I love teaming up with local family-friendly companies to do commercial photography for their business.  These shoots are full-day sessions where we bring in products, baby models, and and experts in set design to create gorgeous images for their website & marketing materials.  

I recently had the opportunity to work with Inspired Start, a Boston-based baby food company that is revolutionizing early allergen introduction in babies by incorporating trace amounts of common allergens in baby food pouches to build up your baby’s immune system response to these ingredients?  The end result?  Bye-bye food allergies!

They just launched live on Amazon, and to celebrate I invited Jessica Deckinger, the founder of Inspired Start, to be a guest blogger and tell us a little more about Inspired Start and where this product idea came from.  

Enter the giveaway!!

The very best part?  We’re hosting A GIVEAWAY with Inspired Start & Nicole Starr Photography!  Click the button below to head on over to our Facebook page to comment on the post and enter to win!

What inspires you as a parent?  Click the button to comment on our Facebook post, and you could win a 3-box set of Inspired Start baby food for early allergen introduction, plus a $250 gift certificate towards a photo session with Nicole Starr Photography at our Saratoga Springs or Attleboro studio. 

Gift certificate must be used between November 2017-March 2018.  To be entered to win, please leave your comment below and be sure to LIKE the Inspired Start and Nicole Starr Photography pages. 

Winner will be contacted on Friday, November 17.

Tell us a little about you & your family.  

I am a typical working mom of three young children (which means I generally have at least 2 cups of coffee before I’m fully functional in the morning). In all truth, my girls are all phenomenal humans! They are ages 7, 4 and 3, and could not be more different!

My husband and I live in a small community right outside of Boston (actually the same community I grew up in!) While I occasionally like to dream about living a beautiful, magazine-worthy existence, our home usually looks more like a major world war of toys just took place…and the other side won. But one of the best things I’ve learned as a mom is that no matter how hard I try to be perfect at everything, I never will come close on most things. Forgiving yourself your flaws and imperfections as a mom is “the new black”. Anyone who has seen the inside of my closet lately knows my obsession with all-black clothing, so anything I refer to as “the new black” is really “the new everything”. 😉 

How did you get started working with babies & food allergies, and what brought on the idea of Inspired Start? 

I’ve been working for almost 2 decades in big companies. I’ve always loved what I do and I’ve been exceptionally fortunate to have worked with some pretty phenomenal people! When the last company I was with was acquired, I suddenly found myself thinking “maybe it’s time for me to try something a little crazy”. I wanted to take a risk and put myself outside of my comfort zone. I was ready to put all my experience to the test with no safety net, but my deal with myself was that I would only do it if I found something I was truly passionate about. When I met the team at Adeo and heard what the mission was, I knew I had found it. 

My oldest daughter developed a peanut and treenut allergy at age 1, and we spent years, lots of money, and many anxiety-ridden allergist appointments coping until she finally (and luckily) outgrew her allergy several years later. We are one of the few families I know who had a daughter that outgrew her food allergies. I never forgot how hard that experience was for me, financially and emotionally. I’ve always remained super-sensitized to moms who have kids with food allergies. When I started with Adeo, The LEAP study had recently been released. I knew that early allergen introduction was becoming more and more prevalent and wanted to be part of a team that helped bring groundbreaking scientific research to parents and families. I was lucky to be exposed to this research as part of my career, but I know that with three little kids I would not otherwise have found the time to read it on my own. 

Through friends with babies, I knew that pediatricians were starting to instruct parents to introduce allergens early and often, just like other solids foods. But as I’m hearing that, I remembered how hard I thought those first foods were with my daughters. If there is anything I can do to make that process easier for other moms, that’s something I can get behind. 

I’m fascinated by your system of packs and pouches!  Tell us about how Inspired Start’s method for the early introduction of allergens works.  

Our whole goal with Inspired Start was to create something that would fit into what parents are already doing with new food introduction. It is a new enough concept for parents to introduce allergens early rather than delaying introduction, we didn’t want to add extra steps, strange formulas, or new routines to that mix. 

We talked to countless parents during the process of developing Inspired Start. Over and over again we heard that parents like to introduce new foods for a couple of days before moving on to the next. We also overwhelmingly heard that baby food pouches are the go-to when parents are on the move or want to save time preparing at home. Especially with foods like nuts and shellfish that are hard to make age-appropriate for babies, we didn’t want to add any additional time to parents’ existing craziness. In response to these findings, we decided a simple recipe combining an organic fruit puree and just a small amount of potentially allergenic protein in a baby food pouch would be the perfect way to introduce these allergens. We also decided that we wanted to give parents multiples of each pouch so they could introduce each new food for a couple of days before moving on to the next. Pack 1 and Pack 2 contain two pouches of four different recipes each. 

Inspired Start is a three-part system, but it is designed to be flexible. For parents that have already introduced many of these foods in some form but want to have an easy way to consistently keep them in baby’s diet, the Variety Pack contains one pouch of each of our delicious recipes. I actually use the Variety Pack at home with my oldest daughter (her favorite foods are pasta, bread, quinoa, rice, and more grains) to keep a great source of protein in her diet. 

When is the best time for babies to get started?

It’s varies for every baby! Whenever baby is starting other solid foods (purees, infant cereals, etc.), he or she will also be able to eat the pureed recipe in each of our pouches. That being said, some families choose to introduce the bases (apple, pear, mango, and banana) before introducing Inspired Start just so that the baby has already experienced the flavor of each of our foods. We put 4+ months on our packaging as a suggestion in line with published research, but we want families to do what is right for them and to make decisions with the help of their pediatricians. 

What does this mean for parents, and hopefully, what does this mean for food allergies in the future?

Early allergen introduction is a new way of thinking about the first foods that our babies experience. The reality is that many of these foods are not naturally in baby-appropriate form and let’s face it, we’re parents, not superheroes. When things get crazy at home, we reach for the fast and easy foods. That means not always feeding baby a truly varied diet that regularly includes potentially allergenic foods. With Inspired Start, parents have a simple way to do that. 

Our sincere hope is that we are opening up a world of healthy and varied eating for a new generation of kids by starting early with early allergen introduction!

Where can parents find more info?  

If parents want to hear more from the amazing allergists, nutritionists, and moms who helped to develop our product, they can visit our experts page (www.inspired-start.com/experts). Our website as a whole, especially the blog, is a great resource for parents who want to understand how allergen introduction fits into general new food introduction. We also always encourage parents to reach out to us directly via phone or email. We’re a team of moms, dads, aunts, uncles, and baby food enthusiasts. We really care about providing support to the families that rely on Inspired Start.