After yamo’s quick rise and tough ending, Tobias Gunzenhauser is back in the world of children’s nutrition with a new outlook. What started as a bold, nearly naive effort to change baby food in Europe has become a brand-new chapter. Now, he’s leading the European launch of Once Upon a Farm, a fast-growing US brand co-founded by Jennifer Garner.

In this conversation, Tobias talks about what it’s really like to build a startup with investors, what he learned from closing one, and why coming back to the same field feels more like finding closure than repeating the past. His story gives an honest look at what happens between the big moments and what it takes to start over with clear goals, resilience, and purpose.

About Tobias Gunzenhauser

Tobias Gunzenhauser is the co-founder and former CEO of yamo, the Swiss fresh baby food startup launched in 2016. The company grew rapidly across Europe before shutting down in 2024 amid a difficult funding environment for FoodTech startups. Today, he is leading the European expansion of Once Upon a Farm, the US organic children’s nutrition company co-founded by Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner.

About Once Upon a Farm

In 2015, Cassandra Curtis, along with co-founder Ari Raz, founded Once Upon a Farm to create more nutritious, convenient, and delicious baby food options for her daughter that weren’t available at her local supermarket. After creating her own recipes and selling the first cold-pressed organic baby food at retail, she joined forces with industry legend and former Annie’s CEO John Foraker and actress, philanthropist, and mom of 3, Jennifer Garner, to create the next generation childhood nutrition company.

Now sold in more than 22,000 stores across the US and online, Once Upon a Farm has a growing product portfolio of organic, farm-fresh snacks and meals for babies and big kids.

Naive optimism and the courage to start

Every startup begins with a mixture of curiosity, conviction and a certain degree of optimism about how difficult the journey will actually be. For Tobias, the early days of building yamo were no exception.

Looking back now, the decisions that launched the company feel both bold and slightly surreal, especially when viewed through the lens of everything that followed. “Looking back now, knowing what I know today, we were really naive,” he shares.

At the time, however, that naivety pushed him to build a company with thousands of fans and advocates that really changed the baby food industry. This naivety is what inspired Tobias and his team to begin.

Tobias acknowledges that if they had fully understood the operational complexity of building a new category in children’s nutrition, the regulatory hurdles involved in food production, and the realities of scaling a consumer brand across Europe… they might never have started at all.

Instead, they focused on a simple belief that the category could and should be better. That belief gave the team the confidence to move forward, solve problems as they arose, and learn far more quickly than they would have if they had waited for perfect clarity.

That mindset shaped the company’s culture in its earliest stages. Rather than over-analysing every uncertainty, the team concentrated on momentum and experimentation, trusting that progress would come through action.

“When you set your mind to something, almost everything is possible as long as it’s not against the laws of physics.”

The supermarket moment that sparked the idea

The idea behind yamo didn’t come from a carefully structured market study. It came from a moment of curiosity on an ordinary day.

At the time, Tobias was working in consumer goods and often discussing food trends with his colleague and soon-to-be co-founder, Luca. When Luca decided to experiment with a vegan diet for a month, the two began exploring alternatives to their usual lunch routine. Their office was located outside the city centre, which meant the choices nearby were limited to a gas station and a McDonald’s.

One afternoon, they found themselves wandering through a supermarket. Eventually, they ended up standing in front of the baby food shelf.

The more they looked, the stranger the options appeared. The products looked almost identical, the colours were muted, and the flavours were surprisingly bland. For something intended for young children, the experience felt oddly uninspiring.

This moment of curiosity led to deeper research. Tobias called a friend who studied food science to ask why the baby food category seemed so stagnant. The explanation was straightforward but surprising. Much of the industry still relied on heat sterilisation techniques developed decades earlier. These methods were effective at creating products with long shelf lives, but they also removed much of the nutrients, flavour and texture from the ingredients.

The conversation revealed something even more interesting. Alternative preservation technologies already existed in other parts of the food industry that could maintain freshness while ensuring safety. So Tobias found himself asking: “Why had nobody applied these techniques to baby food?”

“It was the first time in my life that I looked at the baby food shelf and thought, what the hell is going on here?”

Understanding the real pressure parents face

Before building a product, the founders spent time speaking with parents about how they actually approached feeding their children. These conversations revealed something deeper than a simple product opportunity.

Parents were navigating a constant balance between ideals and reality. On one hand, many wanted to provide food that felt fresh, healthy and homemade. On the other hand, they were managing careers, family responsibilities and the daily unpredictability of raising young children.

What they realized was that “most parents today are busy with a lot of things and they need a solution that combines something as fresh as homemade but is still convenient.”

One conversation stayed with Gunzenhauser long after those early interviews. A teacher explained that she spent Saturdays cooking baby food in advance and freezing portions so they could be used throughout the week.

It was her way of ensuring her child always ate something homemade. But occasionally she would forget to bring the prepared meals when leaving the house. She shared the fact that “sometimes when she was in the park and she forgot to bring fruit, she needed to use one of the jars. And the other moms just stared at her and judged her for it,” explains Tobias.

For Tobias and the yamo founding team, this moment captured the quiet pressure many parents feel when trying to do everything perfectly. The insight shaped how the company approached its messaging.

