Once Upon a Farm Is on a Mission to Elevate Nutrition

As its name implies, Jennifer Garner’s popular Instagram series “Pretend Cooking Show” isn’t a master class in the culinary arts. The actor-producer-philanthropist, who sometimes forgets to preheat the oven, is the first to admit she’s not a Cordon Bleu-trained chef. But that doesn’t stop her from experimenting in the kitchen, as she did when her three children were born. Beginning with meals for her daughter Violet, who’s now 15, Garner was determined to concoct a healthier, fresher alternative to the baby food she saw in supermarkets. “I was a working mom with three babies that I felt passionately should not have jarred baby food,” says the star of Alias, Dallas Buyers Club and the upcoming Netflix comedy Yes Day. “That stuff had been sitting on the shelves longer than the kids had been alive.” She didn’t know at the time that pureeing carrots and blending berries would lead to her first entrepreneurial venture (well, third, if you count the thriving babysitting business she founded as a teenager in her hometown of Charleston, W.Va., along with the ice cream she hand-churned and sold seasonally). Giving the customer what she wants Whipping up baby food from scratch—while juggling TV, movie and endorsement gigs—turned out to be “a big hassle,” but it ignited Garner’s love of cooking and made her hyperaware of a white space in the market. She had heard that there were other DIY warriors like her, and she wondered why no one was selling homestyle farm-to-fridge baby food that would pass muster with those consumers. Later, in scouring the landscape for a business opportunity, she stumbled across Once Upon a Farm and had an aha moment. “This would have solved a major problem for me,” Garner says about the tiny startup’s cold-pressed fruit and veggie blends that were stocked initially at a few hundred specialty outlets. “I would’ve used this product and loved it.” That was 2017. Fast forward to the present, where Garner serves as chief brand officer and co-founder of Once Upon a Farm with original masterminds Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz. Rounding out the senior leadership is CEO and co-founder John Foraker, an executive who spent nearly 20 years building Annie’s Homegrown into a powerhouse brand before leading its sale to General Mills for $820 million. Garner, whose day-to-day duties have included everything from sales calls at Walmart and Target headquarters to Zoom meetings with the budding brand’s 35 staffers, tells Adweek she searched for years before finding the right company to get involved with. Once Upon a Farm represents a confluence of personal and professional interests for the Hollywood star, a longtime advocate for poor children in rural America, with the purpose-driven brand growing from less than $1 million in revenue to more than $30 million during her tenure. “We’ve made a lot of progress,” Foraker says, “and we still have a long way to go.” More than a spokeswoman Since 2007, Garner has been one of the celebrity faces of drugstore brand Neutrogena, which she grew up using. And in 2014, she signed with Capital One, going on to appear in countless campaigns from DDB Chicago for the Venture Card, putting her spin on the now-familiar tagline, “What’s in your wallet?” Fronting this carefully curated list, which includes her longtime stylist’s young haircare brand Virtue, has been lucrative and fun, she says, but also “slightly unsatisfying” for its lack of ownership over the product and process. The goal is to give kids a solid start in life and a fair shake. First, they need healthy, nutritious food to feed their bodies and minds. With a “brain that’s wired for business,” says her manager, Nicole King, Garner wanted to participate in a brand from soup to nuts, taking a page from multihyphenate mom moguls like Reese Witherspoon and Jessica Alba. “Jennifer wasn’t looking to just lend her name to a company,” says King, co-founder of Linden Entertainment who’s worked with Garner for more than 20 years. “Anything she does, she puts her whole heart into it.” There had to be “an undeniable connection” between Garner and the project, which was clearly the case when she heard about Once Upon a Farm, a nascent California company that produced organic, non-GMO baby food. (A prolific backyard gardener at her Los Angeles home base, Garner also owns a Midwestern farm that’s been in her family for more than 80 years.) She met with Foraker, who was then an angel investor in Once Upon a Farm, to get his read on the brand’s prospects and, as it would turn out, gauge his interest in joining her in its C-suite. A brand with a purpose Garner and Foraker spent little time discussing Once Upon a Farm’s sales projections, supply chain and other logistics. Instead, they talked values and mission, dovetailing into Garner’s interest in elevating nutrition in underserved communities and addressing the persistent problem of food deserts. “We talked about how we could make these incredible products accessible and affordable for kids