Once Upon a Farm did not come out of a boardroom. It came out of a kitchen, a farmers market, and a working mother’s frustration with what passed for “nutrition” in the baby aisle. In 2015, Cassandra...
Once Upon a Farm did not come out of a boardroom. It came out of a kitchen, a farmers market, and a working mother’s frustration with what passed for “nutrition” in the baby aisle. In 2015, Cassandra Curtis started blending fresh, organic recipes because shelf stable pouches felt like a compromise she was not willing to make. What began as Mother’s Garden became Once Upon a Farm when Ari Raz joined, and by 2017 the company was scraping toward $1 million in revenue, selling cold pressed baby food in a world that did not yet believe parents would open a fridge for it.
That disbelief is the context for why this IPO matters. In January 2026, Once Upon a Farm filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OFRM, targeting a valuation of roughly $764 million at the midpoint. Eleven million shares. A price range of $17 to $19. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan running point. The kind of numbers that sound routine until you remember this business had to invent a category just to exist.
The inflection came in 2017 when John Foraker, fresh off scaling Annie’s into a public company and eventual $820 million acquisition, leaned in as both investor and co founder. Jennifer Garner joined the same year, not as a licensing deal or a glossy endorsement, but as an equity owning Chief Brand Officer who shows up to board meetings and buyer calls. Under that leadership, Once Upon a Farm went from sub $1 million in revenue to more than $200 million trailing twelve months, with products now in over 22,000 stores nationwide.
The engine is High Pressure Processing, cold pressure at 87,000 PSI that keeps food fresh without heat, chemicals, or shortcuts. Four months of refrigerated shelf life. No added sugar. USDA organic. Clean Label Project certified. This is not nostalgia branding. It is physics, logistics, and margin discipline. Gross margins in the low forties. Losses still present, but narrowing on an operating basis as scale kicks in.
The story is also evolving. What was once almost entirely baby food pouches is now a broader childhood nutrition platform. Snacks went from two percent of revenue in 2023 to roughly thirty percent by mid 2025. Refrigerated oat bars, protein bars, dry snacks. A brand aging up with its customers instead of waving goodbye at toddlerhood.
This IPO is not about celebrity heat or fairy tales. It is about whether fresh can win at national scale, whether parents keep choosing the cold case, and whether a Public Benefit Corporation can grow up on Wall Street without losing its teeth. Once Upon a Farm has planted the field. The market decides how big the harvest gets.