They rang the opening bell on a chilly Friday and the moment looked, for a second, like a movie still: Jennifer Garner laughing with her co‑founder, boxes of chilled pouches stacked behind them and a new ticker — OFRM — blinking across the exchange boards.
It was a celebratory debut with real teeth. Once Upon a Farm PBC, the refrigerated organic kids’ food maker co‑founded by Garner, closed up 17% from its IPO price after selling roughly $197.9 million worth of stock. The shares had been priced at $18; they closed at $21.05 and touched $22 intraday, valuing the company at about $847 million on the outstanding share count.
From a San Diego kitchen to Wall Street
The story isn’t a typical Hollywood vanity play. Once Upon a Farm began in 2015 when Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz started tinkering with recipes aimed at keeping more nutrients and flavor in baby and kids’ food. The company’s early pitch: fresh, cold‑pressure preserved purees and refrigerated snacks without added sugar — a product that felt a generation better than the shelf‑stable pouches many parents had long accepted.
Garner and veteran food executive John Foraker joined in 2017. Since then the brand widened from baby purees to bars, frozen meals and smoothie packets — and a product slate that now includes refrigerated oat and protein bars and playful items like Fruit & Veggie Puffs and Tractor Wheel Bars. It’s a premium play aimed at parents willing to pay a bit more for perceived freshness and better ingredients.
Garner has been more than a name on the cap. She sits on the board, helps with retail relationships, has appeared in marketing, and — per the company filing — gets paid for her role as co‑founder and “Farmer Jen.” She has already received a $1 million payment and stock options from a 2022 agreement, with scheduled payments totaling another $7 million through 2028 and bonus potential tied to the IPO price.
“I work to add value and stay involved in any way that I possibly can,” Garner told reporters — and company materials show she has been an active presence in road shows and investor meetings. Her family farm in northeast Oklahoma is even listed among suppliers, underlining that this is personally meaningful as well as commercially strategic.
The numbers, the market and the timing
The offering itself was oversubscribed — reportedly more than a dozen times — and included about 7.6 million new shares plus roughly 3.4 million selling‑holder shares. Leadership had initially filed for an offering last fall but postponed amid the lengthy U.S. government shutdown, a delay Foraker later blamed for pushing the deal into 2026.
Why go public now? The IPO gives the company capital to expand distribution and product lines while giving early investors liquidity. It also puts Once Upon a Farm under the daily scrutiny of public markets: revenue growth, gross margins on refrigerated goods and the ability to scale a cold‑chain business are now measurable in real time.
Investors increasingly lean on new tools to parse IPOs and earnings, and platforms boosting financial search and prediction features have become part of how deals are priced and traded. For example, market participants are using enhanced search and analytics tools across finance platforms to track demand and sentiment during listings, an evolution in how retail and institutional investors approach public offerings. See how modern finance tools are changing the game in Google Finance’s new Gemini-powered features and how broader AI research is pushing into investor workflows in Gemini’s Deep Research coverage.
What this means for parents and the food aisle
Once Upon a Farm sits at the intersection of two trends: parents’ willingness to pay up for perceived better nutrition and the rising consumer demand for fresher, refrigerated alternatives in categories long dominated by shelf‑stable options. That positioning helped drive strong early investor interest.
But the path ahead is not without friction. Refrigerated goods mean higher logistics costs and thinner retail margins; scaling across national grocery chains requires careful inventory management and retailer partnership. Garner and the leadership team have leaned into those relationships, with Garner herself saying she fields calls directly from retail buyers.
Whether the company becomes a long‑term staple in kids’ lunchboxes will hinge on taste, price elasticity and distribution muscle. For now, it has a public runway and the kind of celebrity‑augmented brand recognition that invites both consumer curiosity and investor scrutiny.
There’s also a cultural note: celebrity founders can bring eyes, but IPOs bring accountability. Once Upon a Farm’s public debut will quickly test whether its premium promise translates into sustained growth and margins — or whether the realities of the refrigerated food business compress the gains.
Friday’s bell was joyful. The work, as anyone who’s handled supply‑chain spreadsheets knows, is only beginning.