Few sections of the grocery store appear as settled as the frozen breakfast aisle. Consumers know what they are looking for, the largest brands have occupied freezer doors for decades, and convenience has long been the category’s defining promise. It is not the kind of market where a young company would seem likely to gain ground quickly.
Evergreen believed the opportunity was not to replace frozen breakfast, but to build the kind of frozen breakfast many parents had started looking for and struggled to find. Families still wanted something quick on busy mornings, yet more of them were reading labels closely and questioning whether convenience had to come with ingredients they did not recognize.
That tension became the foundation for Evergreen, the frozen breakfast company founded in 2020 by Emily Groden. The company focused on improving a familiar routine rather than asking consumers to adopt a new one, using whole grains, avocado oil, fruits, and vegetables to create products that still delivered the taste and ease people expected from the category.
The Category Had Not Kept Pace With the Consumer
Groden first encountered the gap while searching for breakfast options for her young daughter. Many of the frozen waffles she found contained ingredients she would not normally use at home, even though the products were marketed to families looking for a simple weekday solution.
She began making waffles in her own kitchen, blending familiar ingredients and freezing batches for the week ahead. The recipes solved a practical problem before they suggested a business. Friends began asking for them, and Groden eventually brought samples to small Chicago retailers, where the response led to an early test with Whole Foods stores in Illinois.
That interest confirmed something important about the market. Evergreen did not need to persuade shoppers that frozen waffles belonged in their homes. Consumers already understood the product and the role it played in a rushed morning. The company needed to show that the same convenience could come with a more considered ingredient list.
Evergreen built its products around that premise. Its waffles use 100% whole grains and avocado oil, with fruits and vegetables incorporated across the line. The company now sells both mini waffles and thicker, more traditional styles, but the broader strategy has remained consistent. Product development begins with a familiar breakfast format and asks how the ingredients can be improved without making the food feel medicinal, overly specialized, or difficult to serve.
Scaling a Familiar Habit
The simplicity of the consumer proposition did not make the business easy to build. Frozen food requires dependable manufacturing, careful inventory planning, cold-chain distribution, and retailer relationships strong enough to earn and retain limited freezer space.
Groden entered the category without a background in consumer packaged goods. Before Evergreen, she practiced corporate law at Kirkland & Ellis and later served as general counsel for The Alinea Group and Tock. That experience gave her familiarity with contracts, negotiations, and complex business decisions, but she still had to learn the operational realities of producing and distributing food at scale.
As Evergreen expanded, the challenge became preserving the qualities that made the products distinctive while meeting the volume and consistency demanded by national retailers. A recipe that works in a home kitchen must behave the same way across large production runs, survive transportation, and reach stores with enough shelf life to make the economics work for both the brand and the retailer.
The company grew by adding retail partners gradually and broadening its assortment without moving too far from the breakfast occasion it understood. Evergreen is now sold in more than 8,500 stores nationwide, including Whole Foods Market, Kroger, Sprouts, and select Walmart and Target locations. Pancake and protein-focused lines are also expected to extend the company beyond waffles while keeping it within the same everyday routine.
Finding Growth in a Mature Aisle
Evergreen’s expansion has earned the company recognition from Inc., NOSH, and other industry organizations, while Instacart recently ranked it among the fastest-growing brands on its platform. Those distinctions matter because they indicate that the company’s appeal has moved beyond a small group of ingredient-conscious shoppers.
The larger business lesson is that established categories are not always as closed as they appear. Their products may remain familiar even as the standards consumers apply to them change. When that happens, a startup does not necessarily need to create a new habit. It can build around an existing one that larger companies have been slow to reconsider.
Evergreen entered frozen breakfast with that understanding. Families had not stopped valuing convenience, and they had not lost interest in waffles. They had simply become more attentive to what was inside the foods they served regularly.
The company’s growth has depended on meeting that expectation without losing sight of why frozen breakfast became popular in the first place. Evergreen did not need to reinvent the morning meal. It needed to make an established part of it feel more current.
