Winning Formula

When Elke Pascoe was eight years old, she vowed to one day become a doctor to help African children living with hunger.

Pascoe’s dreams of pursuing medicine never came to fruition, but another opportunity to improve children’s lives arose years later.

“As a single parent with two young children in 2015, I was at a crossroads in terms of what I wanted to do with my life,” she tells The CEO Magazine.

“At the same time, my son had this terrible rash on his skin. I started looking into what I was feeding him and one of the things was his formula. For the first time ever after having two children, I looked at the ingredients on the can and I was horrified.

“We wouldn’t even accept many of those ingredients in our food as adults and yet we willingly give them to our children in formula.”

A Global Concern

Driven by a deep-seated belief that the world’s children deserved more wholesome nutrition, Pascoe spent two years conducting research and discovered that the problem was global.

“In fact, it was far worse in other countries where formulas had glucose syrup, maltodextrin, palm oil and all these other ingredients that were big no-nos in my book,” Pascoe says. “Despite being a single mother with very little money in the bank, I decided I had a responsibility to make something better.”

While she admits she was initially somewhat naive about what it would take to launch a formula company, her passion for challenging the status quo, in the market and the support she received from people in the industry, pushed her to take the plunge.

Pascoe carefully selected the ingredients that would go into her all-natural formula, dubbed LittleOak. First, she chose fresh whole goat milk for its nutritional profile, due to its similarity to human breast milk.

Instead of mass-produced palm and canola oils that wreak havoc on our health and the environment, Pascoe opted for cold-pressed coconut and flaxseed oils. LittleOak is now the world’s first 100 percent certified palm-oil-free baby formula.

“Five years later we’re selling LittleOak across the world,” Pascoe says. “We’re really proud to partner with retailers that understand the changing consumer – the Millennial parent who’s looking for a better formula than what’s been traditionally available.”

From Parents to Team Members

With 23 employees and contractors now on staff, The LittleOak Company has grown exponentially without losing focus on its mission. “The large majority of our full-time employees are LittleOak parents who reached out to us in our early days,” she explains.

“They’ve lived the journey and they really understand what we’re trying to achieve.”

Delivering their product to customers’ doorsteps as quickly and efficiently as possible is one of The LittleOak Company’s driving values. “Our job is to make sure we create certainty for parents. They order the best product, it arrives on time and they don’t have to worry,” she says.

“And because we know the pressures of running out of formula at 11 o’clock at night, we were the first in Australia to have infant formula delivered by Uber.”

Over the course of the next five years, The LittleOak Company is largely focusing on expanding into Canada and the United States.

“We’re currently investing in the Food and Drug Administration approval process, which takes about two years,” Pascoe notes. “Then we’re looking at growing out into the Middle East. After that, we’ll be looking at the United Kingdom and France, which are our phase-two markets.”

Continual Innovation

In addition to market expansion, The LittleOak Company is also tackling growth through product innovation. “I tend to innovate according to what my children need, so as they grow, so does our range,” she says.

Building a global brand was in no way an easy feat, but Pascoe says she would do it all over again.

“There were some really tough times because every cent I had went into the business, but I knew we were onto something and we could help more children. We kept battling through and I’m glad we did,” she says.

“We get all these great pictures from parents with children who were previously covered in eczema or suffering from asthma or who had bloated stomachs, and after switching to LittleOak, they became very content children with clear skin and bright eyes. That makes all the hard work and stress well and truly worth it.”