- Professional chef supervised infant food is low in salt, yet tasty for adults
- Handmade dishes are quick frozen, and each package is enough to share between an adult and a child.
- Home delivery of customized content for each family, including allergies and nutritional balance
The "homeal" service introduced here provides frozen infant meals customized for each family. Delicious meals supervised by a professional chef and nutritionist are delivered to your home ready to eat by heating them up in the microwave.
The service received an award of excellence in the "BabyTech® Award Japan 2020 Breastfeeding and Eating Category. The BabyTech.jp editorial staff interviewed Mr. Sho Onikai, CEO of homeal Corporation, the developer of "homeal" (titles below omitted), to learn about the service, its development process, and future plans.
(We spoke to...)
homeal Corporation Representative Director, CEO
Sho Kikai
Professional skills shine through in "toddler food" that adults can also eat.
Editorial:Thank you very much for your time today. Could you begin by giving us an overview of "homeal" and its features?
Onikai: homeal" is an infant food delivery service based on the concept of "eating with parents and children. There are two main features. The first is that "parents and children can eat together. The second is that it uses a "toddler food diagnostic function" to "deliver customized menus for each family.
The term "toddler food" may be unfamiliar to you, but it generally refers to food for children between the ages of one and six. First of all, the period from one to one and a half years of age, when milk and baby food are finished, is called the "transitional period of toddler food. Then, when the children's teeth gradually come in, they begin to eat foods that are chewy, which is called the "early and late infant food transition period. We have prepared menus for these periods, and all of our products are based on recipes created by our team of professional chefs and dietitians.
This is a feature due to the fact that it is made with a professional chef. homeal is an infant food, so it is necessary to reduce the amount of salt and additives. However, simply reducing the amount of salt makes the food less tasty. Therefore, we use professional techniques, such as homemade fon de veau (broth made from veal meat and bones) and chicken bouillon (broth made from chicken bones), which are equivalent to the broth used in Japanese cuisine, and we take the time and effort to prepare them with a wide variety of ingredients. The taste of the dish is well balanced without relying on salt.
The "Keema Curry with Hidden Vegetables" and "Fricassee with Porcini and Young Chicken" are especially popular. The nutritionally balanced "Meatballs with Liver" are also popular because they are hand-formed and fluffy, making them suitable even for children who have not yet developed their teeth. These chef's skills are used to quickly freeze infant meals so that they can be eaten with their freshly prepared taste.
Solving the problems of "child-rearing households" and providing important time for "parents and children to eat together".
Editorial:I am also a dual-income household and would love to use it!
Onikai:As a typical usage scenario for users, there are probably several days a week when you work hard until the evening on weekdays and find yourself at ...... with nothing to prepare for dinner. It is very difficult to go shopping for ingredients and cook under such circumstances, and the toddler years are not an age when it is easy to go out to eat. In addition, you will worry about your child's nutritional needs. There will also be times when you are not feeling well. At such times, it is reassuring to have homeal in the freezer, and this is a point that makes them very happy. For this reason, the packaging is made as flat and thin as possible, so as not to take up too much freezer space. You can heat them up in the microwave or by boiling water and eat them right away.
When we think about what is important in a child's diet, the most honest wish of children is to eat the same food as their parents, together with their parents. So, when they are eating with their children, they are very interested in the food, asking, "What's that? When eating with children, they will ask with great interest, "What's that? If the adults are eating only cup noodles or strong flavored food, they will not be able to share their food with the children. So, in the sense of "gaining original experience of food" with the child, it is important to eat well-made, delicious food together with the child while saying, "Delicious! We want to value the experience of eating well-made, delicious food together with parents and children. For this reason, all homeal frozen packages are portion sizes that can be shared by one adult and one child. We also envision homeal as a main dish to be eaten with staple foods such as bread, pasta, or udon noodles.
Reviewing "my child's food" became the idea for creating the service.
Editorial:Can you tell us how you started this kind of service?
Onikai: My child was born in June 2017, and around the age of one, she developed an atopic-like condition called "infant eczema". This led me to start researching children's health and nutrition, and I came across the term "infant food". I bought dozens of books on infant food at bookstores and began to make prototypes of dishes, but I realized that cooking was very time-consuming and labor-intensive. At the same time, I thought how convenient it would be if a professional could prepare truly delicious toddler food and freeze it in stock. Thus the idea for homeal was born around May 2019.
However, up to that point, I had been a consultant for new business start-ups and had no experience in the field related to children and food. Therefore, I wanted an expert on children's food to join my team, and the first person I attacked was Takeshi Nishikawa. He is an expert on frozen foods and appears almost every week in some media under the name "Frozen Prince. Meeting this man has led to connections with frozen food factories, nutrition experts, and quality control specialists across the country, and we have the team we need to develop homeal. crowdfunding started in October 2019, and the response has been better than we could have imagined, so we are going to start a beta version of the product in January 2020. We began pre-marketing and officially released the service in September 2020.
Editorial:So your child was the reason for your visit! By the way, how is your skin after that?
Onikai:Thanks to this, my four-year-old child's skin condition has improved immensely. Of course, it was not only the power of diet, but also exercise, sleep, and love that helped him grow up healthy.
Anyway, the praise from "adults" for the "taste" is amazing!
Editorial:Can you tell us how many people use HOMEAL and what they think of it?
Onikai:The number of users has been spreading mainly through social networking services such as Instagram and Twitter. Some of the specific comments include, "How delicious is this toddler food? I wish I had found it sooner!" I wish I had found it sooner!" "It saved me from having to prepare meals for my husband and children while I was in the hospital after childbirth," "I want to send it as a baby gift," "The taste can be eaten by both parents and children," "The parents can eat it even if the children leave some behind," "The salt content is low, but the flavor is amazing! The hashbeef is so good that it will make you faint in the morning!" The hashbeef is so good that it makes you scream in agony from the morning!
Further "visualization" of infant food issues through the development of a dedicated application
Editorial:What are your plans for the future?
Onikai:To date, more than 30,000 people have completed the "infant food diagnosis". This diagnostic function has enabled customers to purchase customized menus based on their child's age, allergies, and nutritional balance, and we intend to utilize this personal data to solve all "infant food" problems in the future.
As part of this effort, we are currently developing an application that will allow users to keep track of infant food, thereby making infant food and child rearing visible. We intend to use the power of design and data to improve the user experience by creating a foundation to support households raising children so that they do not have to worry about their children's infant food.
After the interview
In fact, as a reporter from a working family with a 3-year-old daughter, I was also quite concerned about the monotony of daily meals. However, I feel that homeal's service will be a beautiful relief to the situation ...... that we have no way to solve in terms of time and energy. With our upcoming move, my commute to work will be even longer, and we may have to wait for the introduction of homeal in our home. I feel that this is a service that families struggling to balance their daily busyness with child-rearing should definitely give it a try.
homeal" Official Website
https://homeal.co.jp/
