Delmar Main Street is bringing back its Holiday Expo and small business pitch competition for a second consecutive year at Delmar DivINe on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
The nonprofit, which seeks to provide economic revitalization to the Delmar corridor from Taylor Avenue to the city limits, is looking to tap into Small Business Saturday, an event first marketed by American Express in 2010 as a way to support and encourage shopping with small or local shops.
“On Delmar we don’t have a lot of retail businesses, so we’re bringing all the retail into one location,” said Delmar Main Street Vice President Lisa Potts. “We had about 60 vendors last year, people selling cookies, candies, cakes, clothes, you name it, people were selling it.”
Delmar Main Street will host a pitch competition for small businesses before the Holiday Expo. Potts explained that it grew out of a desire from the Metropolitan St. Louis Community Reinvestment Association, a collection of more than 30 local financial institutions, to give back and support small and local ventures.
“We just want to be able to help give businesses a jump-start, if they are a new business,” Potts said. “Maybe they want to try out a new product [or] expand. Sometimes you just need a little seed money to get over the hump.”
This year’s competition will feature six businesses vying for a top prize of $6,000, slightly more than last year’s $4,500 for the winner. Second and third place will take home $3,000 and $1,500, respectively. Potts acknowledged it may not be an astronomical dollar figure, but the unrestricted funding can still make a large difference for a small, local business.
“It’s money that you just don’t have,” she said. “And now you have this influx of cash to be able to invest back into your company.”
That was true for WOMB 2 BIRTH founder Paris Rollins, who won last year’s competition. Her company makes supplements for pregnant mothers that mimic the flavors of bitter vegetables to help babies begin developing a pallet for them while still in utero.
“The smaller you are it’s really hard to find resources,” Rollins said. “We needed to go to a manufacturer, and they usually have minimum quantities and with those, you need to have a little bit more money.”
Her journey into developing prenatal supplements after her mother was diagnosed with cancer for the second time. Rollins explained how she saw her mother struggle to add healthier foods into her diet and how her daughter was also rejecting those same foods.
“I was hiding veggies in my daughter’s food. It was a lot but I was determined,” she said, adding she eventually coaxed her daughter to eat healthier options.
In this process, Rollins said she interacted with other mothers who faced a similar struggle and decided to launch PICKY EATERZ, a catering service that delivered healthy children’s meals to schools and day cares. But she said she still found children would throw away the vegetable portions of the meals.
Rollins pored over academic studies into the way people, but babies in particular, develop flavor and food preferences and discovered the work of Julie Mennella, a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center.
“Babies learn about foods before their first taste of foods, because the flavors of mothers’ diets are transmitted to amniotic fluid and then human milk,” Mennella said. “They learn about these flavors and they are more accepting of the flavors of the food mom eats when they start to be weaned to solid foods.”
Brian Munoz
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St. Louis Public Radio
It’s a well-established point of view in the scientific literature, Mennella said, but cautioned that any new product making these claims would need to go through clinical trials to validate them.
“It’s based on science,” she said. “But to make a claim about a product, that’s where you would have to be a little bit more rigorous.”
The research and conversations Rollins had with Mennella inspired her to develop supplement juices and later pills that could bring this scientific understanding into the mainstream, she said.
“I knew how much mothers struggle,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Well I’ll come out with the convenient solution for them to still get those flavors to [their babies].”
From last year’s inaugural Delmar Main Street small business pitch competition to now, Rollins said she has used the $4,500 she won to develop marketing materials and pay a manufacturer. A year later, she said she’s in a position to launch her website and showcase her product at a handful of pregnancy and maternity expos in different cities next year.
To Potts, this is the ideal outcome of the pitch competition, but it also helps connect banks like U.S. Bank, Midwest BankCentre, Carrollton Bank and others that are part of the Metropolitan St. Louis Community Reinvestment Association with up-and-coming ventures in the community. It extends beyond the six businesses that will pitch on Saturday to the roughly 60 who applied to pitch this year, she said.
“We feel like we’ve created a cohort of small business owners that are now supporting one another,” Potts said. “We can create space and opportunity for them to make those relationships because relationships are where business can begin.”
Potts said she expects the event, now in its second year, to build on itself in the future.
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