Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Organically growing
“I envisioned this Fran with an apron on in her little kitchen growing old and just happy and birds on my shoulder. Just this lovely lifestyle of cooking these beautiful purees for babies locally and that was it.”
FAYETTEVILLE — Lucy Free has been in the baby food business all her life. At 5 years old, she is handed a torn-off end of her mother’s list, given her own shopping cart and asked to collect items during the grocery run.
“OK, I’ll get these,” she says with little-girl independence, clasping the list of items in her stubby fingers. “But I’m going to check our baby food first.”
The daughter of Fran Free, mother and founder of Oh Baby Foods, she’s the very reason that the company exists. When Fran became pregnant with Lucy, she was a graduate student at the University of Arkansas and was gearing up to return to her grandparents’ farm to start an agricultural tourism business.
There would be a bed and breakfast, an organic salsa company and homebrewed beer.
But Lucy’s impending arrival changed everything. Which school district would she attend? Who would she play with? And most importantly, what exactly goes into baby food?
She didn’t like the answer to that last one.
“[Even] the organic varieties were made with 15 different ingredients and it was too much,” Fran Free says. “There were super grains and ancient grains but they weren’t U.S. raised, so that didn’t further along my goals of supporting [American] agriculture.”
In starting a baby food company, friends say, she’s the ideal executive to work with.
“Fran is one of my favorite people,” says business adviser Ramsay Ball. “She’s a wonderful person and a joy to work with. She’s very smart and a very strong person too, certainly no pushover.”
“She’s just a really fun gal, whether for business or pleasure. We always have lots of laughs,” says Eileen Jennings, vice president of commercial banking at Arvest. “With Fran, I always know I’m getting very accurate information when we have a conversation. It’s nice to work with someone who lets you be a part of the process, not just springing a
bunch of deadlines on you.”
FAR-REACHING ROOTS
A native of southeast Arkansas, Free grew up on a cotton farm where the combines harvested six rows at a time.
“There’s always a joy going home and visiting the farm,” she says. “It’s a part of my heritage, part of my history; I can’t forget it. That’s what … encouraged me to stay on the agricultural path.”
As a child, she stomped the cotton down in the trailer, little bits flying up like confused snowflakes. As an adult she watched the exodus from the farm.
Land prices rose. Technology — tractors, boll buggies, 24-row combines — got larger. Fewer people could harvest more produce. When the investment bank became the largest landowner in the county, it was the final nail in the coffin.
If Free couldn’t move home to promote agritourism, then she would do the next best thing. She’d make homemade, organic purees for babies, buying only the best produce from regional farmers.
“I envisioned this Fran with an apron on in her little kitchen growing old and just happy and birds on my shoulder,” she says. “Just this lovely lifestyle of cooking these beautiful purees for babies locally and that was it.”
Five years later, Oh Baby Foods has earned a reputation as the only baby food company that uses nothing but U. S.- raised, nongenetically modified products, a premium that attracts organic retailers such as Whole Foods, which accounts for more than half of her business.
In the past year, Oh Baby sales have grown 1,300 percent as the acquisition of her competitors Happy Baby, Plum Baby and Ella’s Kitchen put her in the lead as one of the last remaining “momowned” companies.
It has placed her on the next tier, to compete with food giants Dannon, Campbell’s and Hain Celestial. Free seems ready to take on the competition, having recently signed a private label deal that projects a fourfold increase of sales over the coming year.
FARMER FRAN
For Free, family, history and the land have always been a priority. When she wasn’t helping her parents on the cotton farm, she and her grandfather would visit Arkansas Post, the first European settlement in the state.
Leaving home was supposed to be temporary, to get the skills necessary to encourage others to return to the land and understand where their food came from.
“I saw a lot of young people leaving the farm and not coming back,” she says. “I love [the] agricultural lifestyle. It’s a part of who we are. I see things being mechanized and farms being purchased and people lose that identity, that connection.”
Unsure of how she’d do it, Free began in the aviation de- partment at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia to work on a pilot’s degree, planning to fight forest fires from the air.
When she realized that she was a fair-weather pilot, she changed course to study forestry at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, but found herself enjoying the courses on vegetable production even more.
It seemed like the avenue where she could accomplish the most toward her goal of getting people back to the farm. With a final move to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Free found her niche in the environmental, soil and water sciences department.
She gleaned knowledge not just from class, but from visiting the area’s many farmers markets and local farms and focusing on organic produce, a relatively new topic at the time.
It broadened her perspective on agriculture to include much more than the single-crop farms back home.
For those to survive, Free knew they would have to bring something new or nontraditional to the table, and she took her time to figure out what that might be.
Following college graduation, she spent a year touring organic farms all across South America. Traveling by bicycle, Free started in Chile, took a ferry through the Strait of Magellan, harvested chestnuts with her feet — 2,000 pounds of them — and picked tomatoes off the vines in the shadow of the snow-capped mountains of Argentina.
“She went on a year-long trip, traveling through exotic areas in the Andes and Incas and she went all by herself,” says longtime friend Holly van der Laan. “Fran is really brave. She loves people and has a heart for adventure.”
She watched as food became the economic backbone for local growers as they traded produce for goods like lumber and school supplies. She listened closely to their tips for growing food in various climates, seasons and soil types.
