Joe Carr @ Serenity Kids
Bringing Regen Meat 2 The Baby Aisle
Joe Carr is a Co-Founder and the President of Serenity Kids. Serenity Kids is supporting regenerative agriculture with their various regenerative and organic baby and children's food products.
The Brand
Serenity Kids makes baby and toddler foods focused on delivering nutrient density with every bite. They use regenerative meats, organic vegetables, and healthy fats, packaging their products in minimally processed purees and shelf-stable squeeze pouches. They also have vegetable and bone broth-based puff snacks for toddlers, baby formula that mimics the macronutrients of breast milk, and a new smoothies line featuring coconut cream and grass-fed collagen.
Their products are sold in over 15,000 stores, including all Whole Foods and most Targets and Walmarts, and they are on track to be the nation’s leading natural baby brand. While they intentionally started with baby food to address the most vulnerable population, their goal is to be the nation’s leading children’s food brand.
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A Path to Serenity
The brand is named after Joe’s wife and partner, Serenity. As a child, she suffered from significant health issues, plus wheat and dairy intolerance. In 2010, after years of taking medications just to eat, Serenity adopted a Paleo diet. Hooked on the benefits of this new lifestyle, she ditched her Fortune 500 job and became a Paleo coach – teaching people how to heal through food.
And that’s how Joe and Serenity met. Like her, Joe faced many challenges as a child. Misdiagnosed with ADHD but actually on the autism spectrum, Joe was unusually sensitive to inflammatory foods and chemicals, and he also ended up with severe heavy metal poisoning as an adult. Getting rid of processed foods and going Paleo – and falling in love with Serenity – changed everything.
For the Love of Kids
By the time the couple considered having their own child in 2016, they quickly realized the complete void of Paleo options for babies and children.
Serenity became intentional about understanding what kids need from a nutritional standpoint. Serenity dug into as many journals, papers, and books as she could get her hands on, even the USDA’s Guide to Infant Nutrition. The research was clear that babies needed protein and fat, especially from high-quality meat and animal products. Half the calories in breast milk are fats, which are the building blocks of the brain and spine.
What the Carrs found in the baby food aisle, however, was fruit and grain – almost 100% carbs. Less than 4% of baby foods at the time had any kind of meat and almost none of it was organic. Moreover, less than 1% of baby foods had 2 or more grams of fat, despite the fact that babies need 30 grams of fat a day.
"What was really interesting was how universal the science was. Everyone was clear that babies needed meat. Animal products were very important first foods for babies. Babies need fat. The calories from breast milk are half fat. It also said sugar was a real problem - that it was inflammatory and should be limited." - Joe
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A Health Crisis
Joe and Serenity laid out all 246 organic baby food SKUs that were available back in 2016, and found, on average, each pouch had 9 grams of fruit sugar – highly processed sugar, basically the nutritional equivalent of jam. When you give babies all these carbs, they end up with mood, sleep, stool, and immunity issues – all the issues that parents complain about.
This lack of proper infant and baby nutrition is also causing a monumental healthcare crisis:
- 1 in 5 kids is obese
- 1 in 5 kids is diabetic or prediabetic
- 1 in 5 kids will be diagnosed with a mental and emotional disorder by the age of 16
- Toddlers are eating 7 tsp of sugar a day, almost equal to the 9 tsp a day recommended for an adult male by the American Heart Association
“All of this stuff is diet related, and the crisis is starting in infancy right at the baby food aisle. Consumers see what’s available for their babies in the food aisle and think that’s what babies need – fruit, some vegetables, no protein or fat. The American Pediatric Association still recommends fortified rice cereal as a first food, and in the same sentence says meat is important. Yet kids are getting iron-fortified rice cereal that’s full of arsenic and causes constipation.” – Joe
A Healthy Foundation
Disgusted by the options, Joe and Serenity had the idea of creating a baby food based on nature's perfect baby food – breast milk. Breast milk is half carbs, half fat, and packed with protein. The intent was to use high-quality organic vegetables as the carb source and quality meat as the protein and fat source – think meat and veggie blends like grass-fed beef with sweet potato and kale, or free-range chicken with organic peas and carrots.
