Conference Transcript - OFRM 2026-06-10

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending Oppenheimer's 26th Annual Consumer Conference. My name is Rupesh Parikh. I'm the Senior Food, Grocery, and Consumer Products Annuals here at Oppenheimer. I'm very happy to introduce our next presenting company, Once Upon a Farm. So we're excited to have joining us today for the first time, John Foraker, CEO, and Larry Waldman, CFO. So John and Larry, thank you both for being here. For those of you who are not familiar with the company, Old Farm is a natural organic food company operating in the kids' food and beverage space with an offering of organic refruited pouches, snacks, and meals for all children of all ages. The company recently went public back in February. We believe O-Farm represents one of the most attractive small-cap growth stories in the entire CPG universe. As we look forward, we believe Manchin is well-positioned to continue disrupting the kids' food space and sustain industry-leading double-digit top-line and adjusted EBITDA growth for the foreseeable future. The format of today's session will be a fireside chat with a number of questions I've prepared. So let's get started. Since we may have some conference participants that aren't as familiar with the Once Upon a Farm story, I think it might be helpful to kick it off with a quick intro to the company and anything else you think is important to highlight regarding O-Farm and the company's strategy and what differentiates it from other offerings out there.

John Foraker, CEO

Hi there, everyone. We're a leading high-growth organic kids company. The company is about 10 years old, a little more than that. Jennifer Garner, myself, and Larry joined in late 2017 when the business was less than a million dollars in revenue. We raised our guidance after our first quarter this year to 313, 323, so there's been a lot We've been growing for many, many years, and we feel like we're still at the very early innings of that growth trajectory. all of our products are organic non-gmo no sugar added real simple ingredients from a brand that parents trust and the way to think about our brand is we are a brand that spans baby through kid so in the u.s there's been baby brands before there've been kid brands but there haven't hasn't been a brand that gets parents in when the babies are having first foods and then with a building trust and also the right categories to meet them where their needs are as their kids age we follow them through the store up to about age 12 and um we're in about 25 000 retail doors right now um and our real product differentiation is really a few different things one is our pouches that we sell and that we're really well known for are made using cold pressure instead of heat they never get over 40 degrees so it's an incredible uh product tastes like you made a smoothie right in your kitchen parents love that um and we sell our products in coolers in the baby aisle focused on the on there or with a unique assortment as well as dry baby snacking in the baby aisle and then we're over in kid dairy kind of adjacent to kid yogurt with a long-standing assortment of products that are more kid positioned and then we're building the brand as we go through the store um so that's a bit a bit of an overview okay that's great and then sticking out the idea of differentiation how do you feel about your competitive position do you believe that you have built to some degree a competitive moat particularly around your fresh offering so we obviously saw a little spoon launch at target last fall so just overall just you know how do you feel about your competitive position yeah i feel like we're in we're competitively very well positioned and larry and i also both worked at annie's for many years which is a public company we had lots of competitors come at us we're used to this this is not new we've been in the dairy space forever competing with brands like stonyfield very competitively so not only do we have it in our culture and in our products but but we're well prepared to compete um we are competing very effectively against little spoon they're taking a little bit of share because the only new brand in the category outside us for a long time but our velocities on our core items there are about double theirs and we're performing really well yeah i do think that we have a moat i think the biggest moat is our brand our brand strength and trust you know even after all of the marketing we do and everything. Our consumers still find us number one way of word of mouth. So they trust our brand. We do absolutely have a scale benefits and an incredible supply chain in our chilled area where we make the pouches. That is a real advantage in the future. And that advantage is growing, not shrinking. And then the coolers, we have about 3,700 coolers in retail right now. that number will be 5,000 by the end of the year. Coolers are a real barrier too, not a permanent barrier in most cases. I'm sure we'll talk about it, but they give us a long runway to build the brand, you know, with the dominant share in that cooler. And we think it gives us a real advantage to be the leader in the category for the long term.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. So now I'd like to shift gears to some macro and industry questions. So maybe first, I'd love to get your view on the consumer today. Just given the uncertain consumer backdrop, I'm wondering if you've seen any channel shifts or any changes to know from a consumer behavior perspective?

John Foraker, CEO

Yeah, so I'm a student of what happens to premium and organic brands during economic difficulty because I've been doing this now for so many years. And consumers, there's been a tailwind behind premium natural organic brands for decades, and that tailwind's been blowing steadily. It's grown a lot over the last five years, in particular as consumers better understand the relationship between what they eat and their overall health. And also as the cohorts of consumers shift, you have, you know, moving from baby boomers to millennials to, you know, younger generations, they care a lot more about these things. And I, you know, in all the data that we can see, and we have really good access to some data that shows how we perform across income cohorts, like for example, at a big retailer in the upper third income, we obviously over-indexed in the upper third income. There should be no surprise there. But in middle and lower income, the middle third and the bottom third, we index right at the category in terms of participation. We haven't seen any softening in that. The only one thing I've seen is since about 3% of our business probably is being done in snap baskets. And since the snap got tightened up, we've seen about an 8% reduction in that 3%. So for us, it's very small, but that's literally the only thing I can see. And I'd make one more point. Across every single category in consumer, just almost every single category, there are brands that are redefining in a modern way what that category means in terms of functionality and health. And these brands are performing incredibly well up against the legacy CPG brands that have been there forever. So even with the economic uncertainty out there, we feel like we're really well positioned. But one last thing, We've been positioning for a few years to make sure, based on the learnings we had at Annie's, that we're in the best possible position if the economy ever gets soft. So what you want to do in that case is you want to make sure you're over-indexing and built out in the retail channels where consumers move toward when things get tougher. So mass and club, for example. And then also we've been building out our portfolio of multi-packs, which allows to build out our footprint and lower our AUP to the consumer for every single item. So we're really well positioned right now with that work that we've been doing for over a couple of years, but we still haven't seen any weakness in our business.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. That's really great, Collar. Now shifting to some more old farm-specific questions. So we continue to see innovation from the Once Upon a Farm brand, including the recent launch of your new protein products, including protein pouches and protein Power Wheel snacks. So how have recent innovations performed versus your expectations, and then how are you feeling about your innovation pipeline going forward?

John Foraker, CEO

Yeah, we have a very robust innovation pipeline. We plan about three years out. We've signaled to the street that we'll do one or two new categories every 12 to 18 months. Right now, we're saying we've got one that we're planning for 2027. This would be a new category expansion that would take us into basically 100% incremental space for the brand where our consumers want us to go. So we have a lot of robust ideas. We do a lot of consumer work. We leverage our direct-to-consumer business for consumer empathy and understanding, and then we just do lots of research. Our track record on innovation is really good. The products that we just launched and announced, the meat-based products in the baby pouch business, meat and legumes, are performing very well. They just started shipping at the very end of the first quarter. We can see into specific retailers and see what those are doing every week, and they're performing very well, and they're performing very incrementally. so we we expected both of those things obviously this is all still trial but we expect the repeat will be very high as well as we have very high repeat rates with um new household new families as high as 60 percent so um the protein probiotic smoothies too early to say on um on velocity yet they're really just hitting the shelf right now and same thing on power wheels we have some very early reads that look good but it's still pretty early next couple months we'll know more okay Okay, great.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Yeah, I saw some of your new products down at Walmart and Bentonville, so they look great in the cooler. So that's a good segue into my next question, just on coolers. So as you mentioned earlier, the company continues to roll out coolers at retail. You have about 3,700 today across the chain. Can you walk us through the key benefits from the cooler program, including the incrementality, and then why you're so excited about the cooler rollout?

John Foraker, CEO

Yeah, the coolers are extremely incremental to the category. When a cooler goes in, it's about 60% incremental to the retailer's baby aisle, which is kind of unbelievable. But if you think about the white space that we went after back in 10 years ago, it was parents not finding what they wanted in the baby aisle, so they were making it themselves. So consumers are interested in fresher, better product, and we're delivering that. So the incrementality is very high. What happens when we put a cooler in is we usually become the number one or number two brand very quickly. we lift the entire the entire aisle lifts by about 10 points almost every lesson you can take from what happens to a pet food aisle when fresh pet puts a first fridge into the pet food aisle is very similar here consumers have to come down the aisle more frequently we're selling fresh product they can't buy nine months of it from amazon and have it delivered to their house they got to come down the aisle that when they're coming down the aisle they're buying not just hopefully shelf-stable snacks from us, but they're buying a lot of other products too. And every retailer that we're rolling coolers at right now is significantly outperforming their competitors and their market share for share of the total baby food category. So it's a very strong story. And for us, it's a great story too. The portfolio of products in our baby cooler is one of our most profitable. It gives us the opportunity to connect with new families very early and get into their household and awareness very early. And then we know because they come into our dry baby snacking products and our other products over time as they move through the store, we know that this is really strategically important for us. So we've said that there will be 5,000 by the end of next year, I'm sorry, by the end of this year, 8,000 by the end of the following year. and we put a long-term number out there of about 15,000, that very likely will be a number that'll increase over time just given how the coolers are performing. The increases in productivity that we're seeing from them quarter over quarter are very strong right now. So we know we've got a great opportunity to go fast.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

And then from a retail or interest perspective, what type of retail or interest are you seeing currently? And then if the opportunity allows, how do you balance the trade-off of accelerating the rollout versus managing through shorter term gross margin pressures that would help with the rollout?

John Foraker, CEO

Yeah, so we'll be very thoughtful about how we set our guidance to allow ourselves some flexibility to go a little faster on coolers if we need to and want to. I'd say the retailer interest has been really off the charts. We're either in a big rollout now, we're either in a test that's going to a rollout or we're talking to a retailer about a test with virtually every important retailer in the United States right now. And we've been doing this now for five or six years and have a lot of experience with it, and we know it works, and it's a very compelling story. The baby category was largely by retailers ignored for a couple decades. You know, there wasn't a lot of innovation in the baby category at retail until the mid-00s when the pouch came in, but prior to that, it's kind of been ignored and downsized and not put a lot of strategic importance put on it, but most retailers now understand how important it is to attract these young families, because when they attract the young families, the households that are having their needs met in the baby, I'll give them way more of their trips to that retailer and there's loyalty that comes out of that in big baskets. So if you look at what Walmart's saying about baby category, what Target's saying about baby category, for example, you get a flavor of that, and we're leading that with these big retailers and with every other regional retailer that we are in front of okay great and then staying on the topic of distribution so outside the cooler rollout how should we think about other opportunities on the distribution from from here they're significant right obviously baby coolers rolling out every time we put a baby cooler in there's 48 52 skews that go in um but we have significant growth opportunity in our core snacking businesses over in kid dairy We have significant opportunity in these categories that we've launched over the last year and a half or so in the kid bar set. We'll continue to innovate that. And then we'll be continuing to bring new categories that our retailers are asking us for, our consumers are asking us for, and where we think we can really position this brand to disrupt the category in a very modern way.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. So your team sounds quite upbeat then on distribution going forward, the opportunities.

John Foraker, CEO

Oh, no, they're very – I thought I implied that. yeah they're very yeah yeah yeah yeah no no just just confirming so yeah yeah for sure uh and then the company launched in europe recently so can you share with us the overall vision for expansion outside the u.s yeah we've done um we've had a team on the ground in europe for almost two years now and we've done a lot of research there and it's really interesting the white space in europe is almost exactly the same kind of white space we saw here but you know 10 years ago obviously there are some differences slight differences etc but we've been working on it and we just launched in metro london at whole foods we're in most of their stores now or all their stores there we're performing really well we're we're taking a small emerging brand approach to this we're not saying that we're going to expand it really big really fast everywhere in europe we're going to learn we are learning and we'll be adapting and growing there hopefully through the uk and then based on that success through other retailers in Europe. And we think it's a great long-term opportunity. It won't be significant to the overall size of the business in the next few years, but we do think that we have the opportunity to build the brand long-term in Europe, which we're really excited about.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

And in markets like the UK, what are you doing to drive awareness?

John Foraker, CEO

Well, we have a lot of awareness already because Jen Garner, one of our co-founders, is extremely well-followed there. And And so we're really leveraging that right now. We're doing a little bit of all the kinds of things you do when you come in, some paid digital and things like that, but we're keeping it very modest and really letting the brand offering at the shelf speak. And that seems to be working because we're performing really well, better than we expected.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. And switching gears just to your repeat rate. So the company has a very impressive repeat purchase rate of over 50%. How do you see the repeat rate evolving over time as a brand continues to mature?

John Foraker, CEO

Well, I hope it continues to grow. It's been growing for four consecutive years now. Products are performing really well in a very sweet spot with consumers in terms of price-value relationship. We're increasing retail availability, physical availability, and building mental availability with great marketing. We're in the 50s across the brand. We're in the 60s with new households. These are households that have just one new baby. We'll continue to bring new innovation that is loved, and that's a big part of it, just continuing to build the brand in the right places that are meeting consumers' needs. But I would hope we could see repeat rates continue to grow modestly over time.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

And then on the household penetration front, it sits around 5.8% today versus leading competitors average 12.5%.

John Foraker, CEO

So what are key efforts to close this gap versus peers? and then can you help us understand key elements of your marketing program to drive further awareness of the brand and ultimately higher household penetration yeah so we've been doing really effective modern full funnel marketing here for a long time what does that mean that means we tested our way into top of funnel advertising regionally using streaming and then ultimately ended up on linear television at the very top so broad awareness is we really believe in that as very important foundational for the brand. And then down the funnel, really running strong peer-to-peer marketing. So we have a very strong influencer program. We participate in digital marketing campaigns. We participate with retailer media networks, the stuff that works with our key customers, and then social media, and then PR. We leverage all those things. And as a result of that, we've really built a big awareness of the brand. We've added millions of households each year for the last few years. We expect to continue to add a lot of households there. You mentioned the benchmarks out there. We think double or triple household pen is clearly in scope. And then as we go through into existing, into new categories that we're disrupting, there's incremental household pen opportunities there too, just the way it works. we'll generally see increased household pen in the more categories we go into.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

And then as a household penetration goes, what should we expect to see from a buy rate perspective?

John Foraker, CEO

Well, generally when you add households as fast as we add them, you generally see dilution in buy rate. You see buy rate go negative or at minimum flat. We haven't seen that. We've seen buy rate grow modestly over each of the last three or four years, even as our awareness has gone through the roof and our households have gone through the roof, which is a great sign, which means we're adding a lot of users, we're adding a lot of light users, which is what, you know, for sure. But we also have a lot of users that are converting to heavy. And so we're building the brand in a really modern way.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. I'll now wrap up with a few other topics, including some financial questions. So given evolving dynamics out there from high oil prices to concerns over rising food inflation, Can you remind us of the latest your team is seeing on the cost front, and what are your expectations going forward?

Larry Waldman, CFO

Oh, sorry, I get to talk. Go, Larry. Yeah, go, Larry. Thanks for talking. Well, we're definitely seeing impacts associated with the oil increases, mostly in the way of fuel surcharges on our trucks that we're shipping product. We are seeing also a shortage of drivers and as people age and exit the industry. So between the shortage of drivers and the fuel surcharges, we're seeing increases in freight costs, both inbound to our warehouses and outbound to customers. We did add 100 basis points in our latest modeling within to kind of look at and estimate what the cost of the fuel surcharges would be for the rest of the year. We are hoping that this thing does not drag on like everyone else, but we believe that what we built in at this point would cover any additional costs for the rest of the year. On the materials, we've contracted for materials for the rest of this year based upon the harvests that we're in. We're just starting to see impact on new harvests going out as we contract for 27. There have been some increases, but it's been fairly minor at this point. But we are working to offset that with how we do source our materials. We do source materials from all, whether domestically, all over the world. We're looking at different suppliers, different sources of supply, and we're really trying to work and accelerate our vertical integration of our supply chain. And we've just added, and we're doing a test with a strawberry supplier out of Baja in the next couple of months, and that will be a big benefit to us on being able to purchase strawberries, which is a major ingredient for our products at a lower than market rate going forward. And as we see this, this should expand within our supply chain and help offset any inflationary pressures. But we do experience some climate impact every year to be seen where that is at this point. And so we're working on trying to make sure that we can offset that as needed. On tariffs, we also built in 100 basis point on tariffs. We are anticipating that to be favorable to what we built into the model. But who knows? We'll see. And we'd rather be a little bit conservative in what we're projecting. We're currently slightly below 40% gross margin. In Q1, we're still guiding to what we built into our January modeling to be close to 41% gross margin by the end of the year.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Great. And then how do you feel about oil farmers' ability to take price in the current environment? Should a cost backdrop necessitated given increased uncertainty on the consumer front? And then you've talked about the brand being pretty inelastic, but can you remind us of what you've seen historically from an elasticity perspective when you've taken price in the past?

John Foraker, CEO

Larry, you want to take it?

Larry Waldman, CFO

So right now what we're doing is we're building the model and what we would present to our retailers if we decide to take pricing. We have not decided to take pricing at this point. We believe that we can take pricing. If we do take pricing, it would be in the fourth quarter of the year, effective fourth quarter of the year. We did take pricing in 25 on our pouches. And again, showing our inelasticity, we did not see a major impact in our sales or velocity with the price increases. We also really, as John talked about, on price-backed architecture, we continue to drive price-backed architecture. And what you see with price increases is, you know, we see consumers moving from singles into four packs, eight packs and 12 packs to be able to drive lower AUPs, but still stay in the brand, stay in the products. And so we're building the program for it. You know, it has to be submitted to retailers. There's a dog and pony show that you go back and forth with them. They try to make it as hard as possible to do a price increase. But we believe that we can put a price increase in if we need to, to offset the inflation and other things. if we need to, as I said, it would probably be effective fourth quarter if we did.

John Foraker, CEO

Great, and I want to- Just one last thing. It would probably be low single digits if we did anything and it wouldn't be across the whole business. So it's modest.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. Now I want to touch on just your investment philosophy. So if you communicated plans to reinvest any upside this year back into the business in areas such as marketing, beyond this year, should we continue to think about potential upside being reinvested back into the business to drive the top line or to pull forward investments and higher ROI projects to just overall how you guys approach reinvestment going forward?

Larry Waldman, CFO

Well, yeah, so as a leadership team, we've made a decision that we want to continue to drive the growth of the company and not be just kind of short-sighted and drive just EBITDA and profitability. So it's really, you know, right now we made the decision that any increase in EBITDA in 26 would, if the projects and the ROI on the marketing made sense, we would move that up into marketing and drive, really drive programs that would drive 27 and really overdrive 27. We would probably spend this money anyway, but if we can spend it in 26, then it just gets us started earlier, 427. We are looking to utilize the proceeds from the IPO for some projects that we have, kind of the three we have, projects to build automation, take labor out, improve capacity within our major product lines. These projects will have a significant ROI on the projects. We'll start seeing some of the benefits of it late 27, but mostly in 28. And these will be a significant improvement in margins in 28, 29. We also are looking to use funds and invest in really overdriving coolers. So faster we can get coolers into the aisles and send the retailers to move faster in coolers. It just drives distribution. It drives the brand. and our strategy and what we want to be able to do to be able to build out the baby ops. So we are planning on doing it. So each year we're going to look at it. We will not always take overdrives on EBITDA up into the P&L or drive for projects, but we will look at it on a case-by-case basis to see what we end up doing.

John Foraker, CEO

So on 27, we expect a very significant ramp in adjusted EBITDA on 27. We've been planning for that for years. And even with everything that Larry said, still investing heavily in growth in the business, but we've gotten to a place of scale and opportunity to really drive profitability going forward. And really starting in the second half of this year, we expect you to see that.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Okay, great. That's a good segue. into the next topic, just want to go through some of your longer term targets. So your financial algorithm calls for 20% sales growth, and you are targeting 45% gross margins and EBITDA margins in the high teens longer term. So a few questions here. First, what gives your team confidence in your longer term sales outlook for at least 20% growth?

John Foraker, CEO

I'll take that one. It's because of the things we've already talked about, just our household pen, the number of households we have, the categories we can play in, the opportunity to expand across customers and channels, and our continued innovation engine. We have lots and lots of TAM in this business, and we're going after some really big categories over the next three to five years. And so, we're confident that we'll be able to execute those really well and turn into a much bigger business than we are today.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

And then as you think about your EBITDA margin target in the high teens, can you remind us of key drivers to think about in the coming years to fuel the margin expansion?

Larry Waldman, CFO

So key drivers really come in in two areas. One is just really the maturing of some of the categories that we've gone into, especially with innovation right now. Most innovation, new categories come in at a lower margin and then build up over time as we scale those projects. The innovation that we went into in 24 with the dry baby products, the innovation that we're going into now with the kids snacking, a lot of those projects are tied into the automation and optimization projects that we're investing in over the next two years that will drive significant increases in margins in those categories. plus we're going to continue to build margins in our existing pouch categories as we go forward our growth in coolers one is that our investment in coolers even though we're modeling out a eight to ten million dollar investment on an annual basis in coolers as the top line grows it becomes a lower and lower part and lower lower drag on margins as we go forward as it scales um we're so we're looking there we have uh new projects coming in the baby cooler uh margins are actually that some of our higher margins that we have within the business so driving that business also drives margins incremental margins as we go forward we have a major uh emphasis on on efficiency within our trade so we're driving and we're not lowering our spend but we're driving our efficiency within trade and therefore getting a higher return on investment and higher lift as we spend the money. So all those things are driving gross margin. And then it's just the sheer scale of the business as the company grows. We invested a lot of money into the business, both in people and systems and infrastructure as we decided to go public. And we're not going to overspend that money again. We're not going to continue to add that level of people and level to spend to be able to support the IPO and the public offering. So we're seeing a significant amount of scale as this company grows over the next two, three years. We're actually projecting on adjusted EBITDA. So we're looking at, as we said, under guidance, we're two to four million this year. We're looking at mid-single digits, somewhere around five or six for next year. that can definitely overdrive. We're looking at getting to the double digits in 28. So get into the 10 to 12 and at the end of 29 is where we start seeing the mid-teens.

Rupesh Parikh, Host/Moderator

Great. So with that, we'll wrap up. So I'd like to thank John and Larry for joining us today.

Larry Waldman, CFO

Thank you.