Puree on the wall.
An app idea on the kitchen floor.
How feeding twin boys with completely different tastes — while Googling “does cheese have zinc” at 2am — led to building TinyPlates. As a family.
The journey so far
From flat whites near Greenwich to butternut squash on the wall
London Life
Brunch, careers, and a social calendar that needed a spreadsheet
The Big Surprise
“There are two.” — the sonographer who changed everything
The Great Escape
Swapping the Tube for farm shops and fields with actual cows
TinyPlates Is Born
On a kitchen floor, covered in sweet potato, something clicked
The Saturday Brunch Era
There was a time — and I say this like a war veteran recounting peacetime — when my weekends had a rhythm. Saturday morning: flat white from the place on the corner that spelled your name wrong on purpose. Brunch with friends where we’d argue about whether the avocado toast justified the price tag (it never did, we always ordered it).
Two careers, one flat in Greenwich, and a social calendar that required its own spreadsheet. We ate out four nights a week. We thought we were busy. Genuinely believed that. It’s sweet, looking back.
The Scan Room Went Quiet
When I found out I was pregnant, I cried happy tears on my lunch break, standing in the middle of Greenwich Park. We were thrilled. We were ready. We’d read every book, bought every gadget — the bottle warmer, the white noise machine, the baby monitor with more features than our car. We were, we thought, extremely prepared.
Then came the twelve-week scan. The sonographer went quiet. Not the good kind of quiet. The kind where your stomach drops and you suddenly become very aware of the sound of your own breathing. Then she turned and said, very calmly, “So, there are two.”
The room went very loud after that. Mostly me.
Trading Postcodes for Postcards
London is many wonderful things. It is not, however, the place where you want to navigate twin buggy logistics. Have you tried getting a double pram through a Tube turnstile? It’s like threading a shipping container through a cat flap.
So we did the thing. We’d said we’d never leave — every Londoner says that, right up until the moment they leave. We moved out. Properly out — where the air smells like rain and cut grass instead of someone’s emergency Uber Eats. We found a house with an actual garden. There were farmers’ markets several days a week, and farm shops everywhere — proper ones, offering everything from venison and free-range chicken to locally grown fruit and veg, all fresh, all seasonal, all from down the road. Neighbours brought round casseroles when they heard about the twins.
The Human Octopus
Nobody prepares you for the logistics of twin parenting. People try. They say things like “you’ll have your hands full,” as though you might not have noticed.
Feeding two babies at the same time actually looks like this: one in the high chair, one on your lap. You’re spooning puree into Baby A while Baby B is grabbing your hair with the grip strength of a professional rock climber. You have sweet potato in your eyebrow and somehow behind your ear. The baby has rice cereal in his nappy. Not from that end.
You grow extra arms. You develop the spatial awareness of an air traffic controller. You become, essentially, a very tired octopus — but with worse arms and a jumper you’ve been wearing since Thursday.
You also, for reasons you can’t entirely explain, have never been happier.
The Feeding Wars
Same parents, same kitchen, completely different planets
Twin A
The Banana Fanatic
Twin B
The Avocado Enthusiast
Three meals a day. Two completely different menus. Seven days a week.
Essentially running a very small, very chaotic restaurant with two extremely demanding critics.
The 2am Google Spiral
Then the health visitor mentioned iron. Were they getting enough iron? And zinc — zinc is crucial at this age. And omega-3s, of course. And vitamin D, especially through winter.
That night, at 2am, I was deep in a Google spiral that would make a nutritionist weep. “Iron in porridge?” “Does cheese have zinc?” “Can babies eat sardines or is that unhinged?” Seventeen browser tabs open and a growing sense that I was somehow failing at the one job that actually mattered.
Tracking nutrients across two different children with two different palates, across twenty-one meals a week? My brain was running on four hours’ sleep and coffee. No chance.
The Kitchen-Floor Epiphany
The idea came to me on a Tuesday. I was sitting on the kitchen floor — not by choice, but because I’d sat down to pick up a thrown spoon and my body had simply decided we lived there now. There was butternut squash puree on the wall. Don’t ask.
What if there was an app that just… knew? That knew one twin loved avocado and the other didn’t. That could plan a whole week of meals, keep the nutrition balanced, and stop me cross-referencing spreadsheets at midnight. Something that adapted when their tastes changed — because they change weekly, for no reason, with no notice, and with absolute conviction.
That evening I told my husband. He’s a software engineer. By the next morning he had a prototype on his laptop. And just like that, TinyPlates became a family project — I handle the recipes, the testing, and the taste-testing panel (two very opinionated critics); he builds the tech. Together, from our kitchen table, between nap times.
We built TinyPlates because “what should I feed them this week” shouldn’t require a nutrition degree and a nervous breakdown.— Daria, co-founder & mum of twins
The nutrients keeping Daria up at night
So TinyPlates obsesses over them instead
Iron
Critical for brain development. Found in red meat, lentils, fortified cereals, and leafy greens.
Zinc
Supports immune function and growth. Found in meat, chickpeas, pumpkin seeds, and cheese.
Omega-3
Essential for eye and brain development. Found in oily fish, chia seeds, and walnuts.
Vitamin D
Vital for bones and teeth. Especially important during the darker months in the UK.
Daria
Co-founder & Chief Taste Tester
Mum of twin boys (2 years old and counting). Former Londoner, current countryside convert. Powered by coffee and the unshakeable belief that no parent should have to Google “does cheese have zinc” at 2am. Building TinyPlates as a family — she does the recipes, the marketing, and the taste-testing; her husband writes the code. One thrown spoon at a time.
Join the TinyPlates family
Because you’ve got enough to worry about without having a nutritional crisis at 6pm on a Wednesday.