It was the ultimate learning experience for the farmer at heart.
She returned with a list of 110 things she wanted to do by the time she turned 32, primary among them reconnecting with family and friends, having a beautiful child and using agritourism in a way that would inspire people to buy from local growers.
ARKANSAS AVENUES
Back home in Fayetteville, Free opened the only Audubon Society field office in the state, where she worked with farmers and landowners on projects to reshape stream banks in the region.
Wading out to pull canoes to shore during urban stream tours, she seemed content to stay. Each work review yielded a raise — and a word of encouragement to return to school for her master’s degree.
“I knew I wasn’t going to climb the ladder,” Free says. “It was kind of a good time to evaluate where I was, what I wanted to do. I thought, ‘OK, I need to make a move for my-
“I saw a lot of young people leaving the farm and not coming back. I love [the] agricultural lifestyle. It’s a part of who we are. I see things being mechanized and farms being purchased and people lose that identity, that connection.”
self. This is fun and I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment helping people, but I want to focus on my goals.’”
She left the comfortable nest of Audubon to help write an agritourism guidebook for the state of Arkansas at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, then entered the department of agriculture economics at UA.
It gave her the tools to make her family farm into a more profitable destination.
She picked up the financial analyses and decision-making techniques that would round out her experience with the creative side of farming: creating and storing food, entertaining guests, taking care of customers.
Two weeks after she finished her master’s work, Lucy was born.
NATURAL FOOD, NATURAL
STATE
In that first year, Free settled into motherhood and experimented with her ideas for Oh Baby Foods. Prone to insomnia, Free would spend midnight hours reading advice articles on LinkedIn for how to improve herself as a chief executive officer.
After running the Porter’s Five Forces Framework to assess her competition on the baby food market, she decided to go for it. She sold her house to fund her baby food company.
She created a dozen flavors of purees at home with ingredients that were grown within 200 miles of Fayetteville, and narrowed the selection of flavors down to a few — Sweet Potato Boogie, the Blue Plate Special, and Bean Me Up Baby — through anonymous customer surveys.
“One of the things that was so impressive is that she put so much work and effort and attention to detail on the front end in regard to the quality of the food and the taste,” Jennings says. “She spent a lot of time getting that right before tackling distribution and marketing … instead of letting the market drive the product.”
While preparing to hit grocery stores, Free rented a 4,000-square-foot kitchen in Evansville and hired three people to help prepare ingredients and cook the purees. Developed as a frozen item, the product was an alternative to the jars of baby food that required microwaving which killed most of the nutrients inside.
Finally ready for stores, Oh Baby Foods launched in a dozen grocery stores on Lucy’s first birthday, a stressful event that presaged the enormous amount of responsibility that pulls the mother-founder in opposite directions.
“I woke up [the day we launched] and it was Lucy’s birthday,” Free says. “My first thought was, ‘I didn’t even get my baby a card. My first baby, her first birthday and I don’t even have a card for her.’”
She didn’t need a card. Her mother, who was visiting, applauded how much greater a gift Fran was giving Lucy by opening a baby food company on her birthday.
In those early days, Free kept the overhead down by doing as much of the work as she could handle herself. For the first two years, Oh Baby Foods products sold out.
She met now- husband Dennis Nelms years earlier in college. They had been married to other people, and reconnected as she was looking for a car at his dealership. He proposed the day she bought the car from him.
In their modern version of Yours, Mine and Ours, he has a daughter, Lily, and she has a daughter, Lucy, (both age 5) and together they have a son, Levi, 2.
The company moved into a larger facility, which had been a former Tyson location, but it was clear that her model of using local produce to create a frozen food was not working. Local processors wouldn’t take fresh ingredients, which put pressure on Free’s team for hand labor or the cost of shipping. Contracting with only one grower had its downfall when a natural disaster could take out a whole season’s crop.
It took $96 to make a case that sold for $34.
Free knew she had to get the food from the freezer to the baby food aisle, where mothers would find it. But she was turned down by many manufacturers.
At a fundraiser one evening, a family friend asked to be an investor. Out of caution, Free had always turned him down, worried he might regret the investment. But that night, her banker convinced her otherwise.
She needed help, and here it was.
With more funding in hand, she called her No. 1 contract manufacturer, but they still weren’t willing to take a chance on her.
Refusing to give up, Free booked a flight, showed up on their doorstep and secured the contract that would take on the food production, provide business guidance and introduce her to the Whole Foods local grower fund. With it, she acquired the funding to change her product packaging to a squeeze pouch, which is now the most popular storage for baby food.
Recent years have brought other investors, like Ball, who was won over during an angel investor meeting.
“She just blew me away,” he says. “I’ve dealt with hundreds of young companies and usually even after practicing their pitch, it’s [still] a little contrived. She was just remarkable in her honesty and transparency.”
Since then, Oh Baby Foods has expanded to selling its products in 40 states and seems likely to close more gaps within the next year.
Through it all, friends say Free has maintained sight of what is important.
“Like most working moms, she thinks she’s not doing a good balancing job,” Jennings says. “But she and Dennis have good top priorities for the family and support them.”
“She really values being a good parent,” Ball says. “She’s been criticized for [not] working 20 hours a day … but she balances her life very well and I think that because of her values, she’s made a remarkable product.”