| Tell us about your company: |
| BARI is America’s first Asian baby food brand raising the standard of baby food with diverse food traditions, rigorous safety standards, and balanced nutrition. Founded by two sisters Subin and Suahn, BARI offers ready-to-eat meals, snacks, beverages, and first foods that goes beyond the purees. |
| What inspired you to start your business? |
| When Subin was raising her first baby in Austin, Texas, she was advised by her pediatrician to not feed her baby rice because “it’s not safe.” Rice is consumed by more than half of the world every day, and central to our Asian heritage, and we were both shocked by the state of agriculture and food supply chain that makes rice unsafe for babies. We further learned about the lack of safety framework and nutritional balance in American packaged foods, and decided to dive head first into how we could make the baby food better and more like “real food” for the next generation. To us, “better” means 3 things: 1. safety of the end food product, 2. superior nutritional balance, and 3. food that reflects real, diverse food traditions. As a sister-founded business, our mission is simple: introduce babies to versions of real food they’ll eat for life, built from the diverse ingredients, flavors, and cultures we grew up with and love. We innovate baby food with different textures, ingredients, and flavors, with rice as the base ingredient. “BARI” comes from the Korean expression 바리바리, which describes the way parents pile their children with nothing but the best, be it lunch boxes, care packages, or the dinner table. That’s BARI. |
| What are your proudest achievements so far? |
| – Launched on Amazon and DTC in March 2026 and became the #1 Amazon Best Seller in the baby porridge category within two weeks with zero ad spend. – Named a finalist for the 2026 Startup CPG Shelfie Awards with our ready-to-eat Japanese Veggie Curry food pouch. – Building a rigorous safety standard beyond what’s required to sell: third-party heavy metal testing and pesticide residue testing on every batch plus QR-code traceability, microplastics testing on our packaging. – Accelerating our retail presence – exciting announcements to come! |
| What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs: |
| 1. Start with a real problem to carry you through the hard days, but in order to scale, make sure it’s a problem many people actually resonate with. 2. Look for feedback from customers as early as possible. Before products, testing ideas and concepts with real customers can save you time and money. |
| Please share a memory or thought about your alma mater: |
| I appreciate UChicago for teaching me to question everything, stay curious, and build resilience to take on hard problems. Back in college, I didn’t think I’d be in entrepreneurship, but thinking back, my college experience helped shape the exact mindset it takes to build a company from scratch and bring true category innovation to the CPG industry. |
