Little Spoon vs. Yumi: The Best Baby Food For Your Little One

📅 June 14, 2024

In a Rush? Get the Fast Facts

Fresh and Organic Options: Gone are the days of limited baby food choices. Services like Little Spoon and Yumi offer fresh, organic baby food delivered right to your door, making starting solids a breeze.
Variety and Growth: Little Spoon provides a full range of meal options from baby’s first bites to toddler years, featuring unique ingredient combinations and textures that evolve as your child grows.
Nutritional and Freshness Assurance: Both companies use fresh ingredients with no preservatives, but Little Spoon’s use of HPP technology extends the freshness of their Babyblends up to 14 days in the fridge or 3 months frozen.
Cost-Effectiveness: Little Spoon stands out with its affordability, starting at under $3 for a 4 oz jar, and offers discounts and a generous referral program.
Flexibility in Delivery: Little Spoon offers bi-weekly deliveries that can be easily modified, skipped, or managed, while Yumi offers weekly deliveries, allowing for more frequent changes to the menu.
Allergen-Free Options: Both services provide vegan options and avoid the Big 8 allergens, with Little Spoon making an exception for coconut.
Expert-Designed Meals: Meals from both services are crafted with expert input, ensuring they meet the nutritional needs of developing babies, though Yumi also curates menus based on specific age-related milestones.

It seems like just yesterday that your choices for baby food were limited to what you could make at home or the dusty jars on the shelves at your local grocery store. But these days, fresh, organic baby food is just a couple of clicks away and there’s no need to spend hours researching what to do when it comes to starting solids, and then chopping, peeling, steaming, and blending to give your little one the very best. That’s a win in my book.

There are several fresh baby food delivery services on the market right now, but two of the biggest contenders are Little Spoon and Yumi. Both promise the same basic concept: organic baby food made with fresh ingredients, shipped right to your door. So how do you decide which company is right for your family? I broke down the differences between two of baby food’s most popular services and what worked best for my family.

SPOILER ALERT: While both companies have some good options, Little Spoon takes the win as a high quality, and budget-friendly baby food option!

Little Spoon Plates

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Little Spoon

Little Spoon prides themselves on being “the easiest way to keep your kid healthy” and by delivering fresh, organic baby food right to your door, I’d say they’re doing a pretty fantastic job. They offer a very wide array of flavors, ingredients and textures in their 100% USDA-certified organic Babyblends. Plus, their blends are designed with nutritionists and pediatricians so you know you’re giving your baby the very best without having to think twice about it.

What I Love About Little Spoon:

Meals that grow with your kids: Your baby can start Babyblends for their very first bites with Little Spoon’s smooth, single-ingredient blends, move on to more textured and chunckier blends as their palate develops, and then transition to their line of finger foods (AKA Plates). Little Spoon is the only company out there that offers a FULL line of meal options from first bites to toddler years. All the products at every stage are made with high quality, fresh ingredients.
A variety of exotic ingredients and interesting flavor combos: Little Spoon comes up with combos I would never have thought of myself, like Sweet Potato Apple Red Bell Pepper Turmeric (yes…turmeric!) and by exposing your baby to a wide variety of ingredients, it helps develop their palate, prevent picky eating and set your little one up for a lifetime of health. Plus, Little Spoon’s blends are specifically crafted by nutritionists and pediatricians for your baby’s nutritional and developmental needs as they grow, so you know you’re giving your little one what they need, when they need it.

Little Spoon Meals

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Absolutely NO preservatives: Little Spoon doesn’t use ANY preservatives, additives, fillers or other funky ingredients you can’t pronounce in their baby food. Instead, they use a cold-pressure technology called HPP which allows their Babyblends to stay fresh for 14 days in the fridge or 3 months in the freezer.
Big 8 allergen-free: Babyblends are vegan and free of wheat, soy, peanuts, and tree nuts (with the exception of coconut).
White glove care and lots of flexibility: If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a parent, it’s that no matter what I have scheduled for the day, my baby has a tendency to throw a wrench into those plans. With Little Spoon deliveries every two weeks, I don’t have to worry about constantly managing my account or tracking multiple deliveries. They make it super easy to skip, ship or modify orders. Plus, their customer support is amazing. You can text or call Little Spoon for help with your menu or any questions you have. Turns out all their Customer Service people are caretakers and are all certified in Child Nutrition and Cooking.
An added boost when you need it: Aside from their Babyblends, Little Spoon also has clean vitamins and remedies called Boosters. The powdered, single-serving sticks can be mixed right into a Babyblend or bottle, and help with a variety of common issues like constipation and immune system support. Their Poopie Power has definitely saved me from some very unhappy tummy days.

