John Foraker has been a leader in the natural and organic food industry for more than three decades. As CEO of Annie’s for almost 15 years, he took the brand public in 2012 before it was acquired by General Mills two years later. In 2017, Foraker and celebrity Jennifer Garner joined the team at Once Upon a Farm to lead and expand the nascent company and disrupt the childhood nutrition industry.

Today, the Once Upon a Farm brand is sold nationwide, offering a growing portfolio of organic, farm-fresh snacks, and meals for babies and kids. Foraker, an early member of the Bain-ForceBrands Insurgent Brands Network, spoke with Charlotte Apps, Bain’s Consumer Products executive vice president, about the fundamentals behind Once Upon a Farm’s success, rooted in a deep passion for consumers’ needs and the ability to be agile and patient.

Q: As you look back on your seven years at Once Upon a Farm and the journey from small local brand to national distribution, what do you see as the biggest contributor to that success?

Foraker: It started with having a strong conviction that we could disrupt the white space we were targeting—helping parents provide fresh, unprocessed foods to their kids without loads of added sugar. At first, we were narrowly focused on baby food, where 40% to 50% of consumers were telling us that the category didn’t meet their needs. But we learned from our consumers that we needed to widen the aperture beyond baby. Across the entire $50 billion-plus kid food business, parents had a desire for real nutrition. Along the way, people told us the disruption we envisioned couldn’t work or would be too hard.

At the same time, we knew we had to tap that white space with the right offering and execution. It didn’t happen overnight—we had to be patient and learn—but once we landed on a great product, awareness grew through word of mouth, repurchase rates increased, and the brand just accelerated over time.

Q: What were some of the critical decisions you made that spurred the brand’s growth in the early days?

Foraker: When I joined in 2017, our ambition was to “Fresh Pet” the baby aisle—introducing fresh baby food in an aisle that historically only offered shelf-stable items. We thought we could convince stores to join our mission and install coolers. But we very quickly got the feedback that this would be slow and capital intensive.

So, within 60 days we decided to pivot by doubling down in the kid dairy space and build out the business there. Even though the space was crowded with the big guys, our offering proved to be incremental to the category, so our buyers gave us time to build out our inventory. They wanted to see us on their shelves.

As we expanded, we realized that while 80% of consumption was in the kids' space, our branding and positioning were still focused on baby. So in 2019, we took the baby imagery off the packaging, emphasized fruits and vegetables, and added a no-sugar claim to better reflect our target market. Velocities increased two to three times overnight. In early 2020, we went one step further and modernized the logo, improved the packaging further, and velocities again increased two to three times. The brand took off like a rocket, and it has been like that ever since.

Our other big decision was when we broke all the rules about how quickly to grow distribution. In one year, we went from 300 to 8,500 stores, mainly Target, Walmart, Kroger, Sprouts, and Whole Foods. We knew the playbook was about being patient and building demand over time, but it made sense given the assets we had — we had the ability to quickly raise a lot of capital and we had Jennifer Garner, who is a force and could open doors for us. And most important, while the products weren’t perfect yet, they were seeing strong performance on shelf. As a result, about 90% of that distribution stuck.

Q: How did you think about when would be the right time to expand beyond your core?

Foraker: From my time at Annie’s, I recognized it was critical to hammer the core and stay out of category expansion until the core was strong. Expansion beyond the core brings geometric complexity to the business, making it really hard to scale profitably.  

As we saw our sales take off in 2019, I wanted to continue to hammer the core. We could see in the data that we were massively incremental and driving most of the growth in the kid yogurt set, in an otherwise struggling category. When Covid hit in 2020, we couldn’t have launched new innovations even if we wanted to, given the constraints, so we doubled down on the core again and sales continued to grow. That allowed us to drive much higher margins.

We launched refrigerated oat bars in 2023 and dry baby snacks this year. These had been in the pipeline for 18 to 24 months and could have launched earlier, but our core was cranking, so we had to stay disciplined and hold off.

When we did launch, within two weeks the vast majority of items went to the top of the category. That’s the power of waiting. By then we had a big audience of millions of households that love the brand; we had the right products that we had tested at small scale with our most loyal consumers; and we had the right retailers, which increased the chances of a new product working much higher.

Q: As the business has expanded, how have you been able to build a team that can scale with the business?

Foraker: You need to hire for way ahead of where you are. As an emerging brand, you need people who can scale and think like a $100 million company when you are at $40 million and who know what it takes to get there. So we hired great people. But we also heavily invested in leadership development training and in broader human talent development—not just for the leadership team but also for the midlevel of the organization, those who would scale the business as we expand.

Q: From a culture perspective, how did you manage to retain a small-team feel and agility as you scaled?

Foraker: Operational transparency is one way. It’s important to keep the whole company close to what is happening. At the end of every Friday, I email my board an update on the good and the bad for the week. Then I take the same email and copy it to Slack for all employees to be able to read.

We also invest in keeping people close. We went fully remote in 2020 and still are despite having over 100 employees. We bring people together and use remote systems such as Slack to keep people connected. We talk a lot about our mission and remind people why we are here. Also, everybody is a shareholder. From Day One. I got our investors to agree to this. So our employees think like owners. I talk with a founder’s mentality all the time, and they understand and act like owners.

Q: You lived through the IPO and sale of Annie’s. What did that teach you about sale and integration of smaller brands into larger entities?

Foraker: General Mills was really smart on their approach with integration, so I learned a lot of right things. After they bought Annie’s, Jeff Harmening [General Mills CEO] had me report directly into him, not the North America organization. He saw it was important for the core business to continue focusing on their priorities and how important it was for us to keep being ourselves despite the acquisition. Over time, we started integrating things that made sense, like sales and logistics, but we focused on keeping our culture intact.

Q: As someone who’s been in the industry for over three decades, how do you see your role as a leader more broadly in the industry?

Foraker: I feel like a fellow traveler with many of the people I sat on the shoulders of with Annie’s such as Walter Robb [Whole Foods Markets CEO]. I have seen the positive impact they made in bringing health and wellness into the mainstream in the US, and I feel like it is part of my obligation to do this in the kid space. When I was younger and curious, lots of people helped me. So, I try to make myself available to do this for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Q: What has been the most unexpected lesson you have learned as CEO of an insurgent brand?

Foraker: The power of community. I didn’t recognize how important that would be to the success of this business. That, and staying true to your values.