Thank you, everybody, for joining this morning. My name is Jon Andersen . I'm the Research Analyst at William Blair that covers consumer packaged goods and more specifically, Once Upon a Farm. Very excited to have Once Upon a Farm with us today. To my right is Co-Founder and CEO, John Foraker, and to his right is CFO Larry Waldman. Once Upon a Farm is leading a transformation in the childhood nutrition market. Companies offering genuine organic farm fresh food made with no added sugar, no preservatives, and nothing artificial. Once Upon a Farm actually pioneered fresh refrigerated baby food in pouches several years ago, which it makes by blending fresh IQF fruits and vegetables and processing them using cold pressure, locking in nutrients, and preserving enough shelf life for refrigerated distribution to stores nationwide.
Today, the company's portfolio offers parents a variety of better-for-you products that serve a range of needs, from baby's first bites to kids' school-ready snacks. By doing so, it's become the number one brand driving growth in its categories. It's surpassed annual sales of $300 million at retail, growing strong double digits. Many of its customers are now rolling out dedicated Coolers in the baby aisle. First refrigerated Coolers in the baby aisle to assort the company's products and serve modern parent consumer needs. Before handing it over to management, a couple of quick housekeeping items. Immediately following the presentation, there's going to be a breakout session in the Adler Room. Please join us for that. It'll be very interesting. Last, just to inform you, a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest can be found on the William Blair website.
With that, I'm going to toss it over to John to get us started.
Good morning, everyone. Okay, let's dive right in. I'm going to go through this presentation. There's a lot of information on these slides. The slides are available to you later, I believe online. Right, Jon? We'll make sure you have them. I'll try to update you with some of the narratives just from our recent performance and the like as we go too. There's the disclaimers. Larry and I both have worked together for many, many years. We worked together at Annie's. I actually laughed because I pulled this shirt out this morning, I realized it had an Annie's logo on it. I just didn't realize that was there. Anyway, that experience was really incredible for us because we took that company public in 2012, sold to General Mills in 2014.
As a young, fast, emerging growth brand, there are a lot of lessons you learn about how to be prepared to be public, how to run an effective public company, how to grow a business in this space. We've applied now almost nine years, Larry and I and Jen have been working here, and we've applied all these great lessons to the business to prepare us to go public, and we've been executing really well. The headline I would give you on all of this stuff, the single most important thing to me that will drive our success is just how effectively we execute. We'll talk about that. I'll talk about the brand and all that other stuff, but it really comes down to execution, and we really prize that. We pride ourselves on doing a great job with that.
The macro kid market is very big. You'll see that in the TAM slide in a second. The problem is that historically, a lot of the products are all shelf stable. In kid products in particular, there's way too much sugar. It's just a significant opportunity to clean things up and line them up with where modern consumers are looking for things to go. We created a fresh baby food category in the United States. Really positioned and anchored our equity in this brand around fresh, but we've broadened that out, as we'll talk about more in a minute. The most important point on this slide is we're the first brand to build a baby through kid brand. If you think about it historically in this space, there's been baby brands, there's been kid brands. We're the first one that's doing both. It's hard to do that, actually.
It requires really sophisticated marketing messaging because the things that a parent is looking for before their baby starts eating first foods or a five-year-old is looking for, it's a little different. So it's a little nuanced, but we're trying to build a brand that's trusted. People come in through baby, they stay with us, and as the kids age, and we've been really successful doing that. We're a public benefit corporation. This is our mission. Jen Garner and I joined Ari and Cassandra in September of 2017, and the very first thing we did was sit down and write this mission statement. It's really hard to overstate how important this has been to literally every single business decision that we've made.
There's a deep foundation of things that are going on in this business that support the trust and the equity of the brand, and we think it's very important for people to understand that. It's one of our real superpowers, I think. The TAM in kid is really big. It's about $57 billion. We participate in a subset of the categories right now that are about $11 billion. There's a lot of opportunity to grow. There's a lot of white space. Most of these categories in Baby and Kid have not seen significant innovation in decades, and we're looking to take our brand into these spaces in a really effective way over the coming years. It's no surprise natural and organic has been growing faster than total food for many, many years.