everywhere, not just in Beverly Hills or New York City,” says Garner, an artist ambassador and board member for the nonprofit Save the Children. “It was all about making a positive social impact.” In her ongoing role with Save the Children, Garner has spent the past 13 years lobbying federal and state lawmakers on behalf of rural poor kids, spearheading educational and fundraising programs (see sidebar) and visiting with families living in poverty from Appalachia to California’s Central Valley. She says she naturally gravitated to Save’s efforts—her mother grew up poor in small-town Oklahoma, as did many of her classmates in West Virginia. Courtesy Save The Children Star-Studded Pandemic Response As the country was locking down last March due to Covid-19, Jennifer Garner and fellow actor-activist Amy Adams started brainstorming ways to get food and supplies to poor kids who would be cut off from crucial resources at their shuttered schools. Within days, they launched #SaveWithStories to benefit nonprofits No Kid Hungry and Save the Children, where Garner has a yearslong history as an artist ambassador and board member. #SaveWithStories raised money through text-to-give donations and recruited Hollywood’s elite to read more than 230 classic storybooks on social media. Stars participating included Drew Barrymore, Pink, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Meghan Markle and Steve Carell, with the video series logging 90 million views and 241,000 followers. Meals, books, study guides and other supplies went to hundreds of thousands of kids affected by school closures, with an effectiveness and turnaround time that shows Garner’s “energy, hustle, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking,” says Mark Shriver, Save the Children Action Network’s president. Her hands-on approach sets her apart from some boldface names who “flit in and flit out” of philanthropy, he says. “She’s the exact opposite of some celebrities. She’s been doing this work—lobbying in D.C. and state capitals, visiting kids and schools—for years, usually without any media coverage. She’s smart as hell, relentless on it and completely committed to advocating for poor children.” Foraker, as it turns out, had similar concerns about the challenges facing children in America, which have been compounded by the coronavirus crisis. (Estimates say there are 11 million U.S. children—1 in 7—living in poverty.) He was also shocked that there were no existing brands in Once Upon a Farm’s category. “You could buy refrigerated pet food in 18,000 stores, but you couldn’t buy fresh baby food,” he says. “The need was so obvious.” So was the mind meld between Garner and Foraker, who decided on the spot to collaborate on Once Upon a Farm’s future, aiming to speak out on public policy issues and help spark a food justice movement. Baked into their plan was getting into the federal Women, Infants, and Children program that provides supplemental aid to low-income families. Calling it “a hairy, audacious goal” because Once Upon a Farm’s high-quality organic products would have to meet WIC’s low-price guidelines, Foraker says the brand is now approved in some of the most populous states, including Texas, Florida and New York. “The goal is to give kids a solid start in life and a fair shake,” Garner says. “First, they need healthy, nutritious food to feed their bodies and minds.” A challenger mindset In laying the foundation for Once Upon a Farm’s entry into mainstream retail, the execs heard from industry veterans “100 reasons why this shouldn’t work and why we were crazy to try,” Foraker says. One immediate hurdle was placement in grocery stores, since there are no refrigerators in baby food aisles dominated by legacy brands and their shelf-staple jars. Through much maneuvering and negotiation, Once Upon a Farm’s products have found homes in dairy cases and produce sections, which has been a seismic shift for the category. (Be on the lookout, though, for refrigerated cases in the baby section in the future, they say.) There has been and will continue to be scrutiny about product safety in the baby food industry, as highlighted in a recent congressional study that found high levels of toxic metals in some legacy brands including Gerber and Beech-Nut. Once Upon a Farm was not part of that investigation, but as a response, the brand posted its safety guidelines on its Instagram account, noting that its products are independently tested and certified by the Clean Label Project. "We didn't want to be silent, so we let consumers know about the rigorous third-party audits that our products go through," Foraker says, noting that a few small brands have latched onto the lawmakers' study as a marketing hook. "We're the last brand to throw rocks at competitors, so we're just talking about our standards." The baby food category—and the broader food industry—is ripe for more FDA intervention and guidance, he says, because "the federal government needs to take a stronger role in setting more science-based standards." As with any disruptor, Once Upon a