They ran lots of product taste tests with their friends’ babies, and they landed on flavor profiles that the babies liked and were super nutrient dense. Then they tackled sourcing.
An EPIC Assist
It didn’t take long for the couple to connect with Taylor and Katie from EPIC Provisions. They were pregnant with their first child and equally passionate about the need for better baby food. They became the Carr’s first advisors and helped them understand how to set up regenerative sourcing.
"It was still very new at the time, so they helped us set up our regenerative and pasture-based supply chain. There was not a lot of B2B because most of the meat was set up for selling directly to stores or to a consumer, not to a factory to process it into a product. So we had to work really hard to get the right spec sheets and the right uniform packaging methods. It was a lot of work, but we were talking about regenerative from the very beginning. When we launched we were regenerative and grass-fed." - Joe
Between finding regenerative meat and nailing down clean processing, to brand building and raising money, it was two years from idea to launch – which happened to be the same day their first child was born.
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Keys to Success
Sourcing different and higher-quality ingredients has been the biggest key to the brand's success. Secondly, it has been having packaging that told that story and garnered attention in an extremely crowded aisle. Unlike most baby foods, the Serenity brand has a simple, clear design and a focus on the ingredients. These two strategies have allowed the brand to retail at almost double the price of most other baby food pouches ($3.99 vs $1.99).
“A lot of moms go to the grocery aisle to see what’s available for baby food, so having packaging that stands out was critical. We also needed a big enough set size, which has been a struggle. Our competitors have like 40 SKUs, and thankfully Whole Foods has leaned in at 28. Walmart is only at 11, and Target 7, so we had to have packaging that tells a compelling story.” – Joe
Nothing Wrong With Meat
“Meat is being demonized in the health, food, and environmental sectors and some people feel guilty about eating meat. There’s a lot of propaganda around plant-based, but the fact is, everybody loves meat. What’s cool is that regenerative takes away the guilt – you know, you’re getting something that is good for you and tastes good.” – Joe
Joe is a staunch defender of meat. Earlier in his life, he got caught up in lifestyle activism pursuits which led him to adopt a vegetarian and vegan diet. It wasn’t until he was in Palestine working with a human rights organization that he realized what a privilege it was to demonize meat. While the other activists with him refused to eat meat, Joe realized that the Palestinians sharing their meat with him were not only demonstrating tremendous hospitality (given how expensive and rare it was), but they were trying to connect as humans.
“I just realized that these diet cultures, especially vegan and vegetarianism, were disconnecting people. Anything that disconnects me from another person is counter-revolutionary. We're going to have to change the world together. Even if we want to change the world for cows, it's not going to be by not eating cows. It's going to be by working together to change the system.” – Joe
Our Path to 50% Market Share 4 Regen
Like so many other podcast guests, Joe believes regen brands need to be marketing together, starting with a concrete definition of what regenerative means that resonates with the mainstream population. Joe also emphasized that the climate movement has to embrace regenerative agriculture and get away from its "Meatless Monday" mindset.
“It’s just counterproductive. When you boycott a whole industry, we hurt the people doing it right and guarantee that those doing it wrong will win because they’re the cheapest. The people who are willing to pay more, who are environmentally and food conscious are getting inundated with the vegan B.S. And we’ve got to capitalize on that – the truths are on our side.” – Joe
“We feel all this built-up shame for all the harm we've caused. We want to do things better. It's very easy to want to believe we're superior, but that’s really just our own insecurity and it will be harmful. There's no superiority. We’re just trying to give parents information, some education – but they are not going to hear us if we're judging them, they're not going to hear us if we act like we're better than them. The mainstream loves meat. They love farmers and are pro-environment. And so that's where regenerative can win – not by converting the climate movement but by embracing mainstream America. That’s one of the reasons our products do so well at Walmart – shoppers like to see that we support small farmers.” – Joe
You can check out the full episode with Joe from Serenity Kids HERE.
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This ReGen Recap was produced with support from Kristina Tober