I joined Annie's in 1998, and I was saying the exact same thing every year in that run, too. Although things have sped up. Excuse me. Things have sped up and it's really accelerating now, and it's very much driven by the change in households that are buying these products. Millennial consumers, Gen Z consumers care more about organic. You can see on the right-hand side of the page, one of the most important transformational moments for a household and their organic consumption is when a Baby is coming into it and comes into it. Organic adoption for families like that is significantly higher as you would expect. We think organic is just a foundational piece. It's kind of table stakes in the space we play in. These are competitive strengths. I won't hit on all of them. They'll come up in the later slides.
We're really building a modern brand that appeals to Baby through Kid. We've built this business very carefully with incredible products, which I will talk about in a second. We have really strong innovation pipeline. We'll be taking this brand into multiple new categories as we grow, really leveraging the lessons that Larry and I learned at Annie's, but doing it a lot better and much more effectively and bigger. We have really strong consumers, and we've built an incredible supply chain too, that Larry will talk about, that is really in fresh, is a really big moat and we're excited to talk about that. We have a very strong team. Larry and I obviously have a lot of experience in running and growing these kinds of companies.
Once Upon a Farm was $1 million a year business when we got here. We just guided to $313 million-$323 million for the rest of this year. The other most important thing to understand is the next 25-35 people down in this business are literally the best talent in all of CPG. We have an incredibly deep organization, not just my leadership team, but the team down below that and below that. We've intentionally done that to position ourselves to be able to, again, execute really well as we scale. It really started first with the first product. This is one of our original Pouches here. This is the green kale and apple product. Our consumers love these products, and they think that we deliver against clean and healthy and best nutrition for kids.
Cassandra Curtis created these products first in her kitchen because what she found in the grocery store didn't meet her nutritional standards, and she said, "Hey, let's build a company around it." What's important to know about these Pouches is we don't use a heat processing method to make them. We take great fruits and vegetables and other important ingredients for kid and baby nutrition. We put them into a big blender, basically like you would do in your kitchen, except at commercial scale. We put them through high-pressure processing, which uses pressure instead of heat, to give you some shelf life. Never gets over 40 degrees, and then it's transported through cold chain. What's amazing about these products is, two, three months later, it tastes like you just made it.
The color's vibrant, the nutrition's vibrant, the taste is amazing, and it's very differentiated from what's in the category. Our consumers really trust our brand. Back to the baby through kid point, if you ask parents whether they want one brand that will carry through that phase, 65% of them say they strongly value that. They really want a brand they can trust. Why? Because there's a lot of anxiety with parenting, with being a new parent, people are busy. They love a brand that they can trust. When we were running Annie's, it was a very similar kind of brand.
We would ask consumers what they love about it, they'd say, "I trust this brand so much that I see a new product, I barely even look at the nutrition statement or the ingredients because I trust you're going to do the right thing." That's the kind of trust that we're building with this brand as well. We also appeal to a really strong core consumer. They're digitally savvy. This is a consumer, these new households forming, that retailers really, really want to develop relationships with. That's a big change. At U.S. retail, for two or three decades prior to 10 years ago, most retailers were really kind of looking past the Baby space. They were cutting shelf space back. They were cutting sections down. They didn't think it was very strategic.
They've come around to understand that this consumer is one of the most important consumers they need to win because if you have a loyal shopper who you're serving the needs for their baby purchases really well, you're going to get most of their important trips and their big baskets. as a result, this category is very strategic for big retailers now, and we're benefiting from that as our other baby companies as well. Retailers excuse me, love our brand, and this is very surprising. The incrementality levels on this brand are very significant. You can see on the slide here, 69% and 73% in bars. When the Cooler goes into the baby aisle, 61% incremental to the baby food category.
Even our Snacks, which you would think like, "Hey, there's plenty of snacks that have been out there forever." Ours are significantly incremental to the category. If you ask yourself why, it shouldn't be that surprising because we're filling a white space with the original refrigerated products. Consumers were making a lot of their baby food at home, really weren't shopping the category very much. If they were, maybe they were buying some stuff online to stick in their bag when they traveled. We're bringing them into the category, and retailers see that. We have really strong data around that, and it's one of the reasons why we've been so successful expanding the business and why retailers are so interested in doing it. When we walk into those retailers, we have a few different businesses that are real important.
