By Lynne Jones BBC 2's Working Lunch

Like many new mums, Sally Preston spent a great deal of time making her daughter's baby food, cooking and then pureeing fruit & vegetables, and then freezing them in ice cube trays.

And she started to do the same thing second time round when it was her son's turn.

But food scientist Sally couldn't help thinking that there should be a way of combining the goodness of this homemade food with the convenience of baby food jars.

Idea

And that's when she came up with the idea of her Babylicious baby food range.

It is simply food that is cooked and then pureed, and then frozen into portion sizes in a specially designed ice-cube tray, just like most new mums are told to.

There's less waste than with jars of food as you need only get out as much as you want and put the rest back in freezer.

After doing some research and trying it out on her friends, Sally decided there was a market for this frozen baby food.

So she gave up her job to start the business, re-mortgaging her house to provide the funding.

Simple

A simple idea, in fact so simple that Sally found her bank manager wouldn�t believe that it hadn't been tried before and failed.

She wanted to copy what most parents already do at home but provide the convenience without the processing.

Her research showed that up to 50% of Mums are making their own food, and she was passionate that her food should taste and look like real food.

As a trained Food Scientist with 16 years experience, Sally thought she had most of the knowledge necessary for running the business.

"I had assumed that I knew a far amount of the processing and procurement of the raw materials and the understanding of the food side of it.

Learning curve

"But once it got going I realised that it was one of these things where you don�t know what you don't know until you get going, and it was an enormous learning curve for us."

At first Sally thought it would be quite easy just to replicate an ice cube tray but it turned out to be far more complicated.

The tray, which holds enough for 3-4 meals, needed to be quite robust and durable but also easy to pop the food out and able to cope with being in the freezer without shattering.

It took months of development in the end.

Credible

But she was keen that right from the beginning her business was one to be taken seriously, a credible professional company.

So she felt it was right to spend quite a large amount of money on getting the packaging right to reflect that image.

Sally reckons she's now at the end of stage one.

She's got the company off the ground, and it's design and packaging have been sorted out.

Her food is now manufactured according to her recipe by a large food processor who also distribute it.

A year after launching the business you can now buy Babylicious in Waitrose, Costco and some smaller shops.

Perseverance

Mandy Haberman came up with the Anyway Up Cup after watching a friend trying to stop her toddler spilling blackcurrant juice on the carpet.

Mandy Haberman

She found that the easy bit was having the idea, what held her back was the fact that it was a single product idea.

Mandy persevered, she took her prototype cup to about 20 different companies trying to get it produced through licence.

In the end she had to get it manufactured herself in order to get it on the shelves.

But even then her difficulties weren�t over, she had to initiate a patent infringement case when she found another company trying to use her special valve system.

The result came out in her favour.

But the reason she could afford to go through the lengthy legal proceedings which cost her hundreds of thousands of pounds was she had taken out patent infringement insurance.

Success story

Her Anyway Up cups now sell at a rate of 10 million a year and she has 40% of the market, and several awards for her cup's design.

But Mandy believes that anyone can follow her example.

Mandy Haberman and her family can�t resist checking to see whether other families they pass in the street are using her cup.

And seeing her products on the shelves still gives her a thrill.

And yet it nearly wasn�t to be, it was only be sending a full cup in the post to a buyer at Tesco's that Mandy got her cup in the supermarket.

Different

Sally Preston also decided that it was good to be different.

If you read her ingredients list on the back of her packaging it makes far more interesting reading than most.

The amount of each ingredient is listed, her Cauliflower Cheese for instance contains 2.5 florets of Cauliflower.

Counting cauliflowers was a task she shared with her daughter.

In many ways Sally gets to spend more time with her children now, but the flip side is that she often works late into the evening once the children have gone to bed.

Life change

Sally's advice to others contemplating the same kind of life change is that you will have to be prepared to face knockbacks and to pick yourself up after them and carry on.

"You've also got to live or die by your decisions and if you make a mistake, maybe not spotted something on the packaging that's incorrect then the consequences come straight out of your own pocket", she says.

"It's also best to remember that running your own business is a 24 hour a day job, 7 days a week.

"Anyone can do it," she says,

"But you have to be prepared for the sacrifices."