“With yamo, we said to parents, we can help you save time without compromising.”

Building community instead of traditional marketing

Another driver of early growth came from partnerships with content creators on social media. Rather than focusing on large celebrity influencers, yamo worked with hundreds of smaller creators who shared their everyday experiences with raising children.

During that time, influencer partnerships were still relatively affordable, and audiences were highly engaged. The yamo team sent them products to review and were very adamant that “they could say whatever they wanted about it,” states Tobias.

The company also made a deliberate effort to engage directly with its community. Customer messages were answered personally, and feedback was taken seriously. “Every single comment, every single message, we answered.”

Over time, this openness helped build a strong sense of trust around the brand.

“Communication was not a one-way street. We said: “We’re building a community.”

When the growth model stopped working

 For several years, yamo followed the kind of trajectory many venture-backed consumer startups strive for. The company expanded into new markets, the team grew and the product range continued to evolve. Then, the environment shifted.

Rising inflation across Europe, increasing production costs, and a tightening of venture funding placed enormous pressure on many FoodTech startups. “We always had good margins on the products that we sold. It was not that we were selling at a loss,” he explains.

For yamo, this caused a domino effect, relays Tobias, “all of the retailers called us and said the plans they had for next year were not going to happen anymore. From one day to the next, we had to turn the business from high growth to becoming profitable immediately. And unfortunately, we just did not have the time.”

What had once been a clear growth path suddenly required a very different strategy, while at the same time, the company was in the middle of raising another funding round. “We had two-thirds of the funds committed, but one-third was missing, and we just couldn’t find it,” laments Tobias.

“My board asked me, ‘Have we found the last bit of funding?’ I said no. And they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to close the business.’"

Why ending well still matters

Closing a company is one of the most difficult moments in a founder’s journey. For Tobias, the most important priority after the decision was supporting the people who had built the company. “Three weeks after we closed the business, every single person who wanted a job had a job.”

Support also arrived from the broader startup community. Other founders were “just sending me messages, and super kind things,” he says. “And I kept all of these messages for a rainy day because I think most people realize how much it takes to build something from nothing, and therefore, there is a lot of empathy if things don't work out.”

“A lot of people understand how much it takes to build something from nothing.”

The full circle moment

The next chapter began through a relationship that had existed for several years. Tobias joined forces with Once Upon a Farm CEO John Foraker. Once Upon a Farm is a US-based company providing organic, cold-pressed, refrigerated baby food, snacks, and smoothies.

“I had known John for more than five years. At some point, he just wrote me a message on LinkedIn saying that he heard me on a podcast and that it seemed we shared a lot of the same experiences. Then, we had a call, and it was very cool because, first of all, he's an awesome guy. Second, he's very experienced. And we had so much that we could share with each other.”

John said to Tobias, “When you're ready, let's talk about whether there is an opportunity for you to bring Once Upon a Farm over to Europe.” And this is exactly what Tobias is working on today.

Once Upon A Farm successfully went public on February 6, this year, raising $197.9 million at a $724 million valuation. Tobias attended the IPO in New York and is working on the UK launch.

In comparison to his time at yamo, he says that “we try to work in a similar fashion. So I was able to bring along two of the very senior people that I work with at Yamo.” The setup took a couple of months, as they had to establish the entire supply chain, but now, Once Upon a Farm has a European production arm.

“It felt like a full circle moment. We’ve been working in stealth for one and a half years on this project, and I’m really excited to finally kick it off.”

Advice for founders in the thick of it

After nearly a decade of building a startup, Tobias’ perspective on entrepreneurship has evolved. While strategy and fundraising often dominate conversations about startups, one lesson stands out as particularly important.

During the most intense years of building yamo, he realized that his sense of personal balance had almost entirely disappeared. “If you don’t look after yourself, you cannot look after your company. I did almost no sports. I had very little social interaction. I was just working all the time,” he shares. Today, he sees maintaining that balance as essential.

The other thing he realized is that so much happened because he just said yes and showed up. Early in his career, he received some good advice from one of his professors that he now shares with other founders: “Say yes first and figure out how to do it later.”

“The serendipity of life is real.”

Quick-fire round

A tool you can’t live without?

“My mobile phone. Everything is on it and in there, and I would be really lost without it.”

How do you recharge?

“Sleep is the base layer, but spending time with friends and family helps me get out of the grind in my head.”

Advice that stuck:

“One of my professors once told me most things in his career happened because he said yes and showed up. Say yes first and figure out how to do it later. Thanks René!”

Founder or start-up that you admire:

“I admire all founders. I know how difficult it is. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t.”

The next chapter begins

Tobias’s journey is a reminder that building a company is rarely a straight line. It is a cycle of belief, execution and setbacks. And, every once in a while, you get a chance to start again. What stands out is the mindset that connects both of his chapters: a willingness to act without certainty, to learn quickly, and to keep going even when the outcome is not what you hoped for.

In an industry that often celebrates only the wins, Tobias’ story offers something more valuable: an honest view of what it takes to build, to lose, and to build again. The full circle is not just about returning to the same category, but about returning with sharper judgment, deeper resilience, and a clearer understanding of what really matters.