Jennifer Garner Helped Build a Baby Food Unicorn
Jennifer Garner Helped Build a Baby Food Unicorn
Entertainment - November 22, 2025
Once Upon a Farm’s IPO reveals how mission, money, and a star co-founder turned fresh kids’ food into a billion-dollar business.
The baby food aisle isn’t where revolutions start. It’s where jars go to collect dust and brands coast on decades-old formulas. But Once Upon a Farm saw that stagnation as an opening, not a dead end. Now the company is preparing an IPO that could value it close to $1 billion — the kind of number that forces you to rethink what a baby food brand can be.
A big part of that rethink starts with Jennifer Garner. Her involvement isn’t the celebrity cameo most people assume. Before she ever stepped into a CPG boardroom, she spent fifteen years working with Save the Children, visiting families in rural communities where nutrition wasn’t a wellness trend — it was a crisis. She saw kids raised on whatever was cheapest and most shelf-stable, and she saw how little innovation existed for parents who wanted something better.
So when she joined Once Upon a Farm in 2017, along with former Annie’s CEO John Foraker, she wasn’t looking for a side project. She was looking for a way to fix the aisle she’d been frustrated with for half her career. And she didn’t join as a passive name on the cap table. She became a co-founder, director, and Chief Brand Officer — someone expected to show up, push the company forward, and make noise when the category refused to budge.
Inside the company she’s not a mascot; she’s a force. She’s in Slack, in meetings, in the trenches. She once publicly promised that OUAF would become the first fresh organic baby food brand eligible for WIC — before the operations team had finalized the path. Most companies would’ve walked it back. OUAF built toward it. That moment captures how Garner works: act with conviction, then catch up to your ambition.
But Once Upon a Farm isn’t running on celebrity energy alone. Its investor roster is stacked with some of the most serious food-and-impact funds in the country. Cambridge Companies SPG, CAVU Consumer Partners, and S2G Ventures all own more than 5% of the company and have backed the brand across multiple rounds. These are the same firms behind Annie’s, Health-Ade, Beyond Meat, and half the better-for-you brands that reshaped grocery culture in the last decade. When they write checks, they expect scale.
OUAF has delivered. The company says it has surpassed $285 million in in-store retail sales. Revenue grew from $94 million in 2023 to $156 million in 2024. It hit another $110 million in the first half of 2025. For the 52 weeks ending June 15, 2025, it was the top brand driving dollar growth in its categories. This is what investor-ready traction looks like — not a niche brand punching above its weight, but a category leader pulling the refrigerated kids’ segment forward.
All of that momentum is why the company is going public now. They haven’t disclosed share count or pricing, but the intent is obvious: they believe they’ve reached the size, brand power, and operational maturity to compete on the public markets. And the underwriter lineup — Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, William Blair — confirms they’re not testing the waters timidly. They’re walking in with one of the strongest banking syndicates a consumer company can ask for.
Garner, for her part, owns less than 5% of the company through her trust and equity compensation — a meaningful but minority stake. She isn’t the controlling shareholder; she’s the cultural anchor. The brand’s conscience. The operator who shows up to ensure the mission never gets diluted as the company grows. Her presence signals to parents that OUAF isn’t just a business — it’s a statement about how kids should eat.
Once Upon a Farm didn’t become a near-billion-dollar company by riding trends or leaning on fame. It became one by combining mission, discipline, institutional capital, and a founder group unwilling to let the baby food aisle stay stuck in the last century.
Jennifer Garner didn’t set out to build a unicorn. She set out to fix a category. The market is simply catching up to her.
