Why we made this
Wasted food, wasted money, and so many messy outings.
A Minneapolis family and our very messy daughter.
Once our daughter started on solid foods, she loved food pouches. They let her experiment with all kinds of different foods without us throwing away whatever she didn’t or wouldn’t eat. Like a lot of parents, we had our successes and our failures.
What we slowly found out was that most of those failures weren’t failures at all. She just couldn’t get all the food out. The pouch would fold in the middle, and she would give up.
Pretty soon after that, the rest of it clicked. She wasn’t dumping food all over herself in the car seat or the stroller because she didn’t like it. She was doing it because she couldn’t get it out. So she worked out her own way to reach it: turn the pouch over and squeeze. And seeing all that bright colored food come out quickly became a game.
The part every parent recognizes
Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. The pouch creases in the middle. Whatever is above the fold stays there. Your child pulls, gets nothing, and loses interest.
So you take it back. You work the food up with your fingers, hand it over again, and two minutes later you do it again. Two or three times a pouch, every pouch, in the car, in the stroller, in the middle of doing something else.
Nobody talks about it because it is too small to complain about. It is just something parents do.
What already existed, and why it didn’t help
There are pouch toppers. They are usually silicone, they sit on top of the spout, and they are good at what they do, which is controlling the flow and protecting a small mouth.
But a topper sits at the top. The problem is in the middle. Nothing on the market did anything about the fold, which is the thing that actually stops the food.
So we made one
A rigid straw that screws onto the pouch’s own threads and reaches all the way down, so the pouch cannot fold shut. Holes along the side, so food enters along the whole length instead of only at the bottom.
It took a lot of 3D printed versions. Most of them failed. One of them didn’t.
The first time our daughter used it, she finished the pouch on her own. No handing it back, no fingers, no turning it upside down. That was the whole point.
Where it is today, honestly
- It works. It has been used by real children, including some who are not ours.
- It is patent pending. A US provisional application was filed on 4 September 2026.
- What you see in the photos is a prototype. A test print, not a finished product, and not yet food safe.
- Nothing ships until it is tested. Production parts go through third-party safety testing to US children’s product rules first. That is not negotiable and it is why this is taking a while.
We are launching on Kickstarter to pay for the first full production run, and to make the design changes backers ask for while changing it is still cheap.
If you want to help
The single most useful thing is a tap. Follow us on Kickstarter before we launch. Kickstarter tells its own followers the moment a campaign opens, and day one is what decides whether the whole thing works.