Café Baby to open first retail location on northeast side
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — An Indianapolis company that produces and delivers freshly-made baby food is marking another milestone.
Café Baby has announced plans to open its first brick-and-mortar location on the city’s northeast side next year.
Co-founder Jeannie Marrugo says the new space, which will include a retail component, will allow the company to meet the continuously-growing demand for its products throughout the state and beyond.
The new location will be located in the Castleton area in Indianapolis. Marrugo explained the benefits of the space in an interview with “Inside INdiana Business.”
“This space will let us run our nationwide orders out of it. So we’ll have plenty of freezer space to store our food; we’ll have space to store our cookies to be shipped out and then we’ll also have plenty of room to grow,” Marrugo said. “And then our retail space will also have our product out there so that can let people come in and shop. We’ve got plenty of space to grow, plenty of space to add more employees as our orders keep going up, so we should be in there for quite a bit.”
Marrugo co-founded Café Baby in 2016 with her mother, Sherri Sego. The two began making and delivering homemade baby food and in July, Sego told Business of Health Reporter Kylie Veleta the company has tripled in revenue annually and has been on the hunt for a new production space after outgrowing two commercial kitchens.
“We’ve seen some pretty great growth over the years, especially since we’ve grown organically. We really haven’t invested a lot of money in advertising, so a lot of customers have come to us either through their friends or they’ve seen us on social media. That’s just kind of how the mom community works, so that’s been a really great source of growth for us.”
In August, Café Baby announced plans to begin shipping its products statewide, with hopes of eventually expanding to full nationwide distribution in the next several years. Some of the company’s products, such as lactation cookies for nursing mothers, are already being shipped out of the state and Marrugo says the new location will help with that growth.
“We are out of space in the kitchen that we’re currently in, so it’s been really challenging meeting the demand that we’ve seen over the last few months so once we move into this kitchen, we will really start pushing advertising that we’re delivering our food outside of the state of Indiana. We just can’t do it now because we don’t have enough space to store more inventory.”
The new storefront is expected to open in early 2020. Café Baby currently has three employees, however Marrugo says the company is set to announce plans for additional jobs in the coming weeks.
“Our company started as a little dream that we had to make busy parents’ lives easier,” the company said in an email to customers. “It has grown into what it is today because of the wonderful people like you who care for your children’s nutrition and believed in our vision.”