Like providing a healthy, seasonal and locally sourced meal to their kids day after day, picky eaters are the bane of nearly every parents’ existence, but one New Yorker is looking to the past to stop the struggle.
“Think about what your grandmother ate, we’ve got to go back to that,” said Marissa Lippert, founder of Nourish Baby, an offshoot of Nourish Kitchen + Table, which she opened in the West Village in 2013.
Nourish Baby is a weekly subscription service for kids between 6-months and 2-years-old in an age-appropriate serving size — but the ready-to-heat meals created by Lippert and Chef Lizzy Rizzuto are likely better than most adult New Yorkers eat, make or forage off Seamless. Think liver-infused chicken meatballs and salmon roe, for example.
Menu items Metro employees taste-tested included chia pudding with strawberry puree and coconut milk, which was “light and summery,” grass-fed lamb kofte (“one of the best I’ve ever had,” one staffer proclaimed), a “delicious” lemon-nilla yogurt with walnut-date paste and “hearty” bone broth for moms.
“We’re taking a slightly different stance around how to talk about food for early eaters to parents and how they can really take a different path when starting their kids on solid food,” Lippert said.
Having launched in April, Nourish Baby is “a baby itself,” Lippert said, and while she kept mum on the number of subscribers, she said it is “continuously building.”
Among those who use the service is actress and New York mom Olivia Wilde, who recently shared a picture on Instagram of Nourish Baby products near her daughter, saying they are her “saviors” and confessing that she steals “every other bite.”
Unlike some subscription food services that come direct to your door, customers of Nourish Baby pick up their orders at three designated spots in Williamsburg and the East and West Village.
Lippert chose the pick-up route to “build communities and open things up for conversations” between Nourish Baby and its customers as well as among its customers themselves. “Relationships are everything,” she said. “We thought it was important to build that given that this is a delicate topic — and an important topic.”
Nourish Baby isn’t just for kids, though. It also offers weekly add-ons for the rest of the family, including that aforementioned bone broth and gluten-free cookies that aid with lactation, which Lippert said are the “best-tasting cookies I could have ever imagined. We all eat them, even though we are not lactating.”
The cookies were a big hit with Metro staff as well, with one saying it very moist and “didn’t break apart like most gluten-free treats” while another described it as “unreal.”
Subscriptions to Nourish Baby range from $475 for one-month plans to $2,450 for six months. A limited one-week trial plan is available for $120, while a three-day “weekender” is $275. The items come in sustainable and recyclable plastic and glass packaging. For more info, visit nourishbabynyc.com.
