care products.”

Though the company improved the product after a study by MMR – which recommended a sensory branding approach – Lindley admits the research came 18 months too late. “We should have waited; the mistake was to rush into an opportunity to go to market, even though I had 10 years of experience of Ella’s.”

He’s optimistic, however, about the future of British businesses, despite the current economic climate – which, he says, offers opportunities for those brave enough to take risks. “Good things have come out of recession and it’s those small companies that are going to be willing to find the opportunity and take a risk, and reap the rewards from that in uncertain times.

“There’s nothing we can do as individuals [about Brexit] – we’ve had our vote. If you’re an entrepreneur, get your head down and focus on how you can adapt to the different scenarios that will come through. How Brexit, the currency market and regulation are going to land – you can’t really do all of those things day to day. But work out why you’ve got a point of difference, how you can best adapt and sustain that, and just go – because the bigger companies are not doing that. They’re not investing, so there is an opportunity.”

For Lindley, reflecting on 12 years of the brand he built – as the Ella’s team gather in the next room for their anniversary lunch – it all comes back to the people. He still finds it “indescribable” that something that once existed only inside his head is now a big part of people’s lives. 

“It’s humbling to sit on a train and hear someone behind you talking to their friend about your product and how it’s changed their lives.” And he’s proud of the people who have made that happen. 

“It’s been successful because of ideas people have when they walk their dog, as much as when we sit down and say ‘right, here’s a meeting about our next product – what is it?’ I’m proud we have managed to motivate and reward people who have worked on this for 12 years.” 

This article was first published in the April 2018 issue of Impact magazine.