Our original business are our kid position pouches that are positioned over in kid dairy. Think of like adjacent to Stonyfield in a kid yogurt section in a grocery store on the perimeter. That was our original business. We started developing in the baby aisle. The items that are in the baby aisle are a very specific different product set than what's in the dairy set. They're positioned with a baby nutrition facts panel. They say "baby" on them. They're designed for the nutritional needs of a baby and things parents are looking for when they're walking down the baby aisle, and they're sold in a Cooler only in the baby aisle or on our DTC site. We also introduced dry Baby Snacking products. I mentioned those earlier. Those are in that same aisle.
What we're now doing is we're starting to build out in the lunchbox aisle with bars. We launched those last year. They're doing really well. We just launched some innovation on top of those. Our strategy over time will be to build this brand across the store in all these categories that are relevant to the households that have babies through kids up to about age 12. Retailers are very excited about that mission. On the Coolers, this is one of our real exciting opportunities. The disruption a Cooler brings to the baby aisle is no different than when Freshpet started putting Coolers in the pet aisle. It changes the frame of the consumer understanding of what's available to them in the category.
It's very disruptive and it's also very significantly important to the retailer because when we put a Cooler in the baby aisle, the entire baby aisle lifts by about 10 points. It's not just the fact that our stuff comes in and sells really well and highly incrementally, which is true, but what also happens is consumers have to come down the aisle more frequently because we're selling a fresh product. They can't come down and load up on sale and then come back six months later for their shelf stable pouches. They've got to come down more frequently. Everything in the aisle lifts, and we have a lot of research around that. We know where our products are out in retail, and this $48 million retail sales number is basically us.
That's our run rate out there right now in stuff that's just coming out of a Cooler. We know that the opportunity is very large. We have 3,700 Coolers out there right now as of the end of the first quarter. We expect to be at about 5,000 by the end of this year and over 8,000 next year. We've talked about it, and it was in the S-1, that we think there can be 15,000 Coolers out there. That's a very conservative number. There's 15,000 doors. What we really meant by that is where the Cooler would work if we put it in tomorrow. This is not like we're chasing where the consumer's going to be. If we could put a Cooler in a store, 15,000 would work tomorrow. We have a lot of experience launching across all kinds of customers.
We think the number of Coolers is going to be very large. We think the average productivity of Cooler, which is a run rate retail right now across all our Coolers of 13,000 right now is going to be significantly higher. We talked about in our Q1 earnings call that we saw an 11% increase in productivity of Coolers in Q1 versus Q4, and then 26% or 27% versus same quarter last year. Our Coolers are becoming more productive as we put more of them out there, as we work on filling the assortments out. All the same things happened with Freshpet at the beginning. The same consumer things happened. We expect those Coolers are going to continue to become more and more productive, and as that happens, the retailers are even more motivated to put them in.
We're right now either in big distribution with retailers, rolling out Coolers with retailers, or in test about to roll out or discussions to roll into a test with pretty much every retailer in the U.S. now that's meaningful. All the big national players, all the big super regionals, all the important regional retailers. Anyway, significant opportunity for us to grow distribution with that. I'm going to pass it over to Larry, who's built this incredible supply chain to support all this. Go for it, Larry.
Okay. First on Coolers, want to kind of talk about the capital investment on Coolers. There's three ways that we really put Coolers in stores. The thing that really has been the biggest growth mechanism for us is where the retailer is seeing the opportunity for the Coolers. They want the Cooler to be in the Baby aisle, but they want to be able to continue to control the Cooler and control the assortment. Excuse me. About 50% of our Coolers are this type of Cooler where the retailer owns the Cooler. They provide the Cooler to us at no cost. We represent about 90 to 100% of what's in the Cooler. If you go into a Walmart, you'll see the Cooler, very similar to what's there on the picture, where it's wrapped with our branding.
