Once Upon A Farm Acquires Raised Real, Will Launch Frozen Products

Kids food company Once Upon A Farm announced today it has acquired baby and toddler meal provider Raised Real, putting the company into the frozen food aisle for the first time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Launched in 2016, Raised Real had raised $8 million in funding to date, largely from frozen food manufacturer Schwan’s. The company’s co-founders Steven Kontz and CEO Santiago Merea will join Once Upon A Farm, with exact details of what their roles will entail still to be determined.

Raised Real is predominantly a direct-to-consumer business, selling packages of pre-chopped frozen fruits and vegetables that can either be served as finger food or blended into a puree. Originally launching with individual meal packets, the company recently debuted a larger sized resealable bag in a limited number of Target stores.

Merea told NOSH that selling the company had always been an option, and the opportunity to partner with Once Upon a Farm was too great to pass up.

Once Upon a Farm CEO John Foraker added that the acquisition will allow the company (which currently offers refrigerated baby food, yogurt, smoothies, and fruit purees) to enter the frozen aisle — an attractive opportunity that shares similar supply chains for ingredients. The pandemic accelerated consumers’ already growing interest in frozen products, Foraker said, and millennial shoppers (which are a growing segment of parents) have shown particular interest in the category.

“The perception of frozen among consumers as being very close to fresh and, in many cases, as good as fresh food, is really high,” Foraker said. “We think there’s just a really cool canvas to paint on there that hasn’t really been developed in the kid’s nutrition space like it should be. We think we’re a brand that can have a really good, credible shot at being the one that does it.”

In some ways, he noted, it’s easier to offer toddler options in frozen versus refrigerated because most retailers already have a kids’ nutrition frozen category.

Raised Real’s Target line will transition over to Once Upon a Farm branding in the next several months, Foraker said. The company is still determining how to adjust branding for Raised Real’s direct-to-consumer products, which accounts for the bulk of its sales. While Once Upon a Farm also has a direct-to-consumer business, Foraker said the acquisition will give the company a leg up in building out its own ecommerce capabilities, with the opportunity to cross sell Once Upon a Farm products.

Foraker added that the line will also be the first solid food Once Upon a Farm will offer, allowing the company to meet the needs of children going through a developmental milestone. Though the company began with baby food, aging up the brand and offering products for children of all ages has been an ongoing priority. While today, 80% of consumption of Once Upon a Farm is from children ages one to eight, the acquisition of Raised Real will expedite this process, Foraker noted.

“Baby is definitely in our DNA and it’s incredibly important to us,” Foraker said. “[But] really we’re a kid nutrition brand with a baby business.”

To achieve the goal of building a platform that can target children of all ages, Foraker said Once Upon a Farm may consider other strategic acquisitions of plant-based products, but will look to avoid doing too much at once and becoming distracted by shorter term goals. The company had roughly $1 million in revenue when he joined as CEO in 2017, and is expected to have about $40 million in revenue this year just for its core lines, with at least double that next year.

“Raised Real was really just too good of an opportunity to pass up….we just looked at it and thought ‘you know, sometimes you just have to take the risk and go for it,” Foraker said, “But the most important thing is just staying really focused on executing in our core business really well and that’s what’s going to drive most of our growth.”