The Mama Menu

Celebrating female-founded brands you'll want to know.

Since November 2025, we've been spotlighting the best newly launched and emerging female-founded consumer brands, helping them reach new audiences and sharing their stories to inspire the next generation of female founders.

We started Mindful Brand® to support women in succeeding in business, not just through our brand and business advisory, but also by building a platform that champions female-founded brands, helping them gain the visibility and support they need to grow. We believe in a future where more seven-figure consumer brands are built by women, and we're committed to helping make that vision a reality.

Ultimately, we want more women from all walks of life to see building a successful consumer brand as a real possibility, regardless of their background, age, culture or circumstances.

Deciding which businesses to support is a personal choice. If, like us, you want to champion female-founded brands, we hope you'll discover some new favourites.

Today, we’re featuring The Mama Menu, founded by Freya Bielenberg in 2026 in the UK.

About the Brand

The Mama Menu delivers chef prepared, nutritionally specific frozen meals for pregnancy and postpartum across the UK, plus seasonal breakfasts, broths, snacks, functional teas and adaptogenic and electrolyte drinks, all made to promote healing, lactation, digestion and energy.

The brand is designed to support expecting and new mums. It’s also a much loved gift from friends and family around the world who want to care for a new mum from afar.

Every dish The Mama Menu makes draws on global traditions of maternal care, refined with modern nutritional science and shaped by a panel of perinatal experts. But nourishing never means bland: each recipe is created with a chef’s creative flair and cooked to restaurant quality, so every meal feels like a treat rather than a prescription. All that’s left to do is heat and eat.

Meet the Founder

Originally from Ireland, Freya is a London based chef, birth and postpartum doula and perinatal nutrition specialist.

After training as a chef, she followed a path that has fed directly into The Mama Menu: a Master’s in healthcare management, work as a doula, an organic protein company, a school and farm project in Ghana, personal training and nutrition coaching, and managing two busy events companies.

In 2026, she was joined by longtime friend and co-founder Anthony, a talented chef and entrepreneur whose combination of kitchen expertise and financial know how has been instrumental in scaling the business.

How She Started

Freya comes from a family where feeding each other has always been the main love language, so she learned early that food is about comfort and care as much as sustenance.

Working as a doula, she saw the same thing again and again: mothers putting themselves last, and a health system offering little guidance on how to nourish women through pregnancy and the weeks after birth, and no practical, high quality solution.

The Mama Menu was her answer, bringing together her two worlds, the kitchen and the birth room, to create the food she wished every mother had waiting in her freezer, so women could focus on recovering and on their babies.

What She Learned

Freya has three lessons she’d share with other female founders. First, stop apologising for a winding path. A CV shouldn’t just be a list of professional achievements; it’s also a record of passions and interests. Quite often, those different experiences and qualifications come together to create a business that’s very hard to copy.

Second, set things up properly from the start. The founders’ agreement, the mission statement, the less glamorous health and safety processes: getting these right early means they become habit, rather than something to backtrack on later.

Third, word of mouth beats ad spend early on. Pouring hundreds or thousands of pounds into marketing at the start can be a quick way to run out of money. The Mama Menu has instead grown through referrals, practitioners and press, proof that trust is the most powerful marketing a young brand has.

Where to shop

The Mama Menu is available to order at themamamenu.com.

Instagram: @themamamenu

Support brands built by women. Don’t just say it. Shop it. Stock it. Fund it.