Little Spoon Meals

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Cost: starting at under $3 for a 4 oz jar, Little Spoon is by far one of the most affordable fresh baby food delivery services on the market right now—especially considering they are USDA certified organic and use absolutely zero preservatives! Plus, they often offer great discounts for first timers, and their unlimited $20 for $20 referral program means that your orders can basically pay for themselves.

What I Don’t Love About Little Spoon:

Larger deliveries: Little Spoon’s smallest plan size is 14 Babyblends so if you’re just getting started with solids and your baby is new to eating, you might not go through them quickly enough. That being said, if I’m nearing the end of the 14-day mark and have a few too many blends on hand, I love that I can pop them in the freezer and have them on hand for last minute meals or snacks on busy days.
Seasonal ingredients can mean seasonal availability: Little Spoon sources their ingredients from local organic farms, so availability is limited for some of their more seasonal ingredients, meaning you can only get their cult-favorite Pumpkin Spice Babyblend in the fall.

Little Spoon Meals

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Yumi

Co-founded by a mom on the hunt for better food options for her first baby, Yumi talks a lot about the idea that nutrition in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life is hugely important to their development. They use a variety of fresh, organic ingredients and recipes developed by experts to craft their collection of purees.

What I Love About Yumi:

No preservatives: Like Little Spoon, Yumi uses fruits, veggies, grains and other real ingredients in their purees so you know exactly what you’re feeding your little one.

Weekly deliveries: Yumi’s meal plans are smaller due to weekly deliveries, but weekly deliveries mean you have the opportunity to try more flavors from order to order and get smaller batches if that suits your lifestyle.

Big 8 allergen free: Yumi’s purees are also vegan and free of major allergens like wheat, soy, and peanuts.

Milestone Plan: Yumi curates menus based on your baby’s age which can help take some of the guesswork out of knowing where to start when it comes to introducing solids.

What I Don’t Love About Yumi:

No bigger kid options: Once your child outgrows their purees and moves through pinchables, bites and puffs (suggested for 10+ months), you’ll need to change course and find another meal time option for your kiddo.
Expensive Price Tag: Yumi’s food is over $4 per jar, and orders are charged and shipped weekly. You do have the option of paying for a full month’s worth of food, which nets you a small weekly discount but even with that, their largest plan is more expensive on a monthly basis than any of Little Spoon’s three available plans.
Shorter shelf life: Yumi’s purees will stay fresh in your fridge for just one week versus Little Spoon’s two weeks, so you have to make sure you finish what you order before it goes bad.
Added account management with delivery frequency: Weekly deliveries means having to stay on top of managing your menus and delivery schedule. They also have a longer preparation time than Little Spoon, so changes to orders need to be made a full week in advance (versus 72 hours with Little Spoon).
Strings-attached referral program: Yumi has a customer referral program that offers $15 credit for existing customers and five free jars for whomever they refer. However, existing customer referral credits cannot be redeemed until after the referred customer receives their second order (vs. Little Spoon who gives you $20 after the referred friend orders just 1 delivery).

The verdict: In a head-to-head battle of the baby food delivery services, Little Spoon and Yumi both have a lot to offer families. But Little Spoon edges this one out for us! We love the idea of finding a meal service for our baby and being able to stick with them all the way through toddlerhood and early childhood. My little one went crazy for Little Spoon’s creative blends—she would literally cry whenever we finished her favorite Pitaya Pineapple Spinach Banana Coconut Oil blend—and I credit them with her adventurous toddlerhood eating.