5 Questions with Sarah and Jodie of Rainebeau Co

Encouraging a life-long love of food and healthy eating is one the most important jobs we have as parents. And with many meals eaten outside the home these days, we’re always super keen to hear products and ideas for food on the go!

We were excited to discover Rainebeau Co, their bento-style spill-free lunchbox is super kid-friendly and looks like none we’ve seen before! We asked founders and friends Sarah and Jodie 5 questions to find out more!

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourselves, where you live and about your families.

Jodie and I live with our families in a small coastal town south of Melbourne in Australia. We have five kids between us, I have a 5 year old daughter Raine and an 18-month-old son Sigi, and Jodie has three sons, 7-year-old Joey, 5-year-old Beau and 2-year-old Jetsun.

I own a children’s boutique and Jodie is a dietician. We both live within walking distance to the beach and it plays a huge part in our lives, especially Jodie, as she’s an ex-pro surfer! We feel so lucky to be bringing up our kids by the sea where they can breathe in fresh air and have lots of space to create wonderful childhood memories.

We’re both also really passionate about traveling the world with our families and try to get overseas for adventures with our kids in tow whenever possible. We’re headed off to Indonesia in the next couple of months and Hawaii is next on our list. But we also don’t underestimate the beautiful country we live in, and love mini journeys up and down the coastlines; this country has endless discoveries to experience.

2. Tell us a little bit about your brand and how you came to create your label.

Jodie’s eldest son started school 3 years ago. “Wrapper free food” was promoted at the school and it was always Jodie’s priority to provide unpackaged fresh foods, but finding suitable containers – and their matching lids! – 5 days a week was such a pain! It all seemed so complicated, and she dreaded the time when she would have 3 boys at school – 3 lunch bags and 12+ containers AND lids to find each morning!

So, Jodie came up with a solution: streamline packing a healthy lunch by creating one container with compartments. The Rainebeau lunchbox was born! Well, it wasn’t quite that simple! But the idea was good and Jodie knew that it would solve a problem many parents face each morning.

We set out to create a bento style, leak-proof lunch box that could hold a range of food, eliminating the need for packaging. Being a dietician, Jodie designed compartments that were not just practical for all the foods she planned to fill the lunch boxes with, but also met guidelines for healthy eating and portion sizes.

I bring flair for design and style, knowledge of the children’s products market and of course my experience as a parent living a healthier lifestyle. We like to think we are the perfect match between creativity, fun and practicality. Our decision to become business partners came over probably the 100th dinner we shared as family friends. Most of our time together has been sharing food and laughs, whilst the children play.

The name Rainebeau came pretty early on. It’s a combination of two of our children’s names, Raine and Beau, 5 at the time and the best of friends. Alongside the concept of ‘eating a rainbow’, we love the symbolism behind rainbows; positivity, happiness, individuality and fun, which is what we and what our lunchboxes are all about!

3. What is important to you when designing your products?

Practicality is a non-negotiable, we are real mums living in a real world, but our designs also aim to encourage fun, creativity, health and good nutrition whilst reducing impact on our environment. Processed foods not only lack nutrition, they also come with a whole lot of packaging that is ruining the planet.

Being eco-conscious doesn’t need to be boring, we are aiming to excite and encourage a wrapper free lifestyle revolution!

Kids need to know food is more than a package. They need to know where it comes from, how it grows, and why these colourful foods are so good. Most children reach for the packaged foods for the fun wrapping. By packing wholesome unpackaged produce in our fun colourful lunch boxes we hope this will be just as appealing.

Convenience is another important consideration. We love getting out, travelling and being on the go, but we don’t want our, and our children’s, food choices to suffer. Having a travelling lunch box that works is so important – it’s often when out and about that poor food choices are made — whilst people don’t have fresh good food at hand.

4.Where do you look for design inspiration?

We believe in the nutrition philosophy ‘eat a rainbow’ because the vibrant colours in fruit and vegetables contain powerful health promoting nutrients. The different colours have their own individual super powers and can’t be replicated in a pill – eating all the colours of the rainbow is so important to our overall health and vitality, not to mention it looks beautiful. We’ve taken this colourful thought through to our product – we like to think our lunchbox design makes it easy to give children a rainbow for lunch every day.

We love the beach and nature almost as much as colourful fresh healthy food, and we find inspiration in all of those things. Whether in real life or on social media, when we see something that jumps out at us we add it to our inspiration file so we can apply it to our product in some way.
If we had words that describe our style and inspiration they would be: nature, beach, tropical, retro, 80’s, raw materials, (things that symbolise) fun, positivity, happiness, playfulness. We have all this in mind when we create our products, both in how we want the item to look and how we want it to make people feel.

5. How do you juggle motherhood and your careers?

To tell you the truth we are still learning! Our product was created from a love of family life and passion for our family’s health and wellbeing, so we always check in on ourselves when the balance goes off. It’s crazy starting a new business, you don’t realise what even a simple product range requires in time and effort!

We’re starting to find our ways of creating balance and make sure we have routine times for focusing on work that fit in around the family schedule (sport, music and the rest), plus time out where we can all chill, adventure and play.

We’re a small business and sometimes people can wait whilst we take time to nourish our minds and spend time with our families. Organisation is key and creating weekly visual calendars for us all to see takes the stress out of who is doing what and where!

We also have what is perhaps a flaw, perhaps strength; we’re both quite analytical. This is a hard – but necessary – part of business. Too much thinking is unhealthy; you need silence and a still mind occasionally. However analysing how your business is running is vital to success. Creating a time and place for analysis is so important, otherwise you’ll wake up at 2am worrying about things!

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