How Lilly’s Little Lunchbox is tapping a younger, pre-packaged market

Australia’s ready-made-meal and meal-kit market is pretty well stocked with players across the sector focusing on different audiences. But, one segment of customers has mostly been ignored.

The dietary needs of kids is not something that appears in many meal providers’ offerings, which tend to be focused on time-poor working professionals. While some market themselves as providing an easier option for a family dinner – kids’ lunch boxes are going without.

Queensland-born Lilly’s Little Lunchbox is providing that offering, having raised equity through crowdfunding platform Birchal earlier this month.

Already available through Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, Lilly’s is now looking to South and Western Australia for its next phases of growth.

Founder and dietician Cara Aprile told Inside Retail that Lilly’s has been able to expand rapidly as  there is almost no competition in the space.

“I was preparing my daughter’s lunches, and being a dietician I’m quite pedantic about what I put in there,” Aprile said. “I realised that this is something that must be overwhelming for other parents.That’s where the idea came from.”

Lilly’s Little Lunchbox ships fridge-ready meals to customers once per week. It incorporates the five major food groups (fruit, vegetables, dairy, cereals, and protein), and are catered towards children as young as two years old, through to teenagers.

Aprile’s background as a dietician has been key to the business’ offer, she said, as it’s helped her to deliver balanced meals that are focused on delivering what kids, and parents, need.

“We listen to customer feedback to find out what the kids are enjoying, what they’re not, and what they want to see, and that’s how we;ve been able to grow,” Aprile said. “Over the past 17 months the meals have changed a lot.”

First-movers advantage

Director of business development Chris Heydon said that as soon as the business started in 2022 they had customer demand, and that demand has outstripped what they can keep up with. As such, the business is entering a new manufacturing plant in order to scale up.

These changes enabled the business to launch into new states across Australia.

“We very quickly realised that we’d found a huge part of the market that no one else was going after,” Heydon told Inside Retail.

“We know that there will be more brands that join in the market, but we’ve got a 17 month first-movers advantage. Others will come, but we’ll always be first.”

According to Heydon, the market is big enough for competition, with Lilly’s recent $685,000 capital raise proof that investors are onboard. The crowdfund had 1600 expressions of interest, and ended with approximately 280 investors funding its  expansion plans.

“[The crowdfund] gave us huge confidence that there are people out there that the idea resonates with,” Heydon said.

“It’s not a quirky little fin-tech idea that people can’t wrap their heads around. It’s a simple process that people already understand.”

The first step post-raise is to “activate the marketing machine” and start acquiring some new customers, Heydon said, and to help the business move into its new premises to fuel further growth.

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