Once Upon A Farm Pushing Past Pouches With Chilled Bars Launch

Once Upon a Farm is looking beyond its roots in baby food by launching a new line of refrigerated oat bars – its first non-pouched product – in an effort to use snacking occasions to stay relevant as its young consumers age.

“Baby is always our home,” co-founder and actress Jennifer Garner said. “[It’s] is going to always be where we start and what matters to us number one…but I think that with the bar it goes a little higher.”

Available in Strawberry, Banana Chocolate and Apple Cinnamon varieties, the 45 oz bars are priced at $2.79 each, or $9.49 for a five-pack box, and are launching in both Target and Wegmans this month. Each bar is roughly 40% fruits and vegetables.

The company always planned to offer other non-pouched snacks, CEO John Foraker said, but first needed to focus on its “core” lines.

“You look at household penetration on bars versus baby food… It’s pretty clear that the opportunity exists,” Foraker said. “If we had tried to do this in 2018, it would have been much harder…[bars also work with] our consumer business; they can go right in the same box, so there’s lots of efficiencies and synergies that come from doing that.”

Chilled bars are a growing category within fresh snacking, with Mondelez continuing to expand its Perfect Snacks platform, beverage entrepreneur Lance Collins backing Core Bar and numerous emerging brands also in the space. According to Catalina, in early 2022 refrigerated snacks were up 131% from 2020.

Evolving the brand to retain consumers after children age out of baby food has been an imperative, he said. There have been some stumbles along the way: a bottled non-dairy smoothie line was short-lived before being discontinued. Other efforts have been more successful. In 2021 the company acquired frozen food company Raised Real, which now operates under the OUAF brand, adding in a line of frozen vegetable and fruit blends that can be pureed, used in dishes or eaten as finger food.

At 170-180 calories each, Foraker said OUAF is “pretty confident” the 45 gram bars can have cross generational appeal. Comparably sized bars made by other brands tend to have far higher calorie counts, while “100 calorie bars,” also aimed at adults, typically are only half as large, coming in around 20-25 grams.

OUAF is supporting the rollout with placement in the roughly 1,000 branded coolers that can be found in its 14,000 total doors. For retailers that don’t have a cooler program, such as Target, the bars will be stocked in their fresh set alongside Perfect Snacks bars.

“Right now coolers in the baby aisle are rolling out nationally in pretty much every state and every retailer in the country,” Foraker said. “There’s three categories of retailers: there’s either retailers that are rolling out nationally with [our cooler program], there’s ones that are in test with us, or there’s ones that are talking about going in test with us. We think there will be way more baby refrigerated coolers in the baby aisle over the next five years than anyone could ever imagine.”