Farm has had its missteps, including an aggressive retail rollout that the leadership team later reassessed and pulled back by about 10%. Once Upon a Farm is now available at some 9,000 outlets such as Publix, Whole Foods, Sprouts and Kroger. Courtesy Virtue Brands Latch Onto 'The Power of Jennifer’ For a brand partnership to make sense to Jennifer Garner, “it has to knock my socks off” and afford her some creative control in the messages and marketing, she says, noting that “so few are the right fit.” One potential suitor that didn’t pass the litmus test early in her career was a sizable beauty brand that wanted her to pose with an oversize pair of plastic lips for one of its campaigns. “I just said, ‘I can’t do it. That’s so not me.’” Garner, with her manager and co-founder of Linden Entertainment, Nicole King, has winnowed a flood of offers over the years down to a few carefully selected endorsements. Those include Neutrogena, Capital One Venture Card and Virtue haircare, a female-founded brand where her longtime hairstylist and friend Adir Abergel is creative director. Virtue wasn’t specifically looking for a celebrity spokeswoman, but Garner had become a fan of the brand through Abergel. She sets “just the right tone,” says CEO Melisse Shaban, because she’s natural and authentic and “takes the piss out of herself a little bit.” Shaban credits Garner with the immediate success of a new product that debuted in December. When Garner posted about Virtue’s healing oil, it shot to No. 2 in Virtue’s line of 30 products, pulling in 8,000 new customers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in business. “Her posts for us almost always go viral,” Shaban says. “And this went beyond awareness and directly into sales. That’s the power of Jennifer.” Then there was an early meeting with a major buyer where Foraker and Garner heard so much unvarnished criticism that they “felt like we got punched in the face,” he says. “The feedback was pretty tough.” They were dazed but undaunted, he says, and turned it into a learning experience. “When you’re fighting conventional wisdom, you have to be a problem-solver,” he says. “You don’t take one failure as anything more than a temporary setback.” That retailer, by the way, has since become a major and growing distribution source for Once Upon a Farm, which also does direct-to-consumer and subscription sales and has raised $24 million since 2017 in two rounds of funding. Though infants and toddlers are core to the brand’s DNA, Garner says it was always in the plan to age up, giving busy parents like her fresh products to toss into lunch boxes. Once Upon a Farm, which still focuses primarily on children under 8 years old, has expanded beyond pouches for babies to nondairy smoothies and other healthy kid snacks. Also part of the broader strategy: a website refresh and rebrand this spring, with a more modern, streamlined logo and colorful packaging meant to speak directly to youngsters. Marketing maven Because Garner has amassed 17 million social followers in a relatively short period, it may look like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube came easily to her. That’s not exactly true, she says, noting that she had adamantly resisted social sharing for most of her career, aiming to protect both her children and some semblance of her privacy. But as a senior leader at Once Upon a Farm, she also became a de facto marketer, which meant becoming a vocal brand evangelist on social platforms. She was willing, she told her team, as long as she could retain complete control of the content “to do it in a way that felt authentic to me.” Once Upon a Farm's rebrand includes a streamlined logo and colorful packaging. Little did she know she’d become a viral star, creating a well-shared version of the “months of 2020” meme, racking up 155 million views for #PretendCookingShow and landing on must-follow lists as an ultimate girl’s girl and a relatable everymom. There’s no digital agency or PR machine guiding her often self-deprecating, makeup-free posts, which peek into her life as an Ina Garten superfan who has danced, baked and binge-watched her way through quarantine. Her assistant Maureen Grosser single-handedly tackles production. Garner hypes Once Upon a Farm—just as she did at trade shows and other appearances, pre-Covid-19—but gut checks herself so her feed doesn’t seem too commercialized. “It’s really tricky because if I posted about it constantly, pretty soon it wouldn’t resonate anymore,” she says. “But I want to tell a story about what’s so special and unique about this brand. Because it would be impossible to care about a company more than I care about this one.” Adweek Podcast: Challenger Brands Continue to Shake up the Landscape Check out our full list of Challenger Brands honorees here.

Challenger Brands

Jennifer Garner and Once Upon a Farm Are on a Mission to Feed Kids and Elevate Nutrition

Actor-producer-philanthropist bakes social impact into challenger brand

T.L. Stanley

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T.L. Stanley