We will be the majority of the Cooler as long as we perform within the Cooler. We also have Coolers that we provide similar to Freshpet, where we buy the Cooler. We put it in the aisle. We install the Cooler. We have 100% exclusivity for that Cooler. It's our Cooler. It goes as a capital asset. It's depreciated, and there's no impact on the P&L except for depreciation. It's about a third of our Coolers, but it's the slowest growing. It really takes a lot longer because you have to integrate and work with the engineering teams of the retailer to be able to do the resets of the aisle, to be able to run electrical and be able to set it up. There always will be retailers that want to do this, and we will support it if that's what their request is.
Where we see probably the biggest growth in Coolers, and we're seeing it with some of the bigger retailers, is where we incent the retailer to put the Cooler into the aisle by paying a one-time slotting fee. That slotting fee gives us a level of exclusivity within that Cooler. That exclusivity could run three to five years, depending on negotiations with the retailer. It really allows us to make sure that we pay back the slotting fee based upon the performance of the Cooler. The idea is that we want to be able to offset some of the cost about it. We share with the retailer the cost of putting the Cooler in. We both have skin in the game, and what it does is it incents the retailer to move faster on the Cooler aisle.
On the supply chain, we are 100% co-manufactured, but we co-manufacture a little differently than other people. What we've done is we've partnered with our co-manufacturers, working with them. On our Pouch business, we've actually built processing plants attached to inside the plants of the HPP providers. They run the facility for us, but a lot of it is our equipment. It allows us to understand the costs, it allows us to understand throughput, it allows us to continually add capacity as needed to be able to support the growth of the business. It allows us to be able to drive out costs as we grow as a business. One of the things that we're doing right now is we are looking and working with our co-manufacturers to really automate the process of producing our products.
What we've done is we started this business with one pouching machine that was running about 18,000 pouches every two weeks. We're currently running anywhere between 3 to 3.5 million per week. When you do that and you're gradually building the capacity up, even though you are driving cost efficiencies as you drive it up, you're just increasing and bolting on new capacity. What we're doing is we're green-fielding all our manufacturing and looking at if you were building a plant that was doing 3.5 to 5 million pouches a week, how would you build a plant versus how we built it today? We're working on that. It's going to be a significant increase in margin on these products, and this project will be in place by the end of 2027, early 2028.
We did the exact same thing when we went into snacks. The manufacturer, bar manufacturer, we started on a shared line, but when we saw the growth of this business, we built a line in their plant to be able to satisfy the growth of the business. Good thing, not good thing is that we just outgrew our growth very quickly and the line that we put in, so we've added more capacity in that plant and we're in process of building a new line within their facility, fully automated. Our highest cost is labor. This takes most of the labor out of the process. Again, significant increase in margin on these products, and on this line will be up running by end of 2027, early 2028. Financial highlights. First thing on margins, we are looking and we're continuing to grow.
If you look at what we've put into our guidance for this year, so we're looking at about guiding to about a 41% gross margin for the year. That gross margin includes 100 basis point of tariff expense. It also includes 100 basis point of fuel-related expenses that weren't built into the model at the very beginning. We're still looking to get back to the 41%. We have some additional projects that will be coming in this year that will be offsetting some of those expenses. We also are working on a trade efficiency project where we're looking at all our trade spend. We're not looking to cut our trade spend, we're just looking to make sure that our trade spend is being spent at the highest return on investment. We're looking at that.
Now, one of the things that we do, like we talked about on the Coolers, the Coolers that have a slotting fee, we built in $8 million-$10 million in Cooler slotting fee, which is a contra to sales. That's impacting our gross margin this year. We also built in about $1 million-$2 million in capital Cooler spend. That's going to be hitting on the CapEx and be depreciated. If we look in first quarter highlights, we ended up at $73 million in net sales for the first quarter, 44% growth year-over-year. Gross profit, we did increase gross profit both as a percent and as $1 by 55%. I'm going to come over here because I can't see it. EBITDA, we've been running the business on about a break-even EBITDA for the last couple of years.
What we want to do is we want to invest in the growth of the business. We're not trying to drive positive EBITDA at this point. As positive EBITDA comes in, we've been taking that money and investing in marketing, investing in trade, investing in other areas that would offset that. We ended up, first quarter, we ended up with $3 million EBITDA loss, compared to $7 million in Q1 of 2025. Household penetration. Latest household penetration was 5.8%, continuing to grow. We were at 4.5% a year ago. Repeat rate, 50%. Cooler productivity, as John talked about, quarter-over-quarter, 11% growth rate. Year-over-year, about 26%, 27%.
One of the big things that you look in Coolers and why Coolers become more productive, we did not have the innovation, and we did not have the SKU alignment in the Coolers to be able to support the size of the Cooler that we're putting into the store. One of the big things that we learned is you want to put in the Cooler that you want in the store, then grow your assortment to be able to fit the Cooler. We are now at a point where we've grown our assortment. We had a lot of innovation come in at the end of Q1 that went on shelf in early Q2. With that, we're seeing an acceleration of the productivity in the Cooler. Okay. Net sales by category.
The one thing I want to explain is that we did not have a Snacking business in the first quarter of 2024. We were completely pouched. We did have a small refrigerated bar line. In 2024, we rolled out our Baby Snacking and our Kid Snacks. You can see the mix between Kid and Baby. First, baby includes both Snacking and in Coolers. You can see that the growth, both in the acceleration of the efficiency of the Coolers and the growth of Snacks in the baby aisle. We're heading towards a mix between Kid and Baby, about 50%. That's mainly because that we've been focusing our innovation on the baby aisle for the last few years. Although, we're looking at adding in significant innovation center store going forward, and for both Kid and Baby.
The year-over-year growth, Q1, you can see that the continued growth in the Snacks and the Coolers as we go to about 50/50 on the $73 million that we came in for the quarter. For Pouches and Snacks, as I said, it didn't exist in early 2024, but we built it up from $29 million in 2024 to $88 million in 2025. For the first quarter, you can see the continued growth of the Snack business. As I said, we're projecting that eventually it's going to be about a 50/50 mix between refrigerated Pouches and Snacks. Our guidance that we came out at the end of the first quarter, we did increase our guidance top line to $313 million-$323 million, or about a 34% growth rate year-over-year. We did hold our adjusted EBITDA at $2 million-$4 million.
We are expecting to be positive adjusted EBITDA, but we are continuing to. We've made the decision as a leadership team to invest any additional EBITDA into growth of the business to be prepared for 2027. If we overdrive adjusted EBITDA, then we will increase our guidance on adjusted EBITDA. At this point, we're just looking to increase marketing and other spend in other categories. Cooler count, we're still on at about 5,000 for the end of the year, 8,000 for next year, although there's definitely a lot of potential upside in the Cooler numbers. Long-term algorithm. This is where we're looking at four to five years out, continuing net sales growth of 20%. We are looking at a 45% gross margin. Definitely with these projects that we talked about, there's a lot of opportunities to overdrive this margin.
What we also are looking to do to use any overdrive on margin to potential work with keeping our AUP in a spot and driving top-line sales and expanding our customer base. Adjusted EBITDA, we're looking at high- teens to potential 20. It all depends. again, what we're also looking at is driving AUP at the same time, so. John.
Okay. Just wrapping up here real quick. Larry already mentioned the 5.8% household pen. We think there's an opportunity to triple household pen as we grow in categories and as we broaden the business out. We've been adding millions of households a year, and we're going to continue to do that in a very efficient way. We have deep relationships with our retailers. We're going to continue to leverage those. We've got strong innovation coming. We're just going to drive strong, profitable growth. I'll leave it with one last point. The business will be cash flow positive in the second half of this year and adjusted EBITDA positive. There'll be a significant ramp in adjusted EBITDA in 2027. We're not guiding at this point, but we will over the coming quarters. We're very confident in two things.
One, this will be a much bigger business than people think or understand, and then also it'll be a much more profitable business than people think. We're executing our plans really effectively and are excited to just follow along this journey and hope you have some good questions for us as we get into Q&A.
Okay. Thank you very much, everyone